14 years ago today - Hurricane Andrew

Hurricane Andrew hit South Florida 14 years ago today. At the time, I was just 5 years old, but I clearly remember the storm and what we did to prepare for it. We boarded up windows, moved stuff away from the glass sliding doors, moved some other stuff to the area beneath the stairs, and closed all of the doors as we left the house. I remember sleeping that night at the house of one of my dad’s friends and that I had to bathe in a tub with somewhat dirty water (there was no running water). I also recall the power being out so we lit lots of candles to light the place and my parents kept telling me not to touch them. The next morning, after the storm, we drove out to head back to our house and we had to dodge fallen trees and lots of big puddles. It was still drizzling a bit I think, but that probably wasn’t important enough to remember clearly. Anyway, we reached our house and I just remember seeing straight through it from the front all the way to the back. The house was messed up (I wonder if my parents have a photo of the house after the storm somewhere). I remember my mom crying a bit, but not for too long. Probably just an immediate reaction to the utter devastation that the storm had caused. I didn’t realize it at the time becuase I was so young, but I bet my parents knew right away that they had lost the house altogether and that they’d need to start from scratch again. For a while, our family even slept in the warehouse that my family owned in another part of Florida that wasn’t hit as badly as the area where my house was. I slept on this green (or was it blue?) fold-out nylon bed and showered with cold water from the hose outside while my dad erected a makeshift “shower” made from the panels of sliding wooden closet doors. My dad was a genius!

Go to the State Library and Archives of Florida and search for the term “Hurricane Andrew” and you’ll find some photos that will be both fascinating and scary.

More personal accounts of the storm can be found the book, In The Eye of Hurricane Andrew.
From the publisher:

Although Florida has been struck by more hurricanes than any other region of the continental United States, most people living in South Florida in 1992 had never experienced one. On August 24, in a matter of hours, Hurricane Andrew ravaged communities on the South Florida coast, leaving 250,000 people homeless and physical damages of close to $30 billion. Based on interviews with survivors and rescue workers in the weeks and months that followed, In the Eye of Hurricane Andrew is the extraordinary story of one of the most destructive natural disasters in modern American history as told by the people who lived through it.

Nearly 100 people representing diverse backgrounds share their experiences, from a mother who weathered the storm in a tiny bathroom shared with another adult, four children, and a dog, to a roofer who traveled from Tennessee to help in the rebuilding process, to Bryan Norcross, the TV weatherman whose voice guided many through the storm. Their stories create a real sense of how Andrew impacted each person — the decision to evacuate or not, preparations, what happened during the storm, the cleanup, looting, price gouging, rebuilding, living in the aftermath — and testify to the ingenuity and resiliency of South Florida’s citizens.

According to Wikipedia, Hurricane Andrew was a $26.5 billion storm that ravaged through South Florida, the Keys, the Bahamas, and parts of Louisianna. Adjusted for inflation, if Hurricane Andrew (or a similar storm) were to strike again, it would cost roughly $44.9 billion, making Hurricane Andrew the second most costly storm ever on record after last year’s Hurricane Katrina.

Click on the image above to see the photos at a larger size.

[Note: A simple search on Google for Hurricane Andrew photos should bring up more results and information]

This is an infrared image of Hurricane Andrew on the morning of August 24, 1992, as it was making landfall. More satellite images here.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) also has a guide to hurricanes and what you need to do to prepare for them. Why do all of these government websites look so ugly?! It’s almost as if they want to look unofficial!
They also have an entire page dedicated to Hurricane Andrew. You can see lots of maps and satellite images as well as aftermath storm images there.