Clouds of Despair Linger in Florida in Andrew’s Wake

Just last week, hurricane survivor Tom Reale was standing in his south Dade County home--a shell of rafters, wall studs and dangling wires--when 12 months of frustration caught him up like a cyclone from the blue.

He lit a cigarette and his voice quavered when he spoke: “In North Miami and places up there, they have no idea. They say: ‘Yeah, they had a hurricane, but it was a year ago. It’s over.’

“But it’s not over. Contractors, roofers, permits, not enough insurance. Wondering if my business will make it.

“They have no idea what went on down here.”

What went on over a 300-square-mile swath of southern Florida began in the early morning darkness a year ago Tuesday. That day Reale; his wife, Jackie, and their two young children spent three horrifying hours thinking they were about to die.

Running from room to room as Hurricane Andrew’s winds blew in the walls and sucked away the roof, Reale finally stashed the children in the car and considered making a run for it.

A run to where?

“I don’t know,” he says now. “It was hell.”

What has been called the most widespread, most costly natural disaster in U.S. history continues to haunt residents of southern Florida.

From the sprawling suburban plains of Kendall, 15 miles from downtown Miami, to Florida City, a farming town at the peninsula’s tip, Andrew changed both the look and, for many, the feel of life in one of America’s garden spots.

“What we’ve learned is to be as self-sufficient as possible,” said Hernando Vergara, a coordinator with Dade County’s Office of Emergency Management. “We had a powerful storm that affected only half the county. It was small in size, dry and moved fast. So as bad as it was, it could be much worse.”

Nonetheless, Andrew’s numbers were impressive:

* Top sustained winds: 145 m.p.h.

* Deaths directly related to the storm: 17.

* Subsequent deaths: 72.

* Homes destroyed: 47,000.

* People forced to move: 101,000.

* Estimated damage: $20 billion to $30 billion.

With the peak of the current hurricane season looming--from now through mid-September--anxiety levels are up and news reports of even the most distant tropical storms send people scurrying to supermarkets and hardware stores for supplies. For some, the emergency that began last August with a hurricane warning has never ended.

“Every day patients continue to walk into the clinic with symptoms like panic attack, racing heart, a sick feeling in the stomach,” said psychologist Darrell Downs, who runs a south Dade County community mental health center. “It’s stress about this hurricane season and the general stress of coping.”

For thousands, coping has become synonymous with living. A popular bumper sticker speaks volumes: “I survived Hurricane Andrew but the rebuilding is killing me.”

For six weeks after the storm, the Reales lived like squatters, camped out next to the rubble of their home in a Southland Pines neighborhood that had been trashed by a rampage of nature.

Eventually the family got a trailer from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, parked it on their lot and, along with tens of thousands of others, began the painful job of rebuilding--both their homes and their lives.

It has been a full-time job. And it’s not over.

“Maybe by Christmas, we can be back in the house,” said Reale, 47, a plumbing contractor who said his small business is in near-terminal condition from neglect.

Like so many of their middle-class neighbors, the Reales were left with more than just a mess by the hurricane; they were left feeling helpless too.

“We were used to being in control of our lives,” said Jackie Reale, who lost her $32,000 job with a cruise ship line because, she says, her supervisors in north Dade County could not understand how her life had been scrambled.

“Then all of a sudden we were in a disaster, we needed help and yet you couldn’t get it. It was humiliating.”

The Reales are struggling for normalcy. They are not alone. Thousands of small businesses were destroyed and an estimated 86,000 people were out of work in the storm’s immediate aftermath.

Many never did recover. According to the Dade County Planning Department, 48,000 people moved out of southern part of the county for good.

Today, a year after Andrew devastated the area, a drive through south Dade County, Homestead and Florida City is still like a tour of a battlefield where the blood has not dried.

In some of the hardest-hit neighborhoods, about a third of the homes have been repaired, a third are under repair and another third have been abandoned altogether.

In Homestead, 85% of the homes were either destroyed or severely damaged. Homestead Air Force Base has not been rebuilt and will not be reopened except to house two Reserve units.

A few miles to the north, Naranja Lakes, a neighborhood that was once home to 4,000 people, officially became a ghost town when the residents voted to divvy up a $48-million insurance settlement and get out.

In some areas, whole strips of shopping centers remain fenced-off rubble. The 160-store Cutler Ridge Mall remains closed, and some of the buildings have been knocked down. Trash piles still dot the landscape. What trees remain alive and standing have re-leafed into strange, stumpy monuments to an unforgotten fury.

Andrew rattled all of southern Florida’s flora and fauna. Some 70,000 acres of coastal mangroves were wiped out in Biscayne Bay, and the voracious pine bark beetle is killing the native pine trees that the winds did not snap. But officials at Everglades National Park admit that the wildlife was less battered by the storm than was the staff.

“We’ve cleaned up the debris at the park, and reconstruction of facilities is under way,” said superintendent Richard G. Ring. “But psychologically we know that many folks will continue to feel the effects for up to three years.

“I know I never want to go through that again. My house was totaled, and I’m not back in it yet. I’m not physically ready for a storm this season.”

With all but 5% of claims settled, some $15 billion has been paid out in hurricane insurance money, according to Bill Bailey, co-director of the Hurricane Insurance Information Center, a trade association set up in south Dade County by several insurers. The record payouts caused 11 insurance companies to fail outright and 34 others--including giants such as Prudential, Allstate and Travelers--have withdrawn or cut back from the southern Florida market. Everyone’s rates went up.

“The numbers get attention, but it’s the human toll that is extreme,” Bailey said. “Divorce rates, violent crimes and suicides are up. There are thousands of people who have been through the worst experience of their lives and just can’t live there again.”

In addition to being terrorized by Andrew, many homeowners were shocked at how quickly their homes fell apart in the storm. Building codes have been strengthened, but one report by a University of Miami engineering professor found that poor construction rather than the force of the wind or lax code enforcement contributed most to the extensive damage.

With 160,000 people homeless after Andrew hit, expediency forced thousands to move into mobile homes. Almost without exception, mobile homes were turned inside out when Andrew hit them.

Just this month a Dade County grand jury accused county commissioners of ignoring that danger.

“The massive destruction of mobile homes by Hurricane Andrew appears to have been completely forgotten,” the grand jury said in its report. “This is inexcusable.”

One of the many people still living in a mobile home is 21-year-old Yvonne Garcia, who lives with her husband, Arturo, a farm worker, and their two children in the Everglades Migrant Labor Camp in Homestead.

“Everything affects us more,” she said, mentioning in particular the daily afternoon thunderstorms that build up over the adjacent saw grass prairies and sweep in to rock the ground with thunder. “The children get very scared.”

Fear is one of Andrew’s most enduring legacies. Surveys indicate that a vast majority of Dade County residents would flee if told another storm of Andrew’s size were approaching. Urban planners say that the gridlock caused by motorists jamming the highways to the north could turn into a nightmare, especially if a hurricane were to strike during the exodus.

Of course, forecasters cannot pinpoint a hurricane’s landfall when it is three days off the Florida coast. Thus, for example, if three days are needed to evacuate the Florida Keys, many people could end up fleeing their homes needlessly if the storm were to veer off in another direction.

So civic leaders preach preparedness: Know where the closest storm shelter is and be ready at home with canned goods, water, a radio, batteries, Sterno.

Last week, when a relatively minor tropical storm was reported in the southern Caribbean Sea about 1,000 miles from Miami, calls into the National Hurricane Center came in at a rate of 30 to 40 an hour, according to meteorological technician Tony Zaleski. “Fears are heightened by last year,” he said.

Indeed, “just watching TV for hurricane preparedness specials, I find myself getting more anxious,” said Downs, the psychologist. “The TV shows are trying to do good, but they make you relive it too.”

Before Andrew, only a handful of southern Florida residents had experienced a true hurricane, with winds above 100 m.p.h. Now, thousands have, and all attest to a new respect for the forces of nature.

That is one positive consequence of Andrew. Another is wildflowers. “With all the trees down,” said Patricia Tolle, a spokeswoman for Everglades National Park, “there is a profusion of flowers which require sun. So in some places, it’s beautiful out there.”