Hurricane season 2019: A sense of fear for towns already hit

By The Associated Press

The annual start of hurricane season casts a shadow of dread over coastal sections of the United States. People fret over the next Big One, even as communities struggle to recover from the last one. For some communities, the devastation remains an open wound, as in Florida’s Panama City, slammed by Hurricane Michael in October.
Even years later, many towns still bear the scars, physical or psychological.

HOMESTEAD, FLORIDA

Nearly 27 years after Hurricane Andrew cut a path of destruction south of Miami, Karon Grunwell is still overcome with sadness when she thinks about how the Category 5 storm forever changed her hometown.

In 1992, Homestead was a sleepy agricultural town bordered by the Everglades and large farms planted with winter tomatoes and other crops. It was also the site of Homestead Air Force Base. Now Homestead is full of sprawling gated developments where many residents commute 40 miles (60 kilometers) north to Miami with no memory of the monster storm.

Grunwell still lives in the sturdy concrete block home where she and her family rode out the storm in the early morning darkness of Aug. 12. Thousands of homes and businesses in the town of about 27,000 were leveled.

“The Air Force base was totally destroyed. Andrew caused a major impact to schools, grocery stores, retail businesses. And it caused huge economic problems for just your everyday people,” Grunwell said. “The vegetation has come back, but it’s not anything like it was.”

“I still cry when I talk about it,” she said.

Families who had lived in the area for generations got their insurance payouts and moved away. Many went to neighboring Broward County. Grunwell, who was a manager for the Postal Service, said there were 35,000 change-of-address forms processed for the towns of Homestead, nearby Florida City and Princeton.

Jeff Blakley, 69, remembers watching the exodus while pulling 12-hour shifts as a BellSouth lineman, repairing telephone lines for the ravaged area.

“As I went home in the evenings, I remember seeing a solid line of cars heading north,” Blakley said. “It was bumper-to-bumper, and it was heartbreaking because you would see cars with everything they owned. Stuff was coming out the windows and mattresses were strapped to the roof. And they were just leaving because the devastation was so horrific.”

The Air Force base was downsized, its population going from 5,123 before Andrew to 466 in 2000. The storm stunted Homestead’s growth rate in the 1990s, but it surged in the early 2000s as land sold by departing farmers was transformed into housing developments. The town now has about 70,000 people.

But for hurricane survivors, “the stuff will not go away for quite some time,” Grunwell said. “You will keep remembering how things were.”

— Associated Press writer Freida Frisar

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