Former Herald journalists remember covering Hurricane Andrew

It was a sensational day in Bradenton, one with sunshine and without humidity, which was odd for the end of August. But a world’s difference lay bare 250 miles away as Hurricane Andrew ripped through South Florida 25 years ago Thursday.

“Here comes Andrew,” read the front page of the Bradenton Herald on that fateful day, Aug. 24, 1992. The first storm of the year had just formed a week earlier and was headed for South Florida.

“It’s anyone’s guess what’s going to happen when it goes across the tip of South Florida and goes out into the Gulf,” Mike Latessa, Manatee County Public Safety director at the time, told the Herald.

The shelters were open and ready. School was canceled. Anna Maria Island braced for the worst.

But Andrew never arrived. Surfers arrived to Manatee beaches disappointed by calm waters.

The day after the Category 5 storm hit, the front page read, “Miami in shambles.”

Andrew crawled through the Everglades, then headed north to Louisiana, continuing its deadly streak.

The Herald’s assistant city editor, a staff photographer and a senior writer at the time — Art Durshimer, Al Anderson and Nick Mason — drove to Homestead and Florida City days after the storm had passed to see first-hand the destruction Andrew brought. The trio came back to Bradenton with a series of vignettes that would run in the following Saturday and Sunday editions and memories to last a lifetime.

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Packing into a Herald company car with a cooler full of ice, sandwiches, clothes and cameras, the three were off into the early morning.

Taking Interstate 75 south to Alligator Alley, the reporters were met with an army of 34 Florida Power & Light trucks traveling from Bradenton, Sarasota, Venice and Arcadia.

Anderson, the photographer, was driving, so he handed Durshimer the camera.

“I’m hanging out the window of a car with Al’s camera tied around my neck so in case it wouldn’t fall. And the sun was just coming up,” Durshimer recalled in his northwest Bradenton home. “I got one of the best photographs of my life.”

By the time the trio reached Kendall, some clues gave way to signs of inclement weather, like downed limbs and debris. Anderson said that for some time it was overcast, but the sun came out from the shadows. It was hot.

But what they weren’t expecting? People playing golf.

In a couple of minutes, the scenery would vastly change.

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“It was like a war zone,” Anderson said in a recent phone interview with the Herald.

Billboards were knocked down. Buildings had their windows blown out, entire sides ripped open. A church was lifted from its foundation, shifting in one complete piece.

“The total devastation was almost overwhelming,” he said. “I’d never seen anything like that except in a movie.”

Durshimer said he didn’t know he was in Homestead until he recognized its decorated downtown crosswalks.

“It was very surreal because as you’re looking, most of the leaves had been blown off,” he said. “It looked like nuclear winter.”

One of Anderson’s standout photos was of a Homestead street surrounded by broken homes and twisted trees. Someone had painted on the pavement: “P. BUSH SEND MONEY.”

Passing through Homestead and Florida City, it got worse.

The reporters spent time with former residents of Royal Palm Trailer Park and Gateway Estates Park, where the homes looked “like people had taken soft drink cans and just ripped them up and bent them around stuff,” Durshimer said.

Firefighters who spoke with the reporters said that once the back eyewall hit the area, it most likely dropped some tornadoes.

Even a sign for the turnpike landed in a trailer park, more than a mile away.

The trio stayed together, gathering stories from whomever they could. And people were willing to talk.

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From “Hurricane Andrew beats family” by Nick Mason, published in The Bradenton Herald on Aug. 30, 1992:

“HOMESTEAD—Richard Corcoran and his family soon will leave here forever.

Their nine-year roots buried in this small city south of Miami blew away Monday morning in Hurricane Andrew's 140 mph sustained winds.

Corcoran, 29, his wife, Maria, and their two young daughters lived in Royal Palm Trailer Park.

It no longer exists.

The hurricane turned the park quickly into a junk yard.

‘You can see what is left of my house. What a mess!’ Corcoran said Thursday before he and his brother, Bill, sifted through the rubble again.

‘I just finished remodeling,’ he said, tears welling in his eyes. ‘I just laid the carpet down two days before the storm.’

Corcoran does not want to stay, rebuild and subject his family to the danger and heartache of another hurricane. He grew up in Boston, and may return now.”

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“They’re out picking through their belongings,” Durshimer remembered. “It was just heartbreaking, you know. There was nothing.”

“They were looking toward not having a lot of stuff for a long time,” Anderson said. “And it really was a slap in the face to realize, ‘My God, this is what it’s really like.’ ”

Durshimer said he was “pretty impressed with the resilience” of the residents, who had just survived hell.

“The people were friendly, and I wouldn’t call them ‘upbeat,’ but again, they weren’t beating their heads against the wall,” he said. In one of his stories, he described a man’s eyes as “dazed, shocked, confused.”

Anderson echoed his former colleague’s remarks, adding that some were “taking it in stride,” while others appeared “distraught.”

“(The) strength of the people, that really surprised me,” Anderson said. “I felt like just crying and singing the blues.”

An estimated 84,000 people stayed in shelters after being rendered homeless, according to the Miami Herald’s day-after coverage. But Durshimer said some with the oldest homes had better luck.

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From “Family stands firm; storm will not drive them out of home” by Art Durshimer, published in The Bradenton Herald on Aug. 30, 1992:

“HOMESTEAD — The 1926 hurricane did not destroy the Bodys' house on Northwest 19th Street.

Monday morning Hurricane Andrew sent it reeling, left it bloodied, but could not knock it down.

The Body family, like the home, stands firm amid the wreckage that is their neighborhood. Hurricane Andrew will not drive the Bodys from 35 N.W. 19th St.

The Bodys are in Homestead to stay.

‘There’s a rumor that the government is going to buy Homestead and bulldoze it under,’ Tom Body said. ‘Well, they’re gonna have to bring the (National) Guard with ’em to make us move.’

Kelley Body was in Alabama when Andrew ravaged her home. Thursday, she and husband, Tom, were picking up the pieces.

She said ‘old-time construction’ saved her home, and possibly her family.

‘This house was built in the summer of 1926. It survived that hurricane, and this one,’ Kelley Body said. ‘We were relatively lucky.’

Glass from broken windows crunched underfoot during a tour of the house. Water stains marked the ceiling and walls in places.

Kelley Body pointed down. ‘Hardwood floors. Dade County pine. This house is well-built.’

Kelley Body, 49, is a master sergeant in the Air Force Reserve. She is a recruiter affiliated with Homestead Air Force Base, which simply no longer exists.

Andrew did in a matter of hours what politicians could not do in months — close the base.”

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Twenty-five years later, the smell stands out most prominently in Durshimer’s memory.

“Mattresses, clothing, bedding, insulation, all soaking wet. And then it was in a broiling sun,” he said.

That third day after the storm, residents were queued up for water and gasoline “armed to the teeth.”

“People standing there holding shotguns and rifles. Pistols stuck in their belt,” he recalled.

The National Guard came and stayed for two-and-a-half months. Durshimer said a Huey helicopter circled overhead, “flying with guys sitting in the doorway, like a shot from Vietnam, holding their M-16s.”

Despite nearly everyone being armed, there wasn’t any violence they saw that day.

“There were some scenes of great humanity though,” he said.

It was almost as if society deconstructed, without descending into chaos.

A drug store opened its doors to those who needed medication, with names and balances recorded in a composition notebook. A grocery store gave away its perishable goods.

When they had no signal to call back to the newsroom, a miraculous ring called out to them nearby. A worker with BellSouth, which is now AT&T, was steps away from where they were covering Naranja Lakes, where three people were killed. For a half cooler of ice, the worker said, they could use the phone.

Money was useless to the residents at this point, so trading was in order.

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From “Some whiskey buys Southern comfort” by Art Durshimer, published in The Bradenton Herald on Aug. 30, 1992:

“FLORIDA CITY — A bottle of whiskey gave teetotaler Dian Faulk a reason to smile Monday.

She had no place to live — Hurricane Andrew obliterated her mobile home in Gateway Estates Park. She was wearing her entire wardrobe.

Four months after moving to Florida from Birmingham, Ala., she had lost everything.

‘It was about noon or 1 o’clock the day of the hurricane and we were all just bawling and squalling,’ said Faulk, 56, of S.W. 177th Court, Lot 62.

‘Then, around the corner rolled an unopened bottle of Seagram’s 7,’ she said. ‘Even though I don't drink, I grabbed it and put it in a friend’s car.’

Later Monday, Faulk and some of her friends found shelter of sorts in a local hotel. The hotel had no windows and portions of the ceilings and walls were missing, but it beat the street, she said.

‘We got a room that night, but there was no bedding,’ Faulk said. ‘Later on I saw some kids partying, and one of them was sitting on a mattress. I swapped him the Seagram’s for the mattress.’

‘He got what he wanted; I got what I wanted.’ ”

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As evening had fallen and stories were gathered, it was time to head back to Bradenton. But for the South Florida residents, it was just the start of picking up their lives by the pieces. And Mother Nature wasn’t done yet.

“You know how the thunderstorms build up, started hearing the thunder, and then all of a sudden it was there, all across the horizon, to the east. It was coming over the Glades, it was coming from the ocean,” Durshimer recalled. “And I’m thinking these poor people who had salvaged stuff because it hadn’t rained since the storm. They had salvaged some stuff and they had nothing to cover it with. And this was coming.”

The trio rotated the drive back on Tamiami Trail in 30-minute shifts, a long day wearing on them. Durshimer said he didn’t let Mason or Anderson go back into the newsroom; they could go home, rest up and write and edit later.

Durshimer would stay at the Herald for a few more months, relocating to the east coast. Now he’s teaching journalism and English at Bayshore High School. Anderson left in 1999, eventually becoming the photo editor for the White House during the Obama administration.

But Hurricane Andrew would stay with them, a quarter of a century later.

Anderson looked through the streets of South Florida for stories that would translate to Manatee County residents, who narrowly avoided the storm’s wrath.

“After the news cycle is over, in your mind it’s like everything is back to normal,” Anderson said. “First time I had to realize it, you don’t just get back to normal. That was the first experience that really made that sink in.”

For Durshimer, it was one of the biggest news events he said he reported on.

But it taught him a life lesson, too.

“The one thing, going down there, it convinced me to do is if a storm of that magnitude is ever heading where I am, I’m leaving. Period.”

This story was originally published August 23, 2017 at 2:20 PM with the headline "Former Herald journalists remember covering Hurricane Andrew."