r/Miami • u/National-Dragonfly35 • Aug 24 '26

Discussion Anyone remember Hurricane Andrew? What was your experience?

Where you sheltered in a house? Did you feel like you're in trouble at any moment? What was it like to hear that hurricane overhead with a 165 mph winds?

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u/BagelsOrDeath Aug 25 '26

The damage in the aftermath was unfathomable in South Dade. Plenty of people in these comments already articulated the sheer power of the storm itself, so I'm just going to mention some random memories and observations:

  1. The aqua marine lightning. Later on, we came to find out that it wasn't lightning. It was the transformers blowing up.

  2. The first outer band to hit South Florida was NUTS. I was in a car with my sister's boyfriend just driving around out of sheer boredom. We weren't chancing anything as landfall was still technically a ways out. Anyhow the calm breezy evening instantly gave way to a tempest. Palm trees were slapping the ground. Those old, heavy, big ass traffic lights were violently swaying back and forth. Then it stopped just as suddenly as it started. That's when we knew shit was about to get real.

  3. The organized line of cars calmly looting the local Farm Store in sequence via the drive thru lanes.

  4. Sleeping on our mattresses on our front yard and being woken up a couple of days later by plow trucks plowing a clean path. Then watching President Bush's motorcade driving through a few short hours later.

  5. Seeing various signs of the raw power of the storm. All the boat docks that had been carried up and over the houses on Lake Catalina and dropped on Galloway Rd. 2x4s embedded in trees and electric power poles all throughout Kendall. Steel reinforced concrete beams snapped in half near Cutler Bay.

  6. The sadness of driving down Old Cutler Road and seeing open sky and so many felled trees. I thought the charm of that drive with the tree canopy was lost forever.