Hurricane Andrew in 1992 was the last category 5 hurricane to hit the US. Top scientists tell us that global warming makes hurricanes more intense.
Hurricane Pounded 165 Square Miles Flat
By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 30, 1992; Page A1MIAMI, AUG. 29—Amid the ruins of South Florida, people searched today for new ways to say “total devastation.”
Cameras continue to pan the wreckage from helicopters, but the little picture on a television screen cannot show the miles of sprawling suburbs, where as far as the eye can see, every house is roofless, windowless, wasted.
Modern America has never seen a natural disaster like Hurricane Andrew. The storm did not just destroy homes. It leveled entire towns. Florida City, a working-class community of almost 6,000, is gone.
Neighborhoods of South Dade County look far worse than did Kuwait City after the Persian Gulf War. The damage here is not cosmetic. It is absolute. The zone of worst destruction stretches 15 miles inland, from Biscayne Bay to the Everglades, and 22 miles from north to south, encompassing about 165 square miles.
Those were the ‘salad days’, when hurricane landfalls in the US were more frequent. The current CO2-induced paucity of hurricane landfalls in Florida (where I live) is causing massive ‘devastation’ to property insurance profits and depleting cash reserves. Time to crank up insurance rates to compensate for this anthropogenic climate extreme.