Irma May Be Worse Than Andrew: Weather Channel's Norcross

MIAMI BEACH, FL — As Irma continues to stalk Florida, The Weather Channel's Bryan Norcross told Patch that the Category 5 storm has the potential to wreak more devastation in South Florida than even Hurricane Andrew, which forever changed the South Florida landscape. To this day, Andrew holds the dubious distinction of being the only storm of that intensity to strike a major metropolitan area in the United States. Norcross remained on the air for 23 hours straight during Andrew and the memories are still fresh.

"We learned in Andrew when 350,000 people became homeless instantaneously, in the period of three-and-a-half hours when the storm hit, that it took years to redistribute those people and resettle them — and realign the way the traffic flowed, and where people lived, and where neighborhoods were built," he explained in an interview on Tuesday as he made his way from his Miami Beach home back to the anchor desk of the Atlanta-based network. "Everybody had to move out of their house — and there was not remotely enough housing to absorb those people."

Even so, Irma could be worse. (For more hurricane news or local news from Florida, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts and newsletters from Miami Patch, and click here to find your local Florida Patch. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

Another Powerful Hurricane Is Taking Aim At The US

"It could if the core of the hurricane — where the strongest winds are —comes over one or more big Florida cities," Norcross predicts. "It certainly could be, and you could have the Houston situation multiplied because you have so many people stranded in damage zones. It would be a different kind of damage ... even though it will be significant rain, it won’t be a Houston-type epic rain. Flooding rain, storm surge and damaged homes means stranded people. It just really depends on where the worst of the wind goes and we just can’t tell that right now."

Irma is already shaping up to be one of the most powerful hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic. When Andrew struck, it destroyed 63,000 homes and left at least 175,000 homeless.

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Norcross, who chronicles his recollections in a new book titled “My Hurricane Andrew Story" remained on the air for nearly a full day at the local NBC affiliate in Miami and helped countless South Floridians make sense of the unimaginable devastation. Electricity was out for up to three months in the hardest-hit areas.

While it might not be a bad idea to leave South Florida ahead of the storm, Norcross doesn't necessarily advise people to do so after Wednesday.

"If you end up with millions of people trying to do that, the road system can’t begin to accommodate that many people on the Florida turnpike or I-95 or I-75 and the hotel rooms available to the north will be scarce," he said. "If you go to Orlando there’s nothing to say that the hurricane won’t go to Orlando as well. It’s a very dicey problem. Generally, I recommend people in Miami-Dade and Broward County where you have very strong buildings, find a good place to park their car, protect their car, unlike what we saw in Houston where you had tens or hundreds of thousands of cars destroyed."

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The worst case for South Florida is difficult to imagine. according to the veteran hurricane analyst.

"As we saw in Houston, the government just cannot deal with millions of people all at the same time," he asserted.

See also Hurricane Andrew Turns 25 But Legacy Lingers

"It’s just impossible. They couldn’t deal with hundreds of thousands of people all at the same time in Andrew. The scale has the potential to be so much bigger in terms of people impacted."

An estimated 30,000 to 40,000 homes in the Houston area were destroyed by Hurricane Harvey's unrelenting pounding of the sprawling Texas city that has become synonymous with America's oil and natural gas industry and home to NASA's Johnson Space Center.

More so than Andrew, the anguish and human suffering that bubbled up from Houston's flood stricken neighborhoods evokes painful memories of Katrina.

Andrew led to tougher building regulations in South Florida, which will undoubtedly save some homes this time around if the mega storm hits.

"The wonderful thing about the South Florida building code which is in use in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties is that people for the most part in modern buildings will be able to stay in their home after even a hurricane like Hurricane Andrew," he said. "Now, some will get unlucky because some tree or girder or something will come and damage the home or there was a flaw in the construction that the inspectors didn’t catch, but generally speaking these homes should stand up to be livable — not to be undamaged but to be livable after a storm. That’s a huge advantage that we didn’t have in 1992 where almost everybody had to move out of their home that was in the core of the hurricane zone."

He said that preparation was key during Andrew and will be today.

"We don’t know for certain that this storm is coming and we don’t know for certain where the worst of it will hit," he said. "But it’s a very, very large and extremely strong hurricane like we haven’t seen in memory of most people that are here. You have to go back to something like Hurricane Donna in 1960 for a comparable hurricane if it tracks as projected."

Bryan Norcross photo courtesy The Weather Channel