Hurricane Andrew

Hurricane Andrew, tropical cyclone that ravaged The Bahamas, southern Florida, and south-central Louisiana in late August 1992. At the time, Hurricane Andrew was the most expensive Atlantic hurricane in U.S. history (later surpassed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005).

Hurricane Andrew began as a tropical depression off the west coast of Africa near the Cape Verde islands on August 16; the next day it was classified as a tropical storm by the National Hurricane Center of the U.S. National Weather Service. After traveling west-northwest across the Atlantic Ocean, it turned northwest, avoiding the islands of the eastern Caribbean Sea. On August 20 the strength of the storm declined considerably. (A measurement taken near the center of the storm revealed that Andrew’s atmospheric pressure was 1,015 millibars, up from 1,000 millibars the day before; tropical storms and hurricanes typically possess atmospheric pressures lower than 1,000 millibars.) By August 21, fueled by the presence of a nearby low-pressure cell, Andrew reintensified. It became a hurricane on August 22, developing into a category 5 storm on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale the following day. It made landfall on Eleuthera in The Bahamas on August 23 with winds of 161 miles (259 km) per hour.

After weakening slightly over The Bahamas, Andrew strengthened once again over the Straits of Florida before reaching the southern tip of Florida on the morning of August 24. Shortly before landfall, an instrument called a dropsonde that had been released from an aircraft into the center of the storm recorded an atmospheric pressure of 932 millibars. When Hurricane Andrew struck the coast of Florida, the storm’s wind speed was 166.8 miles (268 km) per hour, with at least one gust reaching 177 miles (285 km) per hour. Andrew quickly traveled due west across the peninsula and diminished to a category 3 hurricane. When it made landfall in southern Louisiana on August 26, the winds had dropped to 115 miles (185 km) per hour.

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Disasters of Historic Proportion

Storm-related damage to The Bahamas was estimated at $250 million, whereas damage to property in the United States was roughly $26.5 billion. The area hardest hit was Dade county in southeastern Florida, where the storm destroyed more than 25,000 homes and damaged an additional 100,000. The ability of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to respond to the devastation was sharply criticized as it took four days for FEMA to send teams into the crippled region. The hurricane caused 26 direct and 39 indirect deaths, the majority occurring in Dade county.

In 1993 the name Andrew was retired for hurricanes by the World Meteorological Organization.