| SWEPT AWAY BY HURRICANE ANDREW |
| Written by Maria Elena Salinas |
| Thursday, August 15 2002 |
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| Ten years ago this week the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history destroyed my house, ravaged most of my personal belongings and turned my life upside down. It cost me thousands of dollars, many sleepless nights and months of aggravation. It also brought love into my life.
This month I will look back on Hurricane Andrew with sadness and romanticism. I will remember the destruction and misery it caused for thousands of people, myself included. But I will also think of the indelible change for the better that it made in my life. You see had it not been for the storm, I might not be celebrating my tenth wedding anniversary in a few months and have two beautiful daughters. I know this sounds strange, so let me explain.
Hurricane Andrew blew into South Florida on August 24, 1992. The storm destroyed 60,000 homes, caused $30 billion in damage, and killed 43 people in South Florida and Louisiana. On that fateful weekend, I was in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to attend the wedding of my co-anchor Jorge Ramos. Among the invited guests was a local television journalist from Miami named Eliott Rodriguez who I had met a couple of weeks before.
Two nights before the storm hit, a group of us who traveled to Puerto Rico for the wedding gathered in the lobby of our hotel to discuss the storm that threatened South Florida. Most were Univision News employees based in Miami. Fearing the storm would strike the network's headquarters, our news director decided to temporarily move the newscast from Miami to San Antonio, Texas. Unable to attend the wedding, I immediately left on a plane from San Juan to San Antonio. Eliott, who flew back to Miami, graciously agreed to check on my house in Miami's Coconut Grove neighborhood to make sure that everything would be okay.
On the morning of August 24, the hurricane plowed directly into southern Miami-Dade County, making a direct hit on the communities of Homestead, Florida City, Naranja and Cutler Ridge. While my home was north of the eye of the storm, it was only one block from Biscayne Bay. The storm surge caused the water from the bay to rise several feet above sea level, leaving everything on the first floor of my house underwater.
When I returned from San Antonio, I found National Guardsmen patrolling my neighborhood. It looked like a nuclear bomb had hit. It seemed that every tree and power pole had been toppled over. Boats had floated from the bay onto people's front yards. Fish swam in my swimming pool. Some of my furniture ended up on the front lawn.
Eliott became my savior. He helped me clean out the debris from my house and move me into a temporary apartment. He helped with my insurance nightmares. And as icing on the cake-since Miami was under a curfew at the time-he invited me to dinner in nearby Broward County, where the restaurants stayed open past sundown. Seven months later, Eliott and I were married in a beachside ceremony in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
Hurricane Andrew blew my future husband into my life. It taught me to read the fine print on my insurance policy. It also taught South Floridians a valuable lesson about the power of hurricanes, and the power of human kindness. After the storm hit, neighbors who hardly spoke to each other became friends. They helped each other through the disaster. Miami pulled together as a community in a way it had seldom done in the past. Homes and entire neighborhoods were rebuilt, and local leaders passed one of the strictest building codes in the United States.
On the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Andrew, I will think back on the storm with bittersweet feelings. I will remember the human suffering and the images of mass destruction. But I will also remember how an entire community rose to the occasion. And-on a personal note-how this giant cloud over my life had a silver lining. |
