To me, what was most memorable about Hurricane Andrew was the morning after. The deathly silence I awoke to seemed like the dead of night, but it was broad daylight. It was eerie, no cars, birds, people, or the usual hum of the air conditioners, not a sound. But that was just a prelude to the view of destruction that awaited me when I opened my door to survey the damage. Jay

---

My husband and I had moved into our brand new home in Plantation only 5 weeks earlier, and I was 3 1/2 months pregnant with my first child. At first they thought Andrew was going to hit on the Dade-Broward County line, and I figured my house would be gone and I'd lose the baby. We were spared - both the house and baby were fine. The next day, seeing the devestation in Miami, I was overcome with both relief and sadness. It's a weekend I'll never forget. Lisa

---

We live near Homestead, just west of U.S.1 between Coral Castle and South Dade High School. My family (Alicia, 12, Jacob and Jordan, 6 and my husband, Richard) started out in our bedroom and when the winds really picked up around 2 a.m., we moved to the hallway in the center of the house.

When the eye passed over us around 5 a.m., we got up, walked around, and covered my husband's roll top desk and our computer with plastic, and generally stretched our legs. As soon the eye wall hit, my husband yelled for us to get into the kids' bathroom.

When the eye wall hit, it blew our garage door into the garage. The wind then blew the wall down between the garage and dining room and then our roof blew off completely (where we had a cathedral ceiling). It hit the house in back of us, put a hole in the gable end of that house two feet in diameter, and totaled their new car.

The noise level was absolutely horrendous. The whole house shook when the roof blew off. We were saved (according to the engineer that looked at the house afterwards) by a wall of bookcases, packed with books.

The neighbors started coming out about 7:30 a.m. and checking on each house. Some of them had gone to other houses during the eye because their homes were so badly damaged. Some ended up in their cars in the garage.

My family came through it all. So did our four birds and two dogs. One dog happened to be in the garage when the garage door caved in. She had wedged herself in back of an aluminum shed kit that my husband had bought but hadn't had time to build. The other dog was under a bed in the boys' room. The birds were exposed to the all the wind and rain since they were in the part of the house where the roof blew off. One cage was crushed, but all were fine, although terrified. As soon as the sun started to come up, they let us know they were happy to see the sun.

One of my worst memories is that of the wind. It is hard to explain, but the closest I can come is a mix of a heavy freight train going by at top speed, combined with a jet engine blast. It was horrible.

I woke up at night for weeks hearing that sound in my sleep.

Pamela

---