Was there this much coverage two years after the 1992 Hurricane Andrew disaster?
That was one of my first missions when I got to Ft. Stewart. Utter distruction.
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Having lost my home and surviving in the horrors of the long and frightening aftermath of Andrew, I can tell you there was NO coverage and NO help at all, until Katie Hale from Dade County put out the plea for the cavalry... 3 days after Andrew hit.
10 years ago, her angry plea got hurricane aid moving
Then, the skies eventually started to be black with supply choppers and other aircraft on the goodwill and humanitarian mission. They were desperately needed .. and gratefully received.
Where I was, evacuated to friends out in the country way out west, we were essentially on our own the whole time. My home was literally at ground zero of the storm.
NOTHING in the way of supplies, help, water, basic essentials came to us. A friend thankfully brought us a generator a few days afterward so we could run the well for a shower a day, coffee, dinner, and I would go to my destroyed home area and various soup kitchens, supply and donation centers around town myself every day for sustenance and supplies for us.
While I didn't get to see the TV coverage afterward, as I didn't have access to electricity for months, I imagine there was a fair amount of national coverage .. especially of the looting, which was rampant.
I would love to have been able to see the tv coverage afterward .. and if anyone has a link, please let me know.
I don't think there was Katrina-like coverage at all, except locally, at the two-year mark and subsequent anniversaries .. but otherwise, mostly local coverage.
But then I have to say in retrospect, the catastrophic damage to the Gulf Coast ... due to the location and topography, condition of the levies, larger physical storm, and therefore much larger size area of destruction, the human loss, and heartrending stories and *images*, it does rank as a bigger disaster.
The sad and awful images from Katrina are what's burned in our brains, which amplifies the scope of the disaster. I just don't think there was that much national media or photographic coverage for Andrew .. and especially (although I may be wrong) the thousands of real human tragedies, with images.
The media coverage made a big difference.
If Andrew had hit Miami directly, we'd be talking a whole different scenario, but the South Dade area was much less densely developed in contrast.
At the 15-yr mark of Hurricane Andrew, the Homestead area has probably been in what folks would call a fairly "normal" state for the last 7 yrs or so, though 30% of the population vanished right after the storm. The population demographics have changed, and now they're in a huge development and commercial building boom, due to all the vacant farmland that was sold.
I don't expect New Orleans specifically, due to the catastrophic destruction and inherent political corruption, will ever come back to what it was. Maybe at the 15-yr. mark, the cleanup of some physical and political storm debris will eventually produce a relatively new, completely different place that may be livable .. but it will never be the same.
The land for the townhome development I was in is just *now* (after 13 or so years of legal and county bureacratic wrangling) being built and marketed as a new development .. .. on the scraped up, demolished remains of the old community.
My sweet old home
This is an anomaly, but it happened.