Hurricane Andrew is one of the three category 5 hurricanes to ever hit the United States. It came sweeping onto the florida coast in August of 1992 with winds that were up to 175 miles per hour. The wreckage it left was astonishing, completely destroying over 25,000 houses and damaging 100,000 more. Andrew also killed a total of 40 people, some during the storm and most in the aftermath.
The recovery from Andrew took months and although the destruction left was overwhelming, including a few zoo animals who escaped when their enclosures were damaged, a few good things did come out of the storm. The state of Florida ended up passing a law that reconditioned the state’s building code, as it was obvious from the destruction left by the storm that many building code standards were being ignored. It was also found that the emergency response system in Washington was broken.
One hometown hero that emerged was meteorologist Bryan Norcross. A few days prior to the storm, Norcross had run transmission lines from a local radio station to the basement of NBC Miami, where he was able to broadcast to the public even after power lines and TV towers went down.
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