Hurricane Andrew: The Category Five That Erased Homestead

At four forty-five in the morning on August twenty-fourth, nineteen ninety-two, Hurricane Andrew made landfall near Homestead, Florida. Its sustained winds at the time of landfall were recorded at one hundred sixty-five miles per hour. It was the most powerful storm to strike the continental United States since the Labor Day Hurricane of nineteen thirty-five, and it crossed Dade County in four hours, leaving a path of destruction twenty-five miles wide.

Twenty-five thousand homes were destroyed outright. Sixty-five people died. The Homestead Air Force Base, which had been one of the region's largest employers, was essentially leveled. Ninety thousand residents of Dade County were left without habitable housing. The economic damage was estimated at approximately twenty-seven billion dollars, which made Andrew, at the time, the costliest natural disaster in American history.

What Andrew also exposed was a systematic failure of the building industry in South Florida during the construction boom of the nineteen eighties. Investigations that followed the storm found that homes built during that decade frequently did not meet the building codes on paper, let alone the codes that would have been appropriate for a hurricane-prone region. Inspectors had been overwhelmed, understaffed, and, in some documented cases, complicit in approving construction that did not meet standards. Homes that should have withstood a major storm failed catastrophically while older structures built to stricter specifications survived. The state and county rewrote building codes after Andrew. The revision was substantive.

Homestead was rebuilt, though "rebuilt" does not fully describe what happened: the community that existed before Andrew was largely replaced by a different community, because the people who had lived there before could not always afford to return to the market that replaced what they had lost. The neighborhoods that Andrew erased were not simply reconstructed. They were replaced. The difference matters to the people for whom it was not the same.