Oy! What everyone fears, Andrew type bombing out. A Cat 5 even brushing the coast is bad news, very bad news. Huge storm surge, basically everything the east side of the Intracoastal Waterway under water. Massive structural damage to most structures according to the Safir\Simpson scale. I was down in Kendall\Miami Gardens after Andrew. Think Dresden in WWII. Katrina was bad, but that damage in NO was due to flooding not so much the winds.
Being a weather bug, I recall watching the coverage of Andrew a day or two out from landfall. While a major hurricane, for a time it appeared to be weakening. Then within 24 hours it rapidly intensified, atmospheric pressure dropped by 47 mbar to a minimum of 922 mbar. The only “good” thing about Andrew was that while very intense, a Cat 4/5 when it hit south Florida, it was a small storm and a very fast moving storm and didn’t have all that much of a storm surge ahead of it, nor all that much rain. It was the winds and embedded tornadoes that did the most damage.
Matthew is bigger and so far moving more slowly.