![]() "It looked like a bomb had gone off, it really did."Īs people began to assess the damage, it turned out that the amount of devastation brought by Hurricane Andrew differed greatly from neighborhood to neighborhood. "Cars were damaged from roof debris,' he says. After the storm, he saw most of his neighbors had suffered similar damage. But his roof was gone, and his home was devastated. But at that time, more wind came inside my house, thus knocking down a majority of the interior walls."Īustin's home, like nearly all in South Florida, is made of concrete block. "When the wind caught the front door," he says, "it almost blew it off the hinges. But then his father-in-law made the mistake of opening the front door. With glass flying everywhere, they packed themselves into a hallway closet, Austin says. "I think it was around a quarter till 5 when a plank from my neighbor's fence came crashing through my bedroom window," he says. since records were first kept.ĭoug Austin rode out the story with his wife, in-laws and 1-year-old son in southwest Miami-Dade County. But along with Hurricane Camille in 1969 and the 1935 Labor Day hurricane, Andrew was only the third Category 5 hurricane to make landfall in the continental U.S. Andrew was a small and fast-moving hurricane, tiny compared to slow giants like the more recent storms Katrina and Rita. The storm's wind speeds were later estimated at more than 160 miles per hour they broke the gauges used to collect such data. On WTVJ-TV, meteorologist Bryan Norcross stayed on the air as Andrew pounded the area, telling residents to retreat to safe rooms and to protect themselves under mattresses. 24, Andrew slammed into the Florida coast, just south of Miami. ![]() Most residents had less than a day to prepare their homes and to evacuate coastal areas.Įarly on the morning of Aug. "So, we really didn't forecast it to become a major hurricane until Saturday."Īndrew hit the Bahamas as a Category 5 hurricane and barreled toward South Florida. "It really didn't become a hurricane until the 22nd, which is only two days before it struck South Florida on the 24th," Mayfield says. When Andrew formed in the Atlantic in mid-August, it was a weak storm that many thought would fall apart. Max Mayfield, a former forecaster at the National Hurricane Center, remembers receiving calls through July and August from reporters asking where the storms were. It also changed how we forecast and respond to hurricanes.Īndrew hit in a hurricane season that started out uncharacteristically quiet. Dozens more died from injuries stemming from the storm and its aftermath.Īdjusted for inflation, the 1992 storm was, after Katrina, the second costliest storm in U.S. Hurricane Andrew wiped out communities south of Miami, killing 15 people when it struck in 1992. Twenty years ago, one of the strongest hurricanes ever to hit the U.S.
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