Over the past two decades, Bob Sheets watched as miles and miles of sleek suburban-style homes and condos sprang up in south Florida. It made him uneasy.
Though all these new homes were built under the nation's strictest wind codes, Sheets, director of the National Hurricane Center, saw that hard-learned lessons about the nature of these devastating storms were being forgotten.Solid, reinforced cinderblock homes, built with techniques developed in the hurricane-conscious 1940s and 1950s, gave way to stylish wood-frame and split-levels familiar to millions of Northern newcomers.
Some wondered if quality was being sacrificed in the rush to feed the booming real estate market.
"All of us who looked into it understood that wood-framed structures potentially had problems," Sheets said. "We talked about it and thought with the code requirements that maybe they would survive."
That hopeful speculation was blown to bits by Hurricane An-drew.
While estimates still vary, upwards of 60,000 homes may have been destroyed when the strongest storm to hit Miami in 40 years whirled through two weeks ago. The storm has been blamed for 51 deaths in Florida, Louisiana and the Bahamas. Most of the devastation occurred in Florida - 38 deaths, 250,000 people homeless and an estimated $20 billion in damage - making it the nation's costliest natural disaster.
Also destroyed was the complacency that came with the decades-long respite of hurricane activity along the U.S. coastline: Powerful storms like Andrew and Hurricane Hugo in 1989 may signal a long-anticipated end to that calm.
For those familiar with the killer storms of the past, it is a dark omen for Atlantic and Gulf coast communities even less prepared than south Florida.
"People certainly should pay attention to this," said Herbert Saffir, an engineer who helped develop the Saffir-Simpson scale that ranks the destructive power of hurricanes. "This isn't something confined to Miami. They are just as apt to get a strong storm like this anywhere along the coast."
Floridians once had an intimate knowledge of hurricanes. A 1926 storm killed more than 200 and damaged or destroyed every building in Dade County. A 1935 Labor Day storm killed 408 in the Florida Keys. From 1944 through 1950, the state was hit by an average of one a year.
"If you made it to Thanksgiving Day without having a hurricane, then you really had something to sit down and have Thanksgiving about," said U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, a native of the Miami area.
People learned from the constant threat, developing building styles on a trial-and-error basis. Concrete block homes with steel reinforced columns, shutters and tar and gravel roofs became com-mon-place.
The hard experience was codified into building regulations, giving Dade and Broward counties the nation's toughest building codes: Residential homes were expected to withstand winds of 120 mph; taller office and apartment buildings had to be designed for 170 mph.
"The code is very detailed - what kind of footing and tie beam to use, how to tie down a roof - it's all there," Saffir said.
One example: Elsewhere in the nation, builders are required to tie roof rafters to beams with connectors that resist only a few hundred pounds of wind force that can lift up a roof. In Dade and Broward, builders must use metal connectors known as hurricane straps that can withstand up to 2,000 pounds.
Hurricane preparation once was a part of daily life. Homeowners stockpiled water, candles and canned goods as a normal springtime ritual. They trimmed back trees and checked their shutters on the eve of hurricane season.
"Those people were much better prepared with what they'd need after a hurricane," Sheets said. "They were very self-sufficient."
But this societal savvy faded as shifting global weather patterns pushed the storms elsewhere. The entire country has only seen eight major hurricanes in the past 20 years; south Florida has seen only one since 1965.
This lull coincided with Florida's boom. Northerners, lured by warm weather and cheap housing, swelled the state's population sixfold since 1950; Dade County's population jumped from 500,000 in 1950 to nearly 2 million now.
Until Andrew, only 10 percent of those now living in the county had any experience with a major hurricane.
"The whole state suffered from the same problem - a sense that we weren't hurricane vulnerable anymore," said Kate Hale, Dade County's emergency director.