Hurricane Andrew Turns 25 But Legacy Lingers

MIAMI BEACH, FL — Before Katrina, Wilma, Sandy and Matthew there was Andrew, the granddaddy of modern U.S. storm disasters. It wrought devastation unlike any other storm that had come ashore in South Florida in the two decades before its arrival on Aug. 24, 1992 and still holds the dubious distinction of being the only Category 5 hurricane to strike a major metropolitan area in the United States. For those who lived through the storm of a lifetime, it's hard to believe that Andrew turned 25 on Thursday.

"The only disaster that is comparable to the Andrew disaster was the Katrina disaster," observes The Weather Channel's Bryan Norcross in an interview with Patch from his home in Miami Beach. "The Katrina disaster actually in many ways exceeded it. But the Katrina mega disaster really was not a hurricane disaster. It was really an engineering disaster." (Sign up for our free Daily Newsletters and Breaking News Alerts for the Miami Beach Patch.)

The National Weather Service released an hour-long commemorative documentary on the storm that changed the Magic City (Watch below), while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had planned to mark Thursday's anniversary in Miami, but later canceled when forecasts showed Tropical Storm Harvey heading toward the Texas coast.

"If the flood walls had held the way they were designed to, and supposed to, it would have been a disaster of a different scale," Norcross explained. "It was horrendous in Mississippi, but New Orleans would have been saved."

Norcross, who chronicles his recollections in a new book titled “My Hurricane Andrew Story" remained on the air for 23 straight hours throughout Andrew as the TV weatherman at Miami's NBC affiliate (watch clips below) and helped countless South Floridians make sense of the unimaginable. Andrew was responsible for 15 deaths and the destruction of some 63,000 homes which left at least 175,000 people homeless. Electricity was out for up to three months in the hardest-hit areas.

"The thing that makes Andrew stand out is it's the only super extreme storm since we've had relatively modern technology and fairly high resolution satellites. In Andrew we could actually see the details of what went on in the hurricane," explained Norcross, who will be appearing in Miami at a book signing on Tuesday (Aug. 29) at Books & Books, 1300 Biscayne Blvd. "It just exceeded the strength of anything in relatively modern times we’ve seen."

Perhaps the one image that has been impossible for Norcross to shake after all this time was the devastation at the then Homestead Air Force Base, which was thought to be hurricane proof at the time.

"It was about 12 hours after the storm, we finally got the helicopter over Homestead Air Force Base," Norcross recalled. "And, I was shocked to see it blown to bits after the insistence by the military folks that they were hurricane proof."

Other parts of Miami were simply unrecognizable.

"It was like being on a movie set because nothing was recognizable," he said. "The people that lived there all their lives couldn’t find their way to their house when they were only a block away."

He said that the closest storm to Andrew was Hurricane Camille in 1969, but that was a different era.

"Satellites were just coming into play in 1969 and were far more crude scientifically than the ones we had for Andrew," he explained. "Andrew hit a populated suburban part of a major city as opposed to the Mississippi coast. And as horrendous as Katrina was in 2005, it hit relatively the same lightly populated coastline compared to South Florida."

Ironically, Norcross almost didn't get to cover Hurricane Andrew. He was preparing to leave WTVJ on the very day the storm hit under a recent management changes.

"We built a storm center. We did all kinds of things and the ratings were not responding in a significant way," he recalled. " I went off to look for a job and felt like I had it 95 percent bolted down. They (management) went off looking for a weather guy. And, all of this was supposed to be in some sense consummated on Monday, Aug. 24 when I was going to have an appointment in New York to finalize this job I had put together there."

The rest, as in the case of Andrew, is history.

Norcross will be holding book signings staring on Thursday at Books & Books locations around the Miami area. Here is the list of locations and times:

Watch the commemorative documentary on Andrew prepared by the National Weather Service below:

Watch highlights of the Hurricane Andrew broadcast below:

Photo of the devastation caused by Hurricane Andrew in the Miami area courtesy of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration