The 24th of this month marks the anniversary of the day Hurricane
Andrew chewed its way across South Florida. In the wake of
the storm, which took just 90 minutes to turn 65,000 homes into
scrap, teams of experts from a host of government and trade groups
sifted through the rubble to see what they could learn.
Initially, news reports were filled with charges and countercharges
as to who was to blame. Much of the early criticism fell on
builders, who claimed in their defense that Andrew's winds were so
far above the 120-mile-per-hour design load in the South Florida
Building Code that even wellconstructed
homes went
down.
Early reports by the
National