We can't give up hope on climate change, one of the South's top climate educators says
Caroline Lewis, "the Jane Goodall of climate change," says there's room for hope, but there's a hard road ahead.
"The big one" hit Miami before dawn on Aug. 24, 1992.
Hurricane Andrew erased parts of southern Florida. As hurricanes go, it was small but fierce, with winds of more than 165 mph. Some gusts exceeded 200 mph. The most intense parts felt like a miles-wide tornado. It ripped huge ficus trees from the ground, flattened an Air Force base, disappeared the cities of Homestead and Florida City.
Sixty-three people died and the storm caused $26 billion in damage in Florida—at the time, the most in US history—before moving on to torment Louisiana.
Remarkably, things could have been far worse. Forecasters predicted a wall of storm surge that never materialized. But by the time Andrew moved on, Florida was forever changed.
Caroline Lewis, a nationally-recognized climate educator from Florida, was in Miami during Andrew. She and her husband John still live there, but these days they've sold their home and they're renting. Self-preservation, she says. More disastrous hurricanes are inevitable.
"We got Hurricane Andrew in the 90s and then in the early 2000s we had a year where we had three, including Katrina, that just kept whacking us," Lewis says. "About six years ago, we had Hurricane Irma that didn't hit Miami. It sideswiped us and we still haven't recovered from it."
Andrew still ranks as one of the strongest storms to ever hit south Florida, which is saying something. The state, which juts out into the warm hurricane-juicing waters of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, is kind of like a boxer with no defense, like Rocky Balboa waiting for his face to be punched.
One of these days, Lewis says, "the big one" will come again for Miami-Dade County, the most populous county in Florida and the seventh-largest in the United States. The Atlantic is like a wolf at the door.
