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Hurricane Andrew: 16 Years Ago Today

Special Section: Hurricane Andrew Remembered

MIAMI (CBS4) ― It was the storm we all feared; the storm of our nightmares. After years of skirting the danger, this one was headed right for us.

It was August 24th, 1992. Its name was Andrew; it was the first named storm of the year. It was also the first hurricane many residents of South Florida would ever face, and as we would learn just 24 hours later, most of us were woefully unprepared.

The storm began as barely a blip on the radar. The Friday before Andrew arrived, NOAA Hurricane hunters canceled their trip into the storm, because it appeared to be disintegrating.

A second trip was scheduled for Saturday the 23rd. That trip, too, was almost canceled.

"They made the decision to go ahead," said Dave Game, a reporter for WCIX, the TV station that became WFOR, who was scheduled to ride along on the mission. "We were supposed to go through the storm three times to fix the position of the eye and take readings, and we were supposed to be up about 12 hours."

After a few rough passes through Andrew's eye, the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables received the information and crunched the numbers. Game recalls a conversation in the plane's kitchenette with Bob Burpee, the mission specialist who would later become director of the National Hurricane Center.

"I was trying to write my story," Game said, "and Burpee sat down with a concerned look on his face. I asked about it, and he asked me where I lived. I told him the name of the South Miami-Dade neighborhood, and he asked me if I had hurricane shutters."

Game thought that sounded ominous. He admitted he did not and asked Burpee why. Burpee just looked at him and said, "You're going to wish you did."

What forecasters had learned was that Andrew had strengthened dramatically, into a category three hurricane, and was headed straight for South Miami-Dade.

Forecasters could not say exactly where it would hit, but they warned it would hit somewhere, and could be even stronger by landfall. With the storm bearing down on them, South Florida was starting, at last, to prepare.

At 5pm that Saturday, a hurricane watch went up for South Florida. Some people began to get ready. As the sun came up on Sunday the 23rd, it dawned on South Floridians that this storm was not going to turn.

Hurricane warnings were announced. People started to move as Andrew closed in, and intensified rapidly, with top winds that we now know were about 165 miles an hour that Sunday night. South Florida waited, and feared what would happen next.

"Without question, this is going to be the most expensive natural disaster ever to hit the United States," Meteorologist Bryan Andrews told the TV audience that night.

In the early morning hours of Monday, August 24th, the eye of hurricane Andrew came ashore in south Miami Dade County, and for those who lived there, the next four hours seemed like an eternity, and a terror never to be forgotten.

As the morning continued, people emerged from their homes to a landscape they barely recognized and the reality that their lives would be different for months, for years, and in some cases, forever.

CBS4's consumer investigator Al Sunshine, reporting on the virtual destruction of his own South Miami-Dade home, summed up what many were thinking that awful morning.

"There's no way of knowing how long it's going to take to try to put our lives back together," he said. Years later, we found out: It took a long, long time.

"Horribly, I still remember it like yesterday. Huddled in a closet with all my loved ones, hearing the house exploding, not knowing if it was going to be there or not," Al remembers.

Al rode out Hurricane Andrew in his home west of Florida's Turnpike. The plan was for him to be in place to join a photographer who would meet up with him to cover the cleanup. Al had no idea that the cleanup would start with his own home.

He recalls the terrifying fury of Andrew, whose eye rolled right over his home. "It's like what's next, worst over, boom, boom. Is this it? Is there going to be more? Boom, boom."

Dave Game was assigned to Richmond Heights Middle School on SW 152nd street to report on people riding out the storm in a shelter. Dave was there because that shelter was supposed to be the closest 'safe' shelter away from the brunt of the storm. Instead, Andrew barreled right over the school, just a mile and a half from Dave's own home, where his wife was facing her first hurricane alone with 7 cats and two dogs.

The storm hit, and Dave lost communications with his wife. Outside, his team could hear chaos explode, and could only wonder what was happening outside.

While waiting in the lobby of the school at the height of the storm, Dave and his photographer heard a pounding at the door. Police unchained it, and a family of five stumbled in from the fury. Dave recalls doing the only thing he could think of; he stuck out his mike and asked the father why they were battling to a shelter in the face of the hurricane's fury.

"Even to this day, I won't forget the look on his face," Dave recalls, eyes tearing up 15 years later as he remembers. "He just said, 'it's not that hard to leave when your house blows down around you'."

The comment stunned everyone, raising even more fears about what they would find when the winds finally died down. Al Sunshine and his family were shell-shocked when they finally peeked out of the wreckage of their home.

"We probably looked and felt like World War 2 victims of saturated bombings," he said. That didn't stop him from taking a home video camera, and with the help of his wife, starting to document the chaos of his neighborhood and home.

Reporter Lisa Petrillo, then at WPLG, was sent out to look for what was left. She had a hard time believing what she found. "When you walked into these places, we didn't think these places would get back up and running."

"Got to Metrozoo. It was devastated. The aviary that was so beautiful, all the birds had gotten out," she remembers. The scope of the destruction amazed her, a memory still sharp after 15 years.

Dave Game remained at the shelter until the storm passed and he could get outside. As he and his crew walked out of the school, they found a landscape reminiscent of a World War.

"It was like a nuclear bomb went off," he remembers. "We were lucky our car was safe, because dozens of others were junk."

His job was to cover the story, but his first thought was his wife, a mile and a half away in what had become akin to a war zone, unreachable by cell phone. Covering the disaster would wait until he reached her.

It took Dave an hour and a half to make the short trip to his home, 22 blocks away, and when he arrived, he found trees uprooted, windows blown out, half a roof; and his wife, safe inside. She had spent two hours in a closet with the pets as Andrew beat at the door.

"It's hard to talk about it even today," he said, eyes glistening, voice halting. "It's a little embarrassing to get this emotional about something, but I tell people all the time, who think they've gone through hurricanes, unless you've gone through something like this, you just don't have an idea."

"There is no way to tame nature's fury."

South Dade neighbor Frank Hunt was one person who was left homeless.

"I don't think we were fully ready," said Frank Hunt. "We didn't know the degree what a hurricane could do."

"All of a sudden at about 2 or 3 in the morning, me like a fool I opened up the door a little bit and it almost took me out," said Hunt. "And it was the fear everybody had at the time--the trees, the shingles going across the street, all the debris."

"Back in 1992, you have to realize our ability to forecast hurricanes was much less than it is now, especially for track," said Chris Landsea.

Andrew left us with a lot of tough questions and painful answers. Few expected a direct hit in South Miami-Dade. That left too many local residents poorly prepared for what was to come.

"The best guess was it was going to hit a little further north, Broward or Palm Beach," said Christopher Landsea, of the National Hurricane Center. "But we know back then we had an average error of about 100 miles either side in one day.

Without predicting such a powerful storm, local emergency planners couldn't know they'd have to get ready for a quarter of a million people with nowhere to live, no food, no water, and no electricity in the searing summer sun of late August.

"The biggest problem was we didn't remember how bad hurricanes could be," said Chuck Lanza.

"We weren't ready. We weren't ready for a couple of reasons. One is we hadn't prepared ourselves for the big storm, the Hurricane Andrew Type of storm, and secondly we hadn't looked at the long term effects of it on the economy."

The Economy was an estimated $25 billion worth of damage in 1992. Homes, condos, and commercial properties were destroyed overnight. It served as a vivid reminder that our building code was being ignored, too many corners cut to keep up with South Florida's growth.

"You have to remember that before Andrew we were, what, 20 years without one," said Lanza.

"There were a lot of people who grew up in this town who didn't remember what a hurricane was," said Charles Danger, with the Miami-Dade Building Department. "We were not [ready] and we paid the price."

We're still paying the price today. The insurance industry rates never dropped down to pre-Andrew days.

While a lot of residents still have a lot of bad memories, others have some very good memories.

"I helped everybody in my neighborhood," said James Murphy, as he held back tears. Murphy lost his home, but he remembers how Andrew also brought out the best in so many neighbors here. "I tell you right now, neighbors helping neighbors was the greatest thing in the world."

And Andrew also taught weather scientists like Chris Landsea, whose parents lost their home, how hurricane experts needed to improve their forecasting.

"Compared to 15 years ago, we actually are able to have 1/2 as much forecast error," he said. "Yes, it's a 50 mile error in 1 day compared to 100 miles back in 1992."

Another painful lesson it took Hurricane Katrina to each us: Better pre-planning for disasters, moving critical relief supplies into regional distribution centers before a bad storm hits.

"They are living in places that are substandard. You know and these are consequences that linger on when you have a disaster of that magnitude."

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