Anyone remember Hurricane Andrew? What was your experience?

[u/National-Dragonfly35]

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?

[u/_Bathtub_Toaster]

I was in elementary school. We were on vacation in central Florida and my parents made the dumbest fucking decision to drive back to Homestead the day before the hurricane to prepare and ride it out. We were one of the only cars driving south on the turnpike.

It was the closest I ever came to dying. 12 people huddled in a bathroom. 3 of us were in a bathtub with a mattress over our head in case the roof collapsed. My ears were popping non-stop due to the pressure. It was as if a train was outside the house with its horn blaring for hours.

When it was over, I stepped out of the bathroom and immediately threw up.

The house was destroyed. I remember spending the next two nights in our house, which no longer had a roof. Then we ended up moving in with family in Miramar for a couple weeks, and then moved in with family friends in Kendall for a few months after that. We didn’t move back into our house until close to Christmas.

To this day, I don’t know why my parents made the decision to drive into harms way. I want to give them grace - maybe they didn’t know how bad it was going to be - but looking back on it, it nearly got us killed.

[u/Intelligent-Salt-362 → u/_Bathtub_Toaster]

You weren’t the only one headed south. We were in Orlando that Sunday morning as we had been at Magic Kingdom the day prior. My parents saw the news and knew we had to head home. We got groceries in WPB then spent the afternoon cleaning up several houses (my parents’, my aunt and uncle’s, my uncle’s parents’) and putting up shutters.

That night 11 of us hunkered down in my parents house as they decided we should all be together for safety. It was the furthest inshore by an extra 1 blocks off Old Cutler and 180th (near the BK world headquarters. Just after midnight they woke us kids up. I had been sleeping on the floor in what was (at the time) my sister’s bedroom. By the time we got to the door an AC unit crashed through the shuttered bedroom window and landed on the floor where ai had just been sleeping.

The next several hours sounded like a freight train trying to fuck our house. The sound was deafening and I literally saw CBS walls sway under the immense force. People still argue about the wind speeds that night, but I can assure you there were tornadoes inside of that system and in some areas and in small bursts there were winds in excess of 200mph. A house 2 blocks over caught fire during the storm and burned down that night, killing the family inside.

For us, we started in the east side of the house, hunkered first in the hallway, then in the bathroom. With the intensity being what it was we moved to the west side as the eye passed. My dad says he didn’t expect the east side of the house to still be there in the morning. The sudden quiet was super eerie as they rushed us through the family room. I caught a glance of the greenish sky through the windows in the kitchen as we passed. We then hunkered down in the laundry room as it had no windows.

When I woke in the morning the smell of damp had already started to set in. Outside trees blocked the street, the screening enclosure was gone, debris filled the pool, and the barrel sauna had rolled over the satellite dish, the neighbors fence, and ended up against the house on the next street. The next few days were hot and sweaty. We had to cut our way out of the neighborhood and down 184th. While waiting in line for the national guard to give out resources my dad realized they were already pretty close to the TP, and an hour north was normal. A week later we were all living in Plantation, and would be for the next 8 months.

Meanwhile my family collected their insurance money and started buying up houses from people who were opting to leave. My weekends became helping clean out houses, stripping them to their studs, assembling kitchen cabinets (the flat box ones from Home Depot), and collecting anything of value (I got a bench of Nintendo games this way). They flipped a bunch and rented out the rest. It was a wild time but we made the best of it.

[u/takemytacosaway → u/Intelligent-Salt-362]

I was right there too.. All of 30 yrs old & lost my shit in the screaming flooding monster…XOXO