Culbertson: When did you first realize that Hurricane Andrew might hit Miami?

Carlson: Let’s see, it was Saturday afternoon. I was driving around listening, and of course it was all over the news, and I called the station that afternoon and said, “Assuming that this thing comes in, I’m assuming that you’re going to cancel programming, and what do you want me to do?” At that point they said “We want you to come on in Sunday, and we’ll start our continuous coverage at that point.” So I knew about it on Saturday. I think I first realized that we were probably going to get it on Friday when all of a sudden it had not changed direction, was still heading due west,;, and .it started intensifying. It was real easy to see, just based’ on any satellite photograph that came out, that it wasn’t going to turn, there wasn’t any other weather system that was going to affect it. So, late Friday, early Saturday.

Culbertson: What preparations did you make at home?

Carlson: We were living on Royal Palm Avenue at the time in Coconut, Grove. We battened down all the windows and all the doors, which,, was a hell of a project, because we had all French doors downstairs, all the way around. We had a guest cottage out back, with big sliding glass doors, we had to batten those down. We also had a guest cottage in the back, and those windows all had to be done, and we ran out of lumber before we managed to finish everything on the west side. So a couple of windows and a porch on the west side of the house were left open, untouched by any covering. As it turned out, it didn’t have any problem at all because it was so densely foliated and protected on that side, and so we didn’t have any problems with that.

Culbertson: What preparations did you make at the station?

Carlson: Absolutely none, I wasn’t there.

Culbertson: What were your assignments at the station before, during and after the storm?

Carlson: Before the storm I was assigned to Broward County, because at the time the best guess was that it was going to hit at the Dade Broward line, and so they had me in the Emergency Management Office in Fort Lauderdale, doing occasional live shots on evacuations and preparations being made up there. During the storm, I wasn’t there. I had told them ahead of time that, because we had so many animals, and they didn’t allow those at the station, that there was, no way we could leave the house. My wife was absolutely terrified; of a hurricane, having never been through one, and of course the two children, who were at that point four and seven. So I said, “I’ll work for you on Sunday, but come nightfall, I will be home. And that’s just all there was to it. After the storm, it was interesting. They called, managed to reach me on my cellular phone, or I reached them, about 11:0012:00 the day after the storm, noon, and they said “You’ve got to come in, you know, we’re full tilt here now.” So, I said, “Well, then somebody’s going to have to come and get me.” Because there were trees down, not only blacking our driveway and blocking all our cars in, but there were enough trees down in the neighborhood that you couldn’t go more than a block in any direction before you ran into a massive tree over the road. So I said, “If somebody wants me at the station, then they’re going to have to come and get me. I mean, that’s a fact of life.” So they said, “OK, we’ll send somebody down.” They got down here about two hours later, and there was so much destruction with trees down in the Grove, that I had to hike out six blocks, that was as close as you could get to the house. Which made for an interesting couple of days after the storm, because for a week afterwards, it took a week to get all the trees off the road down the major arteries, so I could get out. The result of that was that somebody had to come get me every morning at 4:15 in the morning. And so here I was, working the daybreak shift, hiking out of the neighborhood in utter pitch blackness, because no power anywhere, with just a flashlight, climbing over trees, walking around paths that had kind of been formed informally through the neighborhood, hiking out those six blocks and waiting on a bus bench wanting for a photographer to come down to the point that I could get out and we could go back to work. That was very interesting. I have never, in all my life, I’m a native Miamian, and a native Grovite for that matter, and I have never in all my years experienced a stillness or an inky blackness like there was the first couple of days afterward. The stillness was unbelievable. It sounded to me like the third battalion rolling through the neighborhood with just me walking across through the leaves and over the branches. I was the only noise that you could hear... no birds, no crickets, no nothing, just absolutely still

Culbertson: Have you been through a hurricane before?

Carlson: Yes, I’ve been through five others. Growing up, I recall living over on S.W. 48th Court in South Miami, we had an acre of palmetto and pine. Hurricane Donna I remember very vividly, and Hurricane Cleo. Donna, as I recall, went over us, we got the eye, and I remember the front door bowing in with the winds at their worst, but I though it was neat and it didn’t scare me, I thought it was the neatest thing going. I was, had to be eleven, at the time, and I thought it was pretty neat. The animals didn’t think it was too cool, the cats were cowered under the bed and never did come out. The thing that I remember most about Donna and Cleo, and the thing that I lust absolutely detested, was that we had an acre of palmetto anti pine, and all the pine trees had all their needles taken off, they were absolutely denuded; and of course it was up to me to rake up. That’s all I did on Saturdays for weeks and weeks and weeks and I hated it. The other storm that I recall, 1 think it was in ‘64, I think that was Cleo, I’m not sure, the names get all fuzzy now, but I know it was ‘64. I was working at McDonald’s Florist over in Coconut Grove at 27th Avenue and Tigertail, which is now the parking lot for the Summerhill Apartments, but at the time it was a glorious floral shop that had its own greenhouse and ran all the way from Tigertail down to Bayshore. It occupied that whole stretch of land and it went down over that hill. I showed up there the day after the storm, I was m high school at the time. The greenhouse had a lot of glass missing, it wasn’t shattered or destroyed, (it would have been in Andrew), but it was just banged up pretty bad here. But, the foliage, the Grove being what it is and what it was back then, we worked, Charles Hammond, another fellow that worked there, and I for weeks and weeks and weeks after school, hauling debris, tree 1 limbs and everything out of the property and piled it up in the front. There’s a picture somewhere, I’d have to look for it, but there’s of a picture of the two of us at one point collapsed on top of the pile, we were so tired. But that was something, we had to haul all that out of there, so yeah, I remember that hurricane very well.

Culbertson: What did you think it would be like?

Carlson: Well, yeah, for Andrew here we’re talking about. I knew that it was going to be a lot of destruction in terms of foliage, trees and the like. I knew that was going to be the case, but beyond that, I had no idea what to expect. Q mean when I saw the size of this storm coming in, and realized that it, for all intents and purposes, really did outclass the hurricane of ‘26. Growing up, everything I’d ever read, the hurricane of ‘26 was “the storm”, “the killer”, and in terms of lives lost down here, it was. But in terms of actual destruction and wind and all that, it really wasn’t much compared to Andrew. Andrew was far worse than that. I expected the waters to be much higher than they were. I expected the damages to homes in the Grove, I don’t know why, to be much worse. As it turned out, that was the least damage. There was some, we had a little bit, but it wasn’t anything that was life threatening or critical, It was the foliage. My father called a couple of days after the storm from over on the West Coast, and he said, “What’s the Grove like?” I said, “It has a transparency that I’ve never seen before. The environment is transparent.” I remember being impressed by the fact that I could stand in front of the Grove Playhouse and see the bay.. I’ve never been able to do that before. I was stunned by that.

Culbertson: Were you satisfied with the station’s weather data in predicting the storm?

Carlson: Absolutely. There was never a question with that. Not at all.

Culbertson: Where were you during the hurricane?

Carlson: I was on the ground floor of our home on Royal Palm Avenue. We had pulled mattresses off the beds in the childrens’ rooms, and we were all huddled in the hallway between the kitchen and the bedrooms. With all the dogs, five dogs. It was not my idea of a fun evening, but that’s where we were.

Culbertson: Who was with you during the hurricane?

Carlson: Children, wife, dogs and the cats.

Culbertson: What happened to you during the hurricane?

Carlson: Nothing. Nothing happened to us.

Culbertson: What were your concerns and thoughts during the hurricane?

Carlson: My biggest concern was trying to keep my wife and children calm and not panicked, because, you know, I knew that there wasn’t much that we could do about it. We were on the high rock ridge there, ‘fourteen feet above sea level, and I didn’t think, under the worst of conditions with the storm surge, we’d get nailed. But I was concerned about flying debris and things like that. If I got up’ and walked around the house once, I did it a hundred times during the storm, because every time something would make a noise my wife would go, “What was that?”, and I’d have to go and check. We had one leak during the storm, and that was it, and with the house built in 1916, it was tight as a drum. It really was. It was wonderful. The wind howling through the various shutters on the doors and the windows and all made an incredible noise. About four o’clock in the morning in pitch blackness, I was laying there, and all of a sudden I felt a little hand on my shoulder, and it was my seven year old, Cameron, and he just said very calmly and quietly, “Daddy, I’m scared.” And I reached out and I pulled him aver to me and I said, “Cameron, we’re all scared, but we’re going to be OK, you know, we’re doing fine.” It wasn’t until days later that I realized, looking at some color radar maps, that we had sustained, here in the Grove, sustained winds of 150 m.p.h. for the hour or two that it went over us. So I probably, should have been more concerned than I was, but  wasn’t.

Culbertson: After the hurricane, when did you get to the station/home?

Carlson: I’ve already been through that.

Culbertson: What was the damage to the station?

Carlson: We lost our microwave tower out in front, which went down very early in the storm. It turns out that it was built long since after the last hurricane we had, and it was not built to withstand winds of above about 60 m.p.h. Boy, it went aver with an enormous explosion, I’m told.

Culbertson: What was the damage to your home?

Carlson: We had some tree limbs down, we had one large limb that went through the top of a storage room that let the rains in, and it destroyed a mess of stuff rugs, old furniture and things like that but aside from that, we had very little damage. The house looked, except for power back to it, essentially back to normal about four days after the storm. We got it all cleaned up. We had sold the house just the week before the storm, and so we were trying desperately to make sure the sale went through. So that’s why we had to get it cleaned up ASAP.

Culbertson: Were you sent out to report on the aftermath?

Carlson: Interestingly enough, no, I wasn’t. I think the station learned from the live reports that we did in Ft. Lauderdale the day before the storm that the best place that I could serve them was live in the station, ad libbing, doing live television, going to various reports around. It was three weeks before I got down to the storm area itself in South Dade. And when I got down there, I was dumbfounded. I mean, even three weeks after the storm, I was dumbfounded at the scope and the magnitude of the destruction. It was beyond anything that anybody could comprehend. And nobody really did comprehend it. I mean, the storm came in on early Monday morning, and nobody really comprehended what the storm was until late Tuesday, until you got up in a helicopter and were able to really look. And then it was just like, yeah there’s a lot of damage, and then the damage never ended, as far as you could see, it never ended. The thing that I was struck by, three weeks afterwards, driving down through it, was going down the turnpike at about 152nd Street and south, leaking east toward the bay, I was struck by the fact that I could see every roof in every neighborhood. There were no trees, none to be seen at all. Obviously the scope of the destruction of the houses and all that, and within a couple of days after that T remember driving back up from Homestead one day, and the scene just sticks in my mind indelibly. Coming up on the Turnpike there in Florida City, just getting on, heading north, and to the right scores upon scores of damaged town homes, just laying in ruins, to the left, and this was all at once, you could see it all at once, damaged town homes on the right, tent cities going up on the left, helicopters absolutely everywhere, and large transports flying in and out of Homestead Air Farce Base which you could now see, when you could never see it before. By that time they had already started burning a lot of the trash, and so you had these great plumes of smoke coming up all over the place, which made it look like something out of the old film, The Day After. I mean it was just holocaust, it was unbelievable. I was very struck by that. But it was interesting, as much as I wanted to get out in the middle of it and report on it, they kept me in the station and we would anchor on average, about six hours on and then a couple of hours off. We were doing a twelve hour on, twelve hours off shift for the first week, which proved to be just awful. I mean, because, especially if you were down here and you had family and kids and you were affected by it. I’d go in at midnight and I’d work until noon, and then I’d come; home and I’d try and find ice, or I’d have to go to Ft. Lauderdale for groceries, or something like that, and then come home and deal with what we could deal with here, and then eight o’clock would roll around, and it was like, I’ve got to get back to work in four hours and I haven’t had any sleep. So the station realized very quickly, within about a week, that that was an untenable situation, we couln’t do that. So we went back to our regular shift after, that. So that was what my first week was like after the hurricane.

Culbertson: Describe the station’s help to the community during the days lust after the hurricane.

Carlson: Essentially, it was one of information, because we were simulcasting on a couple of radio stations as well. The thing that was always an irony to me was that the people who needed the help most, who needed to see what was going on the most, couldn’t. They had no clue what was going on, and so we had to just hope that they picked it up by radio. We also did some convoys down there in the area. The Care Force at Channel 10 kind of came out of the first couple of weeks after the storm. It wasn’t until after the Army got in here and everything got really rolling that the station came up with a concerted effort to do something down there in that area. We had, and still do, teams that go out on the weekends and help individual home owners, churches and things like that clean up, build, reconstruct and things like that.

Culbertson: What kind of effect has Hurricane Andrew had on your daily life?

Carlson: There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about the storm. Our family was very, very lucky, I mean we were essentially untouched by the storm, but there isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t think about it, that we don’t see the physical reminders around us here in the neighborhood, and that we don’t think that it’s like only two months until the next hurricane season rolls around. Every time I walk by all these windows, you know, it’s 1 like, I know we’ve got shutters, but we ought to have more. I mean this house, that we’re in now, was built in 1905, and it’s weathered the worst, and it came through Andrew without a problem at all, as close as we are to the bay. But nevertheless, there’s always that concern, it’s always in the back of my mind, and it’s probably never going to go away. )

Culbertson: Has the hurricane significantly changed your plans for the future? How?

Carlson: I would say yes. I would say yes, in that, we’ve talked for years ...I’m a Grove native ...I mean, I love the Grove, I’ve never really wanted to live anywhere else. I took seven years out living in Kendall, which was the godawfulest, biggest mistake I ever made in my life, but (I’ve always loved the Grove. My wife loves the Grove ...she’s lived here for many years. But since the storm, we have been seriously talking ...we talked before ...but now seriously talking about moving to places like Montana or Wyoming. And I would say that that’s essentially because of the storm, and the possibility of having to go through all this again. It’s just flat out frightening, and we haven’t completely gotten ourselves settled since then. And we talk more seriously about moving just completely out of the state now, which we never did before.

Culbertson: Have you seen a change in the attitudes of the station personnel as a result of the hurricane?

Carlson: No, not really, we’re still as irreverent as hell. Even though a couple of the people on our morning crew, the “Daybreak” crew... I think we’ve got about fifteen people on that crew. ..and two of them lost everything in the storm. But they’ve recovered, they’ve come back, they’re their same old selves. It’s like we put on a different persona when we’re at the station, we deal with things. I mean, it’s there, you got to deal with it, you’ve got deadlines, and the way you deal with it a lot is just a lot of irreverent humor, a lot of gallows humor, if you will, and that has come back with a vengeance.

Culbertson: Has Channel 10 made any revisions in policy in the event another hurricane threatens?

Carlson: That’s interesting, they had a department head meeting ...let’s see this is Thursday. ..they had a department head meeting on Monday to talk about the hurricane season coming up and what they’re going to do. So if there are any revisions, I’m not sure what they are. But as yet we haven’t seen any.

Culbertson: What has Channel 10’s role been to help rebuild the community?

Carlson: We do the Care Force. We salute people and volunteers that are out there, we do regular news reports on that. And obviously we are doing reports on an almost daily basis on rebuilding efforts, financial, insurance, whatever.

Culbertson: Are there any positive outcomes you have seen as a result of the hurricane? Please describe.

Carlson: Sure, oh yeah. ,The most positive that I could see was how incredible the community came together. I mean, all we see is the murder, the destruction, the ripoffs and things like that, and it was so incredible the first couple of days especially. People were actually pleasant to you on the road, they were courteous, they waited for you if there was a light ...no light...or anything like that. The staggering number of volunteers that flowed down into the area immediately afterwards, not just sightseers, but volunteers that went down there with food, clothing, anything they could to get down there. And you knew there were going to be rip-off artists down there, and everyone was warning everyone else about that, but just the number of volunteers that were down there ...that were there, that came from out of state, the convoys of people and volunteers. It was staggering, I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. That was a mighty impressive development afterward.

Culbertson: Is there anything else that you would like to tell us that we haven’t asked you?

Carlson: Geez, I don’t know. No, not really. It was an incredible event, and I hope to hell we never see another one like it, cause the misery that it has caused down here, I think it will be tell’ years before we recover from it. That’s assuming we don’t have; another one, because if we have another one, I think you’re going to see South Florida probably end up as an economic wasteland. Because a lot of people we talked to, especially in South Dade, said if another one came along and did as much or even half as much damage as Andrew did, they were just going to chuck it, tell the’ bank they can have the house, and they’re leaving, and start over) again someplace else, and I think that would be a disaster. That’s about it.

Later additional comments from Mr. Carlson:

We moved here in October of ‘ 92, and we met the Schoonmakers across the way here, and we were down at their dock on the bay, and that was really. . k1 knew that Key Biscayne had absolutely been just laid to waste ...and I knew that Cape Florida was just wiped out ...but I didn’t really get a sense for it until I was down here on their dock looking unimpeded across the bay to Key Biscayne, and you could see the Cape Florida Lighthouse without any difficulty at all. It looked like a bombing range over there, just a few straggling gigs sticking up on the horizon. And it wasn’t until about a month ago that I got the geography lesson that I never really understood. Everything ...the relation of location to location down here. I’m looking at Key Biscayne from here in Coconut Grove, and I’m thinking, “My God, if that’s what happened over there, why didn’t we get that?” Until I realized that if you draw a straight line due eastwest off of North Kendall Drive, you will run through Cape Florida. It’s that much further south, even though it doesn’t look it. And I look at that, and I really rudder, because that was the wall of the storm, really, Kendall Dive...they were getting the wall of the storm and the highest winds. And you stop and think, just another mile or two, if that storm had dogged, and we would have probably been in the same situation... there wouldn’t be a tree standing here, anywhere in the neighborhood. My fatherinlaw was down visiting from Texas, about two months ago, and we drove out to Key Biscayne. We drove all the way down to the entrance to the park... couldn’t get in, obviously, but we stood there ...and he sat there for a while, and finally stood up, walked over, looked around a little bit longer, didn’t say a word, and finally after a minute or two, he said, “I haven’t seen anything this bad since Iwo Jima. I thought that was the worst, but this is the worst.) I look at that, and we have video tape that we shot, I mean. I’ve gone out to Cape Florida since we were in high school. It was lush, green, shady and cool and it’s all gone, it’s all gone. The only thing left is the lighthouse out there. It’s such a loss. Anyway, looking at the Key and then realizing the relation of that to North Kendall Drive and how close we really came to just getting cracked here ...that was a sobering thought, very sobering.