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Hurricane Andrew sequence (click image for larger version)

Today marks the 17th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew hitting South Florida. I was young at the time (5 years old going on 6), but I still remember the event and the storm clearly. There are spaces in my memory that are blank from the event but here’s a list of things I do remember:

• I remember having to live at the house of a family friend for a couple of days and then moving into a warehouse/business my parents owned because our house had been totaled in the storm.
• I remember taking a bath in the dark with a bucket of water because there was no power and no working plumbing during the storm.
• I remember driving through debris in a van (I believe it was the Vanagon) the day after the storm to assess the damage to our house in Perrine and seeing it completely gutted.
• I remember seeing the shoe room we had underneath the staircase intact but everything else just broken and shattered.
• I remember my mom crying for a little while — mainly because of the damage done to the house, but also, I believe, because her wedding dress was destroyed and strewn out on the front lawn.
• I remember finding Emily’s purple Barney stuffed dinosaur all wet

For those of you who don’t know, Hurricane Andrew was one of the costliest natural disasters to hit the US. It was only recently surpassed in total damage amount by Hurricane Katrina which hit New Orleans and several other parts of the country also affected by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. At the time, Hurricane Andrew amassed a total of $25 billion in damages (mind you, that’s 1992 Dollars…you can do the math in today’s amount) and was responsible for about 60 deaths.

I’m not sure exactly how my parents managed through those times, but I do know that calming, feeding, and explaining the event to 5 young children while re-building the family’s life in Florida sure is a sign of how strong and awesome they are.

If you want to get a sense of how destructive the storm was, AccuWeather has a slideshow of images from the storm and NASA has this image to show how large Hurricane Andrew was (you can also check out this NASA minisite for more Hurricane Andrew imagery).