The eyes of hurricane watchers are on Florida, waiting to see if Tropical Storm Isaac will become the first hurricane to hit the Sunshine State in about seven years.
If Isaac keeps swirling along its current path, it could move over the Florida Keys and south Florida Monday morning.
The American Red Cross has already begun assembling volunteers and emergency supplies along the west coast of the state and organizers of the Republican Party are preparing for a stormy National Convention, which is set for next week in Tampa.
Tampa hasn’t endured a direct hit by a full-fledged hurricane in 90 years and even the state of Florida hasn’t had a direct hit since Wilma in 2005.
It was 20 years ago Friday that Hurricane Andrew, a monstrous Category 5 hurricane, blew ashore near Homestead, in Dade County, about 54 kilometres southwest of Miami.
According to the U.S. National Hurricane Centre Andrew’s sustained winds reached 268 km/h when its eye came ashore, but gusts in some places topped 281 km/h.
It was, at that point in time, the costliest hurricane to hit the United States.
In the past two decades, seven hurricanes have hit the state: Andrew, Opal, Charley, Frances, Jeanne, Dennis and Wilma. Global News takes a look at some of the storms that struck Florida in those years and what their impact was.
August 24, 1992 – Hurricane Andrew
Strength: Category 5 (on the Saffir-Simpson scale)
Sustained wind speed at time of landfall: 268 km/h
Point of landfall: Homestead
The 1992 Atlantic hurricane season got off to a very late start, with Andrew becoming the first named storm of the year on Aug. 17, a week before it whipped across southern Florida. Weary of warnings for storms that never came, Floridians believed Andrew would prove no different: Florida hadn’t been hit by a major hurricane in years. Andrew proved them wrong. After lashing the Bahamas as a Category 4 storm, killing four people and causing $250 million in damage, the storm strengthened and barreled toward the coast of Florida’s Dade County.
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Andrew destroyed 25,524 homes in southern Dade County. In Homestead, where Andrew’s eye came ashore, it was estimated the storm pulverized 99 percent of the mobile homes in the area. The total cost of damage in the state was $25 billion.
Remarkably only 15 deaths are directly linked to Andrew, with a further 29 deaths indirectly related to the storm. By comparison, 13 years later, Hurricane Katrina was responsible for 1,833 deaths.
Andrew changed the way cities in the U.S. prepared for hurricanes and construct building to withstand destructive winds.
October 4, 1995 – Hurricane Opal
Strength: Category 4
Sustained wind speed at time of landfall: 240 km/h
Point of landfall: Pensacola Beach
Opal moved east through the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico , after causing heavy flooding in Guatemala and Mexico during its formative stages. It grew to a Category 4 storm as it moved toward the Florida panhandle and Alabama’s Gulf Coast, bringing a 4.6 metre storm surge and 185 km/h winds.
Ahead of the storm, more than 100,000 residents of a 240-kilometre stretch of the Florida coastline, including Alabama and Mississippi, were ordered to evacuate. A tornado spawned from Opal caused the only death in Florida.
Opal’s winds knocked down trees, replaced miles of highway with mountains of sand before moving inland and back into the Atlantic. Damages to homes, businesses and infrastructure totaled $3 billion. It was the third costliest storm on record at the time.
August 13, 2004 – Hurricane Charley
Strength: Category 4
Sustained wind speed at time of landfall: 241 km/h
Point of landfall: near Cayo Costa
Charley was the first of four tropical systems to hit Florida in the 2004 season, three of them hurricanes. It was expected to come ashore near Tampa Bay as a Category 3 storm, but its wind speeds increased rapidly before making landfall as a Category 4 hurricane the afternoon of Aug. 13. It moved over a wide swath of the peninsula over a course of seven hours, devastating areas between Punta Gorda, Port Charlotte, Orlando and the Palm Coast.
Hurricane Charley packed quite a punch, causing $5.4 billion in damage to Florida homes and properties, and hundreds of millions more to the agricultural industry. The total economic loss from the hurricane, in the U.S., mounted to around $15 billion. Ten deaths were blamed on the storm, nine of them in Florida.
After Charley, Florida was hit by two more hurricanes that year – Frances and Jeanne – and the remains of Hurricane Ivan, a much stronger and costlier storm that affected the state after taking a turn to the southwest from off the coast of Virginia. Total U.S. damages was just over $14 Billion, one of the highest on record.
October 24, 2005 – Hurricane Wilma
Strength: Category 3
Sustained wind speed at time of landfall: 194 km/h
Point of landfall: Cape Romano
Wilma was only a Category 3 storm, with 194 km/h winds, when it struck the southern tip of the peninsula. But it was a record-breaking storm before that. It’s winds reached 296 km/h at its peak and its barometric pressure dropped to 882 millibars, the lowest ever for an Atlantic hurricane, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The storm weakened rapidly as it crossed the peninsula, moving in from Cape Romano and out into the Atlantic off Dade county.
With $20.6 billion in damages to crops and residences – in particular, mobile homes – Wilma became the third costliest U.S. storm in history, after Katrina and Andrew. Wilma’s total death toll was 23, but only 5 of those were in Florida.
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