The aftershocks of Hurricane Andrew - troubles and hope in Dade County, FL - Cover Story

Insight on the News, August 2, 1993 by Shawn Miller

Four days after Hurricane Andrew swept through the southern tip of Florida on Aug. 24, Tad DeMilly got his first warning about the bureaucratic nightmare that is the hurricane recovery process. DeMilly, the mayor of Homestead, a small farming community 30 miles south of downtown Miami, was soliciting advice from a group of city officials from Charleston, S.C. -- which was hit by Hurricane Hugo in 1989 - when one of them remarked, "This is the easy part."

Standing amid the ruins of what used to be downtown Homestead, DeMilly couldn't believe his ears. His badly shaken city had just been laid low by the most powerful hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland in a century. Swarms of military helicopters filled the sky, delivering food, water and shelter to a community that suddenly had none. Air-conditioning, cool showers, cold beer - vital necessities when it comes to surviving a brutally hot and mosquito-infested summer on the edge of the Everglades -- would not be available for the foreseeable future. And this man was telling DeMilly that he was going through the "easy part"?

"I thought he was joking," the mayor remembers.

Eleven months later, DeMilly knows it was no joke, or at least not a very funny one. "At least Andrew was over in a couple of hours; the bureaucracy has been here almost a year," he says.

As the first anniversary of Andrew's landfall approaches, many parts of south Dade County still look like they did in the weeks immediately following the hurricane -- in a state of destruction that Army Chief of Staff Gordon Sullivan estimated would take his forces six months of constant bombing to reproduce.

Neighborhood after neighborhood of abandoned homes dominate the landscape, with spray-painted slogans such as "U LOOT WE SHOOT" and "Remodelling by Andrew" scrawled across their walls. Only 10 percent of the 140,000 homes damaged during the hurricane have been rebuilt or repaired; only 65 percent of businesses in south Dade have reopened. Tons of debris still line the streets, waiting to be removed by the Army Corps of Engineers, which left the area in February. "A lot of people down here are still living in the equivalent of a war zone," says DeMilly

Like any disaster area about to receive more than $20 billion in insurance payoffs and $8 billion in federal aid, south Dade became a spawning ground for those looking to make, spend or regulate money. As soon as the roads were clear enough in September, Homestead and adjoining municipalities were crawling with federal, state and county officials; insurance agents and claims adjusters; contractors and subcontractors; waste removal companies; construction workers looking for employment; and the National Guard.

The Guard has left, but the others remain, and Chuck Lennon, executive director of the Builders Association of South Florida, estimates that the area will not be rid of them for "at least five, probably seven years."

For those involved in the day-to-day, travails of life in post-Andrew south Dade, the general sentiment is that the supposed agents of the rebuilding process are doing little to expedite matters. "For the first month after the storm, the bureaucratic agencies pretty much put the rule book aside and used common sense," says DeMilly. But once the crisis period passed, he says, "they began to dot every |i' and cross every |t' and make multiple interpretations of every page of every regulation, to the point where it is difficult to actually get anything done."

The morass of loan applications, insurance claims, lawsuits and contracts for everything from rebuilding a roof to installing a Port-O-San has been exacerbated by heavy criticism of local building standards, which stung the Dade County government, and of the federal government's initial response to the storm, which stung the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Both Dade and FEMA have vowed to do better next time, which adds another layer of regulatory hoops for residents to jump through. "We're not just dealing with red tape," Katrina Ennis of Homestead says with a sigh. "This is barbed wire."

Ennis, president of Homestead Gas Co., gained instant celebrity status when the Miami Herald reported that, while trying to get a disaster loan from the Small Business Administration, she asked an SBA agent if he "wanted to know my bra size and how many times a week I make love to my husband," since he already knew everything else. She suspects the quote perfectly captured the frustration that locals are feeling with the awesome bureaucratic machine that has taken up residence in their town.

"Before Andrew, I don't think most people down here, including myself, were aware just how it is our-government functions," Ennis muses from her cluttered desk, on which is prominently displayed an "I Survived Hurricane Andrew, It's the Recovery that's Killing Me" bumper sticker. "Well, now we know, and I don't think we can take too much more of this kind of governing."

Besides the sea of paperwork she has had to wade through to get her home and business back into shape, Ennis has had to deal with a lawsuit against a FEMA-contracted bulldozer crew that accidentally destroyed $600,000 worth of her company's gas lines and underground tanks. Ennis estimates she has lost almost 50 workdays to her pile of paperwork, with "no end in sight'