National Geographic: Cyclone! Page #4

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their fourth child on Sunday.

Andrew's winds exceed 74 miles

an hour on Saturday, August 22nd.

Hurricane warnings in effect

for Dade and Brown Counties.

Hurricane watch in effect...

The first hurricane

of the Atlantic season is born.

By noon on Sunday, massive

evacuations are ordered

along the Florida coast.

Sunday afternoon.

Right on schedule, Barbara has been

in labor since around 6 AM.

Here we have from the hurricane

to the other action in this room.

Which is Barbara going through

early stages of labor.

Four centimeters contracted,

going through labor pains,

In the birthing suite,

Stan videotapes the proceedings

with all the fervor of an

expectant father.

Still, the meteorologist in him

can't help but be distracted.

And we still have, waiting

for the hurricane.

Beautiful skies. Calm.

You'd never know what was going

to happen here

in the next 12 to 14 hours

or so.

Late in the day,

Andrew's winds accelerate to

a hundred fifty miles an hour.

Traveling nearly due west,

it descends upon the Bahamas.

Around 6 PM,

it strikes Eleuthera Island,

packing a storm surge 23 feet high,

taking four lives.

Having a boy makes you feel like

a father

and having a little girl makes you

feel like a daddy.

Stan steals a few hours with new

arrival Pearl,

then leaves the hospital.

He'll ride out the storm at home.

In Miami, violent skies herald

Andrew's approach.

Inland, residents take routine

safety measures.

Seven miles from shore,

Stan and his boys are joined by

his sister-in-law and family.

Sunday, 23rd of August.

We have the family here:

Jonathan, Daniel,

Roger, Benjamin, Joseph,

Aaron, Ruben.

We have Ann.

And we're gonna weather it out

through the storm.

Say hi, Daniel.

Hi

In the dead of night,

Andrew suddenly intensifies as it

approaches the tip of Florida.

August 24th, around 4:30 AM.

Andrew comes ashore.

Our TV's out, maybe the power's out

for the duration of this.

You can hear that outside...

You'll start hear

the rule outside.

In the hallway of the Goldenberg

house.

Winds outside,

I think, are at least a hundred,

hundred and ten miles an hour

or more...

Arie, are you OK?

It's okay, it's OK.

And there is the cat...

And there is...

every body here?

Just waiting it out in the hall

because we lost the plywood

on the front window

The rear plant gate would

probably layers.

And we are sitting back here

resting in the Lord,

In the hall way.

We can feel our ears

possibility cut?

pressure drops.

Yes, Johnson.

Lord we thank you and ask for

your protection.

This is Stan, at 8:30

in the morning.

We have been through a night.

This is our street,

trees down everywhere.

The back street is a history

in front of me...

just one window broken

on that car.

Trees down everywhere.

These are our sweet precious

neighbors

These shadows survive the storm

every window cover

with these type shadows survived.

But our house, which had wood

shutters, the roof lifted off.

and as you can see,

we have no house.

This wall fell on us, containing

the refrigerator, the stove.

This is the wall, fell on top of us,

the stove down there,

the cabinets, all fell on top of us,

and that small space you're

looking at,

the mattress and everything,

that's where we were pinned during

the worst part of the storm.

Incredibly, three adults, six

children and a kitten emerge,

unharmed, from the wreckage

that was Stan's home.

The scope of the disaster

has not yet dawned on Miami.

At the hospital, Barbara rests

assured that her family is safe.

We will perhaps get the first look

at what's going on, up in the air.

The hospital had an emergency

generator,

so we still had power.

And we saw all of the first footage

of this destruction and storm,

and we were in shock.

The first areas they went through

they were kind of relieved,

saying, "Oh..." and just making

interesting comments

about how this car is thrown here

and there.

But they became much more sober

as they went farther south.

It did not look possible that

anybody could be alive.

And that was just a mile or

two from my house.

And at that point, I really

felt despair.

One two, three, four, five, six,

seven, eight.

And there must have been about,

oh, let's say,

counting and trying

to estimate

at least three to four hundred

mobile homes here.

The rest are just completely gone.

In the morning, my wife finally

got through to somebody there

just to find out that I was okay,

somehow we both had a peace,

that each of us was okay.

But I still remember the

first time,

I got through to her on the phone,

I just wept.

I mean it wasn't just the excitement

of me getting through to her,

as me pouring out the emotions

of what I'd been through.

I mean, we'd been through an

incredible experience.

Andrew's storm surge wreaked

havoc along the Florida coast.

But its winds devastated an area

larger than the city of Chicago:

some 135,000 dwellings damaged

or destroyed.

The homeless numbered 160,000.

It seemed miraculous only 44 died.

Not one official wind gauge

survived Andrew's peak winds.

No one knew

how fast they had gusted.

Intrigued, Dr. Ted Fujita

"Mr. Tornado"

flew to Miami to study the

aftermath.

Roofs ripped from homes.

Trees snapped in half.

Concrete beams carried hundreds

of feet.

Plywood embedded in a tree trunk.

Fujita finds evidence of winds up

to 200 miles an hour.

But his most startling finding comes

from aerial surveys

with local meteorologists.

They point out narrow streaks of

total devastation

near areas with lesser damage.

To Fujita the patterns are

eerily familiar.

He develops a theory:

that the worst damage in Andrew

was caused by "mini-swirls":

tornado-like rotations, brief but

violent, embedded in the eye wall.

The theory has personal meaning

for Stan Goldenberg.

We never expected the kind

of damage we experienced.

Not only were we

in the areas of

some of the maximum areas

of the storm,

we had in addition, we believe,

an area of more intense winds

probably caused by the mini-swirls

that Ted Fujita talks about.

There was a strip,

right through my house,

of homes that were devastated,

and I was right in that strip.

Stan would relocate his family to

a new house.

Parts of Florida remains scarred

to this day.

Andrew also ravaged the Louisiana

coast, taking 17 lives.

Finally, the storm would vanish

over the mid-Atlantic states,

some two weeks after its birth.

Andrew was America's costliest

disaster.

But it had a silver lining.

It spared New Orleans,

a city defined by water.

Repeatedly flooded and drained

over the past three centuries,

the metropolis was built

on swampland

surrounded by

the Mississippi River.

Shaped like a bowl, the city's

terrain rises near its edges,

and dips in its mid-section to

below sea-level.

Lake Pontchartrain crowns its

northern shore.

Over a hundred miles of levees

and flood walls up to 20 feet

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