30 Years Since Hurricane Andrew

I've mentioned before that the only time I ever heard my dad cuss in front of us kids was during Hurricane Donna. We lived right on the beach and water was rushing in under the front door. Mom was yelling at dad, water is coming in, water is coming in. Dad replied "It's an F-ing hurricane what do you want me to do?"

 

I lived in a Miami Lakes apartment at the time. A day or two before I accepted an invitation from friends to stay in Boca Raton. Glad I did.

When I went back to work our department office staff did some volunteering helping employees who were hit. Got to see quite a lot of damage. It was inexplicable how in some neighborhoods around Kendall one house looked mostly ok and the one next to it was demolished. I remember see a small pine tree branch stuck in the side of a house wall and trying to figure out the physics of that.

Then on weekend went with some friends to volunteer in Homestead. It looked like a war zone. Seems like I recall seeing upside down cars but don’t remember if i saw that live or on news. The biggest problem helping people was logistics. We were at a makeshift donation center in a parking lot and there were tractor trailers lined up down the street waiting to unload.

 

We landed at Homestead AFB from Dyess AFB Tx. a couple of days after the storm to begin relief operations. We set our billet tents up in the ECM parking lot. The Army got the showers working intermittently at the base pool. No hot but it didn’t matter. The base looked like someone took a giant chainsaw and cut the tops of the palms off. Just silence. Hot as all get out until they set up the expandable shelters with A/C and shower facilities about 3 weeks in. The non flyable F16s left in the alert facility were blown around. I was able to stand on the beaver tail of a non flyable rescue C130; the aircraft was broke in half. It was non stop 24/7 relief ops for about 5 weeks. We handled military, civilian flights. Even the old C47 C54s. Then we went to daylight ops only than turned over ops to the Guard and Reserves. One of my more memorable trips. We did something for our own people.

 

My wife had just taken off from Homestead with her mom to head to Tx where we'd meet. Their house got shredded.

 

Drove down to Perine/Kendall from Weston to help some friends and relatives. Took forever as all street signs, trees and landmarks were gone. Still recall a friend's wife sitting in her kitchen stunned and crying while we cleaned up their debris.

Luckily for us, we had moved from a 2 story golf course townhouse in Perine the prior year. Andrew took the second story.

As for improved bldg codes in the state, maybe, but I've seen a lot of apartments going up in central Fla that look just like those in Kendall that were blown away. Look like they are made of sticks. Hopefully Tampa Bay never gets a cane even close to Andrew. It would be catastrophic.

 

There were building codes. We were pulling building permits long befoe Andrew, codes changed after Andrew though

 

This is an excellent explanation for what you saw in the neighborhoods around Kendall.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?
v=S7Fu-v490-c

But in all seriousness, the explanation for the extreme spotty damage where the next house looked fine was because the damaged house either got hit by something that was flying around or there was a small tornado embedded in a specific rain band of the storm.