Hurricane Andrew cover up??

[Reeder]

5,000 people dead? How the hell do you cover that up? 350 mph winds from a hurricane? I have never read such malarky in my life. Why would a person write something like this?


http://www.nexusmagazine.com/hurricane.html

[Mr. Blue Sky]

The article was written by "a distinguished writer" named k.t. Frankovich. I checked the IMDB and found only one entry. A 1975 movie named "Cries". There is NO info about the movie though. So much for being "distinguished". Sounds like somebody needs a career boost.

Just another loony conspiracy nut.

[JeffB]

Originally posted by Mr. Blue Sky
Just another loony conspiracy nut. [/B]

But, but, but -- she has an Offical Website (http://members.aol.com/KFrnkovich/). How could you possible doubt a "former screenwriter, author, poet, psychic, advocate of the homeless and spokeswoman for the suffering and disaster victims"? She also lectured at "the largest UFO Convention in the world" last year in Turkey. (Turkey?)

From her poem "Sestina Chime":

Sweet dreams befall
this weary life,
I leave behind the wisdom ...

Yes, indeed, k.t., you have left behind the wisdom.

[Duck Duck Goose]

Oh, geez. What magnificent malarkey. :D She evidently thinks she needs to get the word out to the rest of the world.

Contrary to what the American news media broadcast across the United States and throughout Europe...
Word to all our Doper friends Down Under and across the Pond: this woman is several sandwiches short of a picnic, okay? Actually, I think she's left the entire picnic basket at home.

...the first outer wall of the hurricane unexpectedly slammed into South Dade...
Um--what?
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/1992andrew.html

Satellite pictures and upper-air data indicate that Hurricane Andrew formed from a tropical wave that crossed from the west coast of Africa to the tropical North Atlantic Ocean on 14 August 1992.

on 16 August. At 1800 UTC on the 16th (UTC precedes EDT by four hours), both the TSAF unit and SAB calculated a Dvorak T-number of 2.0 and the "best track" (Table 1 and Fig. 1 [85K GIF]) shows that the transition from tropical wave to tropical depression took place at that time.

at 1200 UTC 17 August, it became Andrew, the first Atlantic tropical storm of the 1992 hurricane season.

Andrew reached hurricane strength on the morning of 22 August, thereby becoming the first Atlantic hurricane to form from a tropical wave in nearly two years

The region of high pressure held steady and drove Andrew nearly due west for two and a half days beginning on the 22nd. Andrew was a category 4 hurricane when its eye passed over northern Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas late on the 23rd and then over the southern Berry Islands in the Bahamas early on the 24th. After leaving the Bahamas, Andrew continued moving westward toward southeast Florida.

Andrew moved nearly due westward when over land and crossed the extreme southern portion of the Florida peninsula in about four hours.
They had been watching this thing since August 16. It was officially a hurricane on August 22, two and a half days before it "unexpectedly slammed" into the Florida coast. It took it four hours to travel across the extreme southern tip of Florida, a distance that is measured on my Florida map as about 50 miles.
...for no one in South Dade had been evacuated or even advised to evacuate.
Um--what?

http://www.att.com/press/0892/920823.cha.html
FOR RELEASE SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 1992

Hurricane Andrew prompts AT&T to ask people not to call Florida
BASKING RIDGE, N.J. -- In order to give priority to people making calls from Florida, AT&T is requesting that family and friends refrain from calling Florida residents.

As hurricane Andrew forces the evacuation of one million people, AT&T is limiting calls into the area at the request of local exchange carriers, such as Southern Bell. With the vast number of people leaving Southern Florida it is going to be difficult to find anyone to answer a call.
She didn't notice that a million people had been evacuated?
...residents had been repeatedly informed by local news media that South Dade should expect to experience "50 mph winds".
No idea where she would have gotten this from. Just not paying attention, I suppose.
Never will I forget the frantic, last-minute "emergency alert" broadcast that was aired on television just before all hell broke loose. My son and I had the TV on, hoping to catch an updated report on the hurricane, when the screen suddenly went blank with a loud warning signal. Before we knew it, a panic-stricken voice began the announcement:

We interrupt this program to bring you an emergency alert from the National Broadcast Emergency Center. This is an emergency alert! I repeat, this is an emergency alert! The outer winds of hurricane Andrew have just reached the Florida coast. Hurricane Andrew has unexpectedly shifted five degrees south. I repeat, Hurricane Andrew has shifted five degrees south. Andrew is expected to strike South Dade within minutes. I repeat, Andrew is expected to strike South Dade within minutes. All South Dade residents should take immediate cover! I repeat, all South Dade residents should take immediate cover! This is an emergency alert!

First of all, I seriously doubt that any local news outlet would have made this type of panicky broadcast. Actually, people who were there had nothing but praise for the local media's coolness during the emergency. What she probably heard was a simple announcement that "the hurricane that has been moving towards the Florida coast for several days has now officially reached it".

And since she somehow missed the fact that a million people had been evacuated to flee the coming storm, naturally this would have come as a shock to her.

I don't see anything in NOAA's official storm track record that mentions a sudden shift to the south. And she sounds like she thinks that "five degrees" would have made a difference, anyway. Not with a hurricane that size, it wouldn't. It wouldn't have been, "Oh, we'll be okay in Homestead, the hurricane's going to hit Fort Lauderdale."

And this part of her supposed news broadcast--"Andrew is expected to strike South Dade within minutes" just could not be true. She couldn't possibly have heard this. Hurricanes don't move that fast, and they have big leading edges that take hours to move into an area. She's talking about a tornado warning, not a hurricane warning.

And what's the source of her information on the supposed horrendous death toll? She says, it was some guy who stood up at one of her lectures and said he was a Chief Petty Officer and who said he "knew for a fact" that the death toll was "5,280-something". Come on, people, either it's "5,000-something" or it's "five thousand two hundred eighty" exactly.

This part, however, is true:
When hurricane Andrew slammed into South Dade, the State Attorney of Florida was none other than Janet Reno. Her office was located at the Dade County Court House in the City of Miami. The President of the United States was President George H.W. Bush, and the Vice-President was Dan Quayle. Bill Clinton was running for President, and Al Gore for Vice-President. Senator Bob Graham held office, and the late Lawton Chiles was Governor of Florida. His successor turned out to be Jeb Bush, still the Governor of Florida and, ironically enough, the son of former President Bush whose other son, George W. Bush, the then Governor of Texas, has since become the "self-selected" President of the United States...
Oops, now we're veering back to fantasy. :D

And more fantastic fiction:
Curious how the United States Government evacuated Homestead Air Force Base just before hurricane Andrew struck, yet never released the information to the civilians of South Dade.
Sheesh. :rolleyes:
What upsets me most is the incident that happened during the late afternoon hours just prior to Andrew striking.
A neighbor warns her that there's a hurricane coming...
"But the National Hurricane Bureau has known all along that hurricane Andrew is going to slam into South Dade! They're telling the public it's going to come in at Palm Beach because they want Miami Beach evacuated, and there aren't enough shelters for South Dade residents to evacuate to. They don't wanna cause panic. So they're keeping quiet."
Yeah, right. ATT's keeping quiet because they don't want panic-stricken evacuees tying up their phone lines.

So she does what any normal person would do--instead of just turning on the TV or radio, she starts pestering the CBS affiliate's meteorologist for the skinny, whose secretary, naturally, makes reassuring noises, as she's been doing for days now, to idiots just like K.T.

Aw, geez, I'm getting sick of this.

Final Straight Dope:

This--
The Hiroshima-like horror was beyond catastrophic. Entire families perished in ways too horrifying to describe. The stench of death had already begun to saturate miles and miles of the massive devastation; the hot humid air was reeking with foul, rotting flesh.
--is just not true.

[JeffB]

DDG, you have far more patience then me. Just one point:

Originally posted by Duck Duck Goose
idiots just like K.T.

She actually goes by k.t. Frankovich -- lower case initials but capitalized last name. I'm sure this is of vital importance to her since, after all, she is "one of the Hollywood Frankovich family."

[Cartooniverse]

DDG, all I can say is thank goodness you're still here with us. You ROCK :)

Can I be your Special Undersecretary of Research? :D

Cartooniverse

[TBone2]

If there was a real cover-up with regard to Hurricane Andrew especially, and several others before and since, it is the shameless gouging of the American consumer by lumber companies like Georgia Pacific and Weyerhauser in the aftermath of such disasters. Citing the temporarily increased demand for lumber in stricken regions, these companies have managed to gain cartel-like control over the commodity price of lumber, with the effect that board-foot prices have quadrupled in recent years. Aided by an increasingly-tight labor market and attendant wage increases, the price of the average new home in the U.S. is fast approaching $200,000, a great portion of which winds up in the lumber companies' coffers. Seems odd to me that the effects of those 'temporarily increased demands' never fade, and the jacked-up prices never go down, disaster or no disaster.