As anniversary approaches, Hurricane Andrew’s legacy remains strong in South Florida

There was no air conditioning and parts of the roof were gone, so the mosquitoes would swarm in on those hellishly hot nights. People had their guns ready for the looters. There were also monkeys, llamas, cougars and who knows what else roaming around.

Lorraine Valladares, 70, was a middle school teacher who lived on the eastern edge of the Everglades in a house that was damaged but still standing after Hurricane Andrew. She didn’t get power restored for months, and to this day, she’s still haunted by the sound of a portable generator.

Like other south Miami-Dade County residents, she can divide her life cleanly into two parts: before Andrew and after.

The same could be said for South Florida.

As the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season begins Thursday, Andrew’s legacy is everywhere. He’s there when we plan and prepare for potential disasters. He looms when we buy and build houses — and unfortunately when we buy property insurance.

Andrew also changed the storm culture in South Florida. The complacency that arose in the largely hurricane-free 1970s and ’80s, reflected in hurricane parties and stubborn refusals to evacuate, isn’t as prevalent as it once was.

“That, culturally, psychologically, ended with Andrew, because we saw what a real hurricane [could do],” said Richard Olson, director of the International Hurricane Research Center at Florida International University in Miami.

Since the last hurricane struck South Florida in 2005, millions of people have moved here. For the uninitiated, just learning about Andrew could be considered valuable hurricane preparation.

Bryan Norcross, the former WTVJ-NBC6 weatherman whose around-the-clock coverage of Andrew made him a local icon, put it this way:

“If you don’t know Hurricane Andrew, then you don’t understand what can happen to your community.”

At about 5 a.m. Aug. 24, a Monday, Hurricane Andrew made landfall on the Florida Keys, with wind speeds that were later determined to have topped 165 mph. It was the third-strongest hurricane on record to strike the U.S.

In Miami-Dade, 15 people died as a direct result of Andrew. The official toll of people who died indirectly from Andrew was 25. However, in January 1993, the Miami Herald reported that at least 43 more deaths could be indirectly linked to Andrew.

Whatever the actual death toll, it was regarded as being miraculously low considering the catastrophic damage to the landscape. Twenty-eight thousand homes were destroyed. Another 107,380 were damaged. About 180,000 people were left homeless and 1.4 million had no power.

Shock soon give way to anger. Widespread damage had been expected, but in a place where hurricanes are a fact of life, much of the rubble bore signs of disgracefully shoddy construction.

The South Florida Building Code, used by Dade and Broward counties, had been regarded as one of the best in the country. Andrew revealed another truth: Standards aren’t worth the paper they’re written on without adequate enforcement. Lawmakers, buoyed by public sentiment, set about making changes.

Improved roofing standards were the first to come. In 1994, the first post-Andrew version of the South Florida Building Code arrived. Impact-resistant windows or hurricane shutters were now a requirement for new buildings. Cheaper materials like particle board were prohibited.

Meanwhile, at the state level, there hadn’t been a statewide building code prior to Andrew. The first one took effect in 2002, superseding local codes and also incorporating the stronger Broward and Miami-Dade provisions.

Today the high cost of property insurance is a fact of life in South Florida, and its origins can be traced to Andrew. Before then, insurance rates were relatively low, but Andrew made it clear that insurers had dangerously underestimated the threat posed by a significant storm.

Insurers paid more than $15.5 billion in claims related to Andrew, according to a 2012 report from the Insurance Information Institute. The cost drove many insurers out of the state and some out of business. Those that remained raised rates.

The response to Hurricane Andrew was itself a bit of a disaster. As the week wore on, victims became more and more desperate for food, water and shelter. Media reports outlined communication breakdowns and confusion that led to the delayed arrival of supplies and troops.

Three days after the storm hit, a furious Kate Hale, then Dade County’s director of emergency management, had had enough. With her famous “where in the hell is the cavalry?” quote, she managed to articulate the victims’ desperation. Help was then on its way.

Then-Gov. Lawton Chiles ordered the formation of a committee informally known as the Lewis Commission, which would issue 94 recommendations. Federal authorities also did their own reports.

The result was a wholesale change in emergency management — better communications, better processes, better planning — at both the federal and state levels.

“In many ways, Hurricane Andrew was our Katrina,” said John Wilson, the former public safety director of Lee County, who was in hard-hit Florida City in the days after Andrew to help with the recovery effort.

Hurricane forecasting methods also have improved since Andrew. In 1992, the first hurricane warning was issued on Sunday morning, only about 24 hours before Andrew’s landfall. Today, forecasters are able to refine the potential strike zone earlier — which means more time to prepare.

Not far from where Lorraine Valladares lives in rural Homestead is a graying old structure that looks like a haunted house from an old “Scooby Doo” episode. Anderson’s Corner, which opened as a general store in the early 1900s, was for a long time a popular spot in the farm community. Hurricane Andrew nearly wiped it out, and it’s been vacant ever since.

Valladares, now 70 and retired, was a teacher at Cutler Ridge Middle School in 1992. She saw firsthand how Andrew affected local kids. The smaller children were terrified that Andrew was a person, or a monster, who would come back some other night.

Farmers lost everything. There were suicides, she said. Her mother’s house — the same house where Valladares had grown up — had been destroyed.

Many residents just left. A 1995 Sun Sentinel report based on IRS records indicates that 83,000 residents left Miami-Dade County in the aftermath of Andrew, while Broward and Palm Beach counties saw a net gain of nearly 20,000 former Miami-Dade residents.

“Everywhere you went,” Valladares said, “everything was destroyed.”

Perhaps one of the best-known images to emerge from that destruction was a rooftop dispatch in an obliterated neighborhood. “ANDREW WAS HERE,” read the giant letters. It was only partly accurate. Andrew had never really left.

Clarkson writes for the Sun Sentinel.

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