It's another 90-degree morning at Mount Pleasant Missionary Baptist Church. The choir sings "Revive Us Again" to the accompaniment of a portable synthesizer organ.
Worshipers wield hand fans, flapping like captive butterflies. Instead of the usual biblical scene, the white fans bear the words "Andrew was yesterday. Recovery is today," and a toll-free number for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.Since Hurricane Andrew destroyed its sanctuary, Mount Pleasant literally has been a church without walls, gathering every steamy Sunday under a borrowed, off-white tent with rolled-up sides.
The hours of terror and violence, days of deprivation and misery that Hurricane Andrew brought to south Dade County have ended, but the experience is far from over.
The storm's damage estimates run higher than $30 billion, making it the nation's most costly disaster. The human cost is much greater; as Andrew's survivors watch the Midwest struggle with flooding, they understand.
"We can really feel sympathy and empathy with those folks," said Mount Pleasant's Rev. James C. Wise. His advice? "Thank God for what's left."
Dade County took the heaviest hit from Andrew. The progress of recovery differs wildly, depending on where you look.
Whole neighborhoods and shopping centers remain gutted, as if the storm had just happened. But elsewhere, generally in more affluent areas, the steady racket and procession of construction workers have brought renewal.
The southern part of the county, once lush, doesn't have much shade now. But the remaining trees have greened, though many still lean west, pointing out the direction of Andrew's powerful wind bursts, which may have been as strong as 200 mph.
The legacy of Andrew a year later includes less visible effects, such as a vast tangle of lawsuits by desperate property owners; a drastically revamped insurance system; and frustrated residents who, at a recent town meeting, complained to Gov. Lawton Chiles of neighborhoods overrun by burglars and crooked contractors.
The state attorney's office has reported at least 90 cases of corrupt contractors, with arrests in 84 of the cases. A fraud hotline was opened this month.
Local politicians have revved up efforts to finish work of the most basic type - debris cleanup, replacement of street signs and blocking off unsafe property.
In some neighborhoods, residents are still paying the price.
"My life ain't been right since," said Eva Brookins of Florida City, which along with its sister city of Homestead on the tip of the Florida peninsula, was flattened by the storm. She recalled huddling with her grandchildren under three mattresses as the storm raged.
"When it lifted up the roof it was like we was in a big ball of fire," she said.
In the remains of the squat brown house that was home before Andrew, Brookins splashes through puddles littered with photographs, broken appliances and food containers.
For the past six months, she has shared a donated travel trailer with the three children and a friend.
"It's just hard," she said. "It makes me wanna give up, because I'm not used to asking people for nothing. Sometimes I get in this trailer by myself and I just cry."
Her story is repeated in pockets throughout the county, but there are many encouraging signs of renewal.
No event so heartened the people of south Dade County as the surprise announcement in June that flattened Homestead Air Force Base, slated for closure, would be resuscitated.
It was selected as a model base to serve as a national example of how such installations can be returned to their surrounding communities. Col. Rodney Bates will have more resources to work with as he and his staff work on the cleanup.
"All we have to do is get it started and push it in the right direction," he said.
The F-16s of the 31st Fighter Wing are gone. But they'll be replaced by planes belonging to Air Force reserve units, the Florida Air National Guard and U.S. Customs as the base becomes a mixed-use, civilian and government facility.
Military retirees were crushed, however, to learn that key facilities such as the hospital and commissary would not return. As many as 6,000 retired officers have left since Hurricane Andrew to seek the benefits of other military bases.
The migration also has affected cities like Florida City, which lost half of its 8,000 residents.
But the cities are fighting to rebuild.
In Florida City - where Andrew blew away all of the city's government buildings, 90 percent of its houses and 65 percent of its tax base - a new $6 million municipal building will include a large room residents can use for meetings and activities.
The tempest's effects - both bad and good - linger in the keys, as well.
A year ago, Boca Chita key was a popular spot for boaters in Biscayne National Park. Located in Biscayne Bay east of Homestead, it functioned much like a rest area on the highway, with restrooms and fresh water and historic limestone structures left from 50 years ago when the little island was a playground for millionaires.
Since Andrew, Boca Chita's been closed, visited mostly by cormorants that perch in the few remaining trees, surveying the rubble of the restrooms scattered across the bleaching, shattered hulks of downed Australian pines.
"It doesn't seem possible it's been a year," said Ruth Mero, a 22-year-old waitress at the International House of Pancakes in Naranja, one of the first restaurants to reopen after the storm.
She most misses the places she and her friends used to go for fun.