Every year between May and November, people in the eastern U.S. watch for hurricanes. These vast tropical storms in the Carribean Sea travel northwest, striking at the Caribbean islands and sometimes at the mainland of North America. One of the most terrible of these storms was Hurricane Andrew, which struck in August of 1992.
The center of the storm struck south of Miami on August 24. With wind gusts up to 165 miles an hour, Andrew leveled whole communities in a few hours. The winds uprooted trees, threw trucks on top of buildings, and reduced mobile homes to splinters. Driving rains flooded low-lying areas an swelled rivers to torrents.
Andrew killed 14 people and left 250,000 homeless. Damage was estimated at $30 billion, making it the most destructive storm in U.S. history.
