Interview with Dr. Harold R. Wanless, (Associate Professor of Geology, University of Miami) conducted by  Robert Warzeski on December 2, 1992, Coral Gables, FL Hurricane Andrew - An ocean-going tugboat left high and dry by storm surge. Courtesy National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Adminstration Photo Library: .

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

Wanless: It was Thursday or Friday before the storm. We were working out of helicopters on the west coast of Florida, at Cape Sable. Friday afternoon, we got back from that field trip very late, about six, seven, and I noticed that the news suggested there was a storm sort of heading toward us. Things looked such that it might be heading our way. So we went down to Home Depot Friday evening thinking, “Gosh, nobody else will be there” and of course they were already out of propane and everything else.

Warzeski:  What preparations did you make?

Wanless: Well, my wife and I are separated, so I had two houses, and I had two offices and laboratories. Plus the home of my motherinlaw on Key Biscayne, who was up north. So we basically started by securing her condominium on Key Biscayne. Putting down shutters and things like that. That one was straightforward. At the outside laboratory/processing area we have on Virginia Key, at the Rosenstiel School, we moved a lot of things off the floor, because there’s a first floor inside area. We cleaned off most of the outside area, except for tables and things that we, perhaps, foolishly left. Nothing happened to them, though, because they were leeward. At my wife’s house, which is down south of Kendall, we moved things off of the porch. We put canoes on cars in the garage and things like that. But we did not do any taping of windows, and there were no shutters. But we secured the outside area. We took the neighbors’ hoses off, because I remember in Betsy, hoses turned into lethal weapons as they got whipped around, and did a lot of damage in some cases. At our house in north Coral Gables, again, we moved all the orchids and the heavy potted plants inside. All the wood, all the little sailing boats and things, we put into the garage. We basically secured everything that was loose outside, brought it inside. Did not tape any windows here. I guess at Marjorie’s house, my wife’s house, we did tape a few windows because I remember pulling it off quickly after the storm. And then at my office on the main campus, we noted that the windows, they were big windows that are horizontal and open sort of like a jalousie. I noticed there were screw holes on those, so we went over the evening of the storm with screws and screwdrivers and screwed those shut so that they wouldn’t be popping open.

Warzeski: What did you think it would be like before the storm? You’ve been through a few at this point. [note: Hal evidently interpreted this literally in terms of what he thought the period before the storm would be like.]

Wanless: Well, normally storms have squall lines come through. And they are breezy and rainy, and then it’s like calm. So I expected it would be like that. And sort of expected it would be a gradual building of the wind with each squall line as they became more and more frequent. That’s what I expected it would be like.

Warzeski: Where were you during the actual hurricane?

Wanless: We were in this house in the northern part of Coral Gables. And fortunately, I made the invitation to my wife and the two of our children who might have been with her to come up so we’d just be together. And I also invited two people from Key Biscayne to come join us. So we had quite a few people here that night.

Warzeski: What happened to you people during the storm?

Wanless: Well, we made a very good decision by chance, probably, for everybody to come here. Had Marjorie stayed in her house, she would have had people in wheel chairs. Hers was one of the houses where the shingles and tarpaper came off, and the water poured in, and the ceilings collapsed everywhere. Turned out it probably wasn’t a dangerous mess, but it was a sloppy mess. Here, it was incredible. This is a house built in 1926, so it’s seen a few storms. I had just purchased it on July twenty fourth, and went away till August fifteenth. So I was still unpacking, basically, when the storm hit. So I knew nothing about the house, even if the roof leaked. But I knew it had an old roof, so I had patched it the Sunday before the storm. I went and got some patching stuff, and just ... anywhere that looked a little ragged, or something ... It’s sort of one of these flat, sloping roofs, it’s not a Vshaped roof. So I had done patching to sort of glue it together a little bit. But during the storm we had no roof leaks. We had one tiny one. And we had a little bit of water coming through the corner of a windward window in my daughter’s room. But we had basically, no leaks. Even the East-facing backporch door that has a little wood rot in it . .. I was standing there during the storm, and nothing was coming through. And I remember Hurricane Betsy with water pouring through doors and stuff. We were, of course, north of the super damage, because we’re all of four or five blocks south of southwest eighth street here, but we were certainly in a time of major hurricane wind. The neighbors lost about four or five huge trees. I lost my tree out front. But the damage to the house was minimal. On the other hand, three days later, when it rained, the roof leaked like mad. So obviously it loosened it, but I guess it wasn’t a very wet hurricane. This roof held. We had no window breakage. Marjorie’s house, as I told you, the roof got messed up. Plus she had a lot of broken windows on the windward side, probably from other peoples’ roof debris. Her house had fifty thousand dollarsplus of insurance coverage that was paid.

Warzeski: What were your thoughts or concerns during the storm itself?

Wanless: That I wish I had had stronger light so that I could have gotten better video. (laughter) Well, at about five in the morning, at the height of this thing, we realized ... I had figured out where the storm was. We had no ...oh, we had a couple of radio headsets, but I figured out as the wind was starting to sequence around, I realized exactly where we were in the storm. And that the major eyewall was some distance south of us. I knew we weren’t too far, but I knew we were a little north of the main part. So we opened the front door, which faced west, which was pure leeward the whole storm. And I’m trying to take pictures and look around. And everybody ... of course we went to sleep about two ... actually our friends from Key Biscayne didn’t leave the key until onethirty, because they were busy propping things up. But that was the way this storm was. It came ... It wasn’t what I had expected. It had a squall line at ten in the morning on Sunday, I remember. And I said “OK, this is normal.” And then there was, really, no more rain. I had laundry on the line till onethirty that morning. And when they arrived, it was just starting to sprinkle here. The wind was trivial, so I said “well, it’s starting to rain, I’ll bring the laundry in.” So that was at one-thirty in the morning. and then we went to bed around two, and woke up about fourthirty as the wind was pounding from the northeast. At that time, we all got up, we got our flashlights, and we had the door open.

Warzeski: It was inconvenient not for it to have come during the daytime?

Wanless: Well, I’ve driven through one hurricane, in 1964: Cleo, near Jacksonville. Rushing down to Miami to not be late as a graduate student, not realizing that it didn’t matter after a hurricane had come through Miami. So I didn’t do much with that one. I drove through another one that year, up the coast at Palm Beach. That was at night, we drove through it on A1A. It was a small one. Betsy was at night. Hurricane Inez in ‘66 was during the day. It was barely hurricane force, but we did go out and get pictures in it. It would be nice to see. It’s interesting.

Warzeski: What did you do after the hurricane?

Wanless: Well, actually, at six or so, as the winds were starting to subside a little bit here, everybody sort of crashed till about nine o’clock. I think most of the people in the neighborhood did that, because we got up at maybe nine or ninethirty, put some clothes on and just went out. It seemed like everybody was just emerging out of their cave that they’d closed themselves in. And we looked around. Actually, we went out during the storm once, because at about fivethirty, as the winds had switched to just a little south from east, I looked out and my car, which was on the north side of the house, had a huge limb on it. The soft part of the limb. And Don Heuer and I decided we’d go out and move the limb, which was probably not very wise. We had to lift the thing up into the wind and roll it somewhere. We did it, but it was probably a foolish thing. So that was the first time out. But then after the storm had subsided, probably about nine o’clock, ninefifteen, we went out and looked around. And then we cooked everybody breakfast. We had a little camp stove, so we decided that, since we knew from the visual situation outside, we were going to have to start to use the refrigerated stuff as quickly as we could. So we cooked a big breakfast and then sent the Heuers on their way to go wait in line to not get on the Key. And I left them a key to the house, because I suspected they’d need it. Of course, they weren’t allowed on Key Biscayne that day, so they came back late that night. But after breakfast, then, we drove down to Marjorie’s house, to see what the damage was. I drove down with my video camera stuck to my eye, basically. We thought it was a good challenge. I remember we went over to Eighth Street and Red Road, on the corner. Somehow we got out to there. And the first reaction was, right next door to where we were living, which as it turned out was on the edge of the storm, a Shell station had all the pumps blown over, and the whole thing was just destroyed. It was just spectacular, and all the traffic lights, of course, were down, and it was a very striking sight. That was sort of the first thing.

Warzeski: What was the effect of the storm on your family?

Wanless: Well, our oldest son, who was in England at the time, called us at nine, nine-thirty that morning. He called, got right through to us. So he, I guess as the rest of the world, had been aware that we were being pounded. Of course, we hadn’t been down to Marjorie’s house, so we told him we had no damage, everybody was fine. Which they were. So he went on and enjoyed his next couple of weeks in England and Europe, without thinking about it. The total effect has been, been ...well, during that day, the effect was very rugged on Marjorie, because it got to her house, which she had bought June 24th, not two months before. And here it was trashed completely. It was beautiful, really, quite new house, not brand new, and it was just absolutely trashed. It’s a sight beyond description to have a house that looks like it just has a few shingles missing on the outside, and then you go inside and every ceiling has collapsed, with all the pink fuzz dropped on everything. Her bedroom was a strange one, because it was a poster bed, and all you could see was the posts sticking through where the ceiling had dropped, and all the pink fuzz was draped on everything. Trevor’s room had an eagle sticking out of the whole thing, a stuffed eagle. Everything else was pink. I thought it looked hilarious. Of course, she was crushed. Ryan, I remember, broke into big tears after about five minutes. That was traumatic. On the other hand, her mother’s condominium on Key Biscayne wasn’t damaged. So Marjorie stayed here for a week and then they moved out there. So, in a way we always had a place to go. The electricity here came back on Tuesday evening, believe it or not. It’s embarrassing. We lost no food from either house. We had some ice chests full of ice during the storm. And just about the time we were running out of ice and knew we were going to lose stuff, we got the electricity back. It was either Tuesday or Wednesday evening. It was embarrassing, really, where all the other people suffered so long. I know I took Ryan down, because part of my job as a scientist was surveying the damage everywhere on land, on the coasts, and offshore. And I took my nineyear old son Ryan on one of the very early trips down to Homestead to go to Biscayne National Park Headquarters, which was destroyed, and to try to get into the Everglades National Park. But it overwhelmed him. I guess to a child nine years old the damage was just overwhelming. He made a concerted effort not to go, and not to look. A second time, about a month later, he had to go to Homestead with me, just because I had to pick him up from school and deliver some stuff down to the park. But he basically made an effort not to look out the window, which I thought was very interesting. I don’t know what that means for the long term effect on him. He, like the rest of the kids in Miami, makes wonderful hurricane pictures that are just trees flying. They’re quite ... well, that’s just where his mind is. But he’s never had the feeling of having physically lost a house or something. Katie’s accepted it in stride. Trevor, my nineteen year old, went through the hurricane with his friends. I think the hurricane came on dramatically enough that it wasn’t a big drunken beer bash. But I remember he called me at four thirty in the morning, saying “Dad, you wouldn’t believe it. We were looking out the window at this tree blowing and it fell on the house.” It was one of these big liveoaks, or whatever they’ve got around the golf course in Coral Gables. He thought that was just the neatest thing. He’s an artistic person. I’ve never seen him do any sketches of the hurricane in his art, so obviously it was a “neat thing” and hasn’t mentally impacted him. He’s disappointed his car didn’t get damaged in the storm, because he probably could have benefited from that. So Marjorie’s happy now. She’s been well taken care of with insurance, and her house is being rebuilt. They’ve given her money to take care of replacing everything. I think we all see how horrible it was for many people. I think we all realize, the adults of us from Katie on up, that we have nothing to whine about, and we have no justification to build a mental stress on what happened to us compared to what happened to so many other people.

Warzeski: Obviously, you weren’t really in need of help after the hurricane. Were you able to do anything for other people?

Wanless: Well, of course, the people who stayed with us would make a wonderful interview. It was Don Heuer, who is the printer out at the Rosenstiel School. When they arrived at one thirty in the morning, his station wagon was full of four tool kits and three chain saws. And, of course, when he found he couldn’t get on the Key, he became the neighborhood help. And he had people’s yards cleaned up. I mean, I, frankly, I was busy as a scientist. I spent a little time down with Marjorie, helping her get her place, sort of the urgent parts, cleaned up. Wet paintings and books and things that you needed to salvage; you couldn’t replace. But personally, after that, I felt that my contribution was on the scientific part. So I spent every bit of time doing that, that I didn’t have to give to my family. But I remember Don Heuer, he was a wonderful person. He didn’t owe anything to this neighborhood. But there were people coming from several blocks away saying “could you do this so that I could get my car out, my family.” He spent, basically, two days here clearing wood. He also made it a hobby, deciding “I will go his way” when he decided to drive around a bit. He ended up clearing a lot of roads, just for the fun of it. Most of my work, or my help, I think, was trying to quickly understand how the hurricane impacted our environment. That’s an odd way of thinking of helping. Maybe it was selfish, but I think in the long run we can learn a lot about better preparing for these storms. It’s awesome how poorly we did prepare for this one.

Warzeski: Did you have a plan in mind for how to investigate it when you started out?

Wanless: Well, I did like everybody else did. I remember talking to one of Lenore’s brothers, who lives up in Boca. He called that morning, or his wife called. And they said, “Oh it was terrible” up there! I mean, they had a few broken branches, and it was windy, and the sliding glass doors probably vibrated a bit. I’ve been through a seventy mile an hour storm, and they’re a little unsettling. I understand that. But it was like, “No, you don’t understand, we had the hurricane!” Of course that’s what I thought in north Coral Gables. By the time I got down to Marjorie’s area, which was just south of Kendall Drive, near Town and Country, I thought, “Oh! My God, this is where the storm was.” And of course it was another day or so till I got down to Homestead. It was like every mile south, I realized, “Whoa, this is where the storm was, it wasn’t where I was before.” And so I guess like everybody else, it was just gradual discovery of the nature of the storm. I had a plan, that was to see the wind intensity on land, as an index for what to look at in the water, because it doesn’t necessarily leave a record in the water. Whereas the land does, whether it be telephone poles or trees, and which direction they’re down, and how many are down. It’s a pretty good barometer preserved. So I spent the first two days trying to stay ahead of the Army and everybody else that was busy sealing things off. And that was actually the logistical plan. To get as many places as I could on land before they were closed. The only place I failed in was Everglades Park, where it was a week till they even let the researchers in, which is a megatragedy. A complete lack of proper priorities, because there’s a lot of information that’s lost that’s critical to evaluating management of how you prepare for other storms, by not really knowing what happened. The first week was basically on land. I was whining to the Herald and everybody I could for helicopters, right away. And I was trying to negotiate boats, though I wasn’t really in a rush to get out on the water. It’s usually the marine environment I study. But as a geologist, I thought at the time what washes away in a week (after the storm) doesn’t matter. It was a horrible mistake, because there were a lot of areas in southern Biscayne Bay that probably had anoxic bottom waters for the two days after the storm just because of the turbidity and organics. There’s only one possible record from that, aside from a lot of dead sponges and sea fans. So we really don’t have a direct record, or as much as we should. Fortunately, some of my students were working down around Homestead during those first few days, so we do have some data.

Warzeski: How did you go about eventually getting some time to spend up in helicopters?

Wanless: Well, as I mentioned at the beginning of this, I had just been funded to do a threeyear study on the west coast of Florida north of Cape Sable. That sort of remote stretch that really hasn’t been looked at since Spackman did it in the sixties. It was a study that was both to look at the geologic history over the last three or four thousand years through corings, but also to try to assess how hurricanes, and freezes and other things impact the environments and generate change in them, especially the mangrove coastline and fresh water wetland environments. So part of the job of that study was to look at hurricane effects on that coastline. We had of course assumed, having been twenty some odd years without a storm, that you can’t count on having a hurricane in a three year study. So our assumption had been that a lot of this was going to be interpretation through historical air photos and that kind of thing. This storm sort of reorganized that priority. And it was my very great frustration that we weren’t even allowed in the front door of the park. Finally I went ahead with my own money and rented an airplane to get up and see what was happening. Shortly after that we got into the park. It was about two weeks after the storm that they started to organize a resource evaluation team. This was a governmentdesigned team to come in and, as part of their incident control, or incident command program, they do a resource inventory evaluation of damage. So it suddenly went from famine to feast, where you couldn’t get in the park, to suddenly you had all the helicopter time you said you needed, all the boat time, and all the rangers you driving around you said you wanted. It got to the point where I’d be out in one area, and I’d have my students out in another area. It was good, but it was two weeks late in coming. It was one of the things that happened by being pushy. I basically drove down to Everglades Park entrance every other day, beginning on Wednesday after the storm. I left notes saying “What’s going on? How can I help? How can I get helicopters? Can I bring a boat in?” Of course, as the people in Everglades Park said, “We’ve always planned for disasters, but we never realized the disasters were going to be to us too.” Since most of those people lost their homes, every time you went down there you ended up talking to some ranger from Kentucky or Idaho that they’d brought in to take over. It was a situation that nobody had anticipated. There was no way in the first two weeks of handling, at the government level, the research, or coordinating who should be allowed in and out. It was pretty sad. That’s one of the things that, when I sit down and start writing my personal letter of recommendation for the future, goes to the county, the state, the Federal Government, all the parks that are responsible for all our marine environments. In a catastrophe like this, we get so overwhelmed with human tragedy that you ignore the environment. You ignore making sure the people that should be are looking at the evidence for the currents, or the evidence for the waves, or the evidence for pollution, that really has to be done right away. There must be a mechanism set up to make that happen. The State Department of Natural Resources was driving down that Sunday night. They were driving down Sunday night, and Monday afternoon they were measuring beach profiles. They were the only organization that I saw that mobilized the instantaneous scientific response and monitoring. And they did it because they knew that all the hotels were going to have their bulldozers out as soon as they could get the salt water off of them. And they did!

Warzeski: When were you able to get back to your normal work and teaching at the University?

Wanless: Well, see that’s probably not a fair question for me, because my normal work is to study the effect of hurricanes. We had funds from the NSF to study Hurricane Kate when it went over Caicos. The southeast Bahamas had previously been worked before that storm in ‘85. And so on. We’ve just been actually funded to look at the historical effect of storms on the coastline. So, in a way, I went to work the minute I came out of the house. On the other hand, the scientific opportunity the storm has afforded has been disastrous to the courses that I was teaching. I was out in the field and had too many demands on making sure we adequately recorded the nature of the storm. I still haven’t moved into the house. I still have boxes of tools in the dining room that haven’t been moved into the shop yet, which I hope we get to before we set up the Christmas decorations! So, in a Fall when I was supposed to be setting up a house as a single parent to take care of three children during the weekdays, this has been a comedy in a way, and a little stressful for them. I’m afraid the work got back to normal immediately, and the other slants of the work, like the teaching, and then the home life, have been ... it’s happening, but that’s the part that’s been abnormal, probably.

Warzeski: What other ways has the school year up to this point been different from other school years? What visible changes do you see in your students because of the hurricane?

Wanless: I’m teaching one class to freshman at the University of Miami, and most of them haven’t been anywhere, haven’t seen anything. They were here during the storm, and they were sent home for several weeks. And then they came. I don’t think most of them have cars, so they did not get down to Homestead. For most of them this was just their struggling semester. They’ve seen the pictures, and maps and all that I’ve had during the Fall, but I don’t think they’ve had a reaction to it. They’ve been inconvenienced by me. The older geology students I have, if anything are the ones that have benefited. Because they’ve gotten to get out in the field and seen geologic processes in action. So I think to them, maybe it’s been a little bit exciting. And certainly for my graduate students it’s been a bonanza, because we were sort of heading into this standard geologic study, and suddenly it becomes this dynamic, exciting thing. We’ve diverted the whole Fall off onto the hurricane. Not doing the deeper coring for the longer term geologic history. We’ve sort of shoved that off to the side, even though the helicopter flights before the storm were actually reconnaissance for locating places to go for that record. The long term history study, we’ve completely diverted off that, but we’re planning to head back to that right after the new year.

Warzeski: It’s probably not appropriate to go into the scientific results here, but there was a comment you and your students made at a talk I heard a week or two ago about this being a chance to see the incipient stages of something. Could you go into that a little bit?

Wanless: Sure! Because this was an interesting storm. As most people know, it moved through very fast. Most big storms are moving at, maybe, twelve miles an hour. There is one historical storm, I can’t remember the name, that went up through New York at 40 miles an hour, and had winds probably approaching two hundred miles, an hour. But most big storms are not doing that. As they move fast, they tend to fall apart. This storm moved very rapidly, and as a result it had an intense impact on things. Some environments are decimated. I mean, in some mangrove environments they just all fell down. What more can you do? After you’ve uprooted everything, you’ve destroyed that environment. I suppose you could wash it away. But many environments had what looks like minor damage. As Orin Pilkey published in an article in EOS, a geophysical newsletter, he said “nothing happened”. And on some of our first over-flights we felt nothing had happened. But as we started to look at it, we started to see that what did happen was actually dramatic. Or what did happen was small, but was of a nature that most processes wouldn’t think of doing. And that’s what we meant by saying what we were seeing was the beginning, or incipient stages of catastrophic change. Usually if you have a storm with a hundred and seventy, or two hundred mile an hour winds, you have it move across and spend three to ten, twelve hours lashing at a shoreline. And you have this horrendous erosion, and modification. Huge inlets form. What we saw was the incipient stages of overwash from these very strong storm surges. And the channeling that starts to form with it. We saw channeling starting to dissect mangrove coastlines. But I think we can relate this to something like (Hurricane) Donna, which was a big storm and affected a mangrove coastline. It went by much more slowly and did much more extensive damage. But this was like the beginning of the experiment. We’re seeing how it works. I guess you’d say this doesn’t work for houses that were completely destroyed or something like that, because the experiment went to completion. But a lot of places, it was just beginning. The beginning of the modifications by these very intense currents. Or very intense winds.

Warzeski: Was it the manmade structures that it went to completion on, and most of the natural ones it was just the beginning?

Wanless: Yeah ... except for the hardwood hammocks, and mangrove forests. And there are places in Biscayne Bay where the northsouth current was focused, and it basically did 100% destruction of the hardbottom community. To the point that it was uprooting slabs of bedrock and things like that on the bottom. Where it focused its current you could see this incredible modification. And where it didn’t, right next to it, at first you wouldn’t see much damage at all. “The incipient stages of a catastrophic modification” is to fight this concept that nothing happened. Because something did happen. But it didn’t cause three hundred feet of erosion. I think we now have learned better how a beach will erode in this kind of a storm. At least I did, because we’ve seen the form it takes with a very brief onshore surge. Most of the onshore surges were less than half an hour in length. That’s a very short time. And it’s neat, it’s neat in a way. Scientifically, you had this incredible thing started, and you just changed its direction as the storm moved through, so it never carried its process through. So that’s the concept. Fighting this idea that most people who have looked superficially have said nothing had happened. In some environments everything happened, if you get into the storm. But there are some environments that, with an over-flight, it looks like, “Oh, it’s still there.” Well, sort of. But you can start to see the changes going on, and the way it works, and that’s cool.

Warzeski: Has the hurricane changed your plans for the future? Has it continued to affect your daily life?

Wanless: Well, I’m still patching the roof. Maybe I should go to the insurance company. See, I figured the roof just had a few weak spots, but I’m still fighting that. So that’s one way. There are a few other little things need fixing up. But Marjorie’s house is taken care of, so that from our personal life this storm has had very little effect. It’s directed some of our future research, obviously. I guess it’s been gratifying, because I have given lectures for years to Dade County, to the State people, to the City people, to the people on Key Biscayne : “Get rid of your stupid Australian Pines.” And I guess my name wasn’t Andrew, because I never had much effect. But I think maybe people like us seeded the need to do this, and suddenly when this storm blew them all down, they’re eliminating them. It’s just the most gratifying thing to realize that you were listened to, and that actually something’s happened. Even Cape Florida Park, now, which had all it trees basically go down. Over 90% of the Australian pines went down. They’re going to redesign the park as a natural system. Cape Florida is a park, but the land was “fill” in the fifties, and it grew up with Australian pines. They just sort of took over. So when it became a park in the late sixties, it was an Australian pine park. Now is an opportunity for them to revert it to a natural setting. I don’t know. Those kinds of things are very gratifying, but you start to feel that people … I was one of these people that sort of share the billing every once in a while with the guys from the Hurricane Center. And like them, sometimes you think maybe you’re crying wolf. You’re saying “Get rid of the Australian pines; get better evacuation plans, maintain you natural beach sand as a protection against erosion,” and you wonder if you’re just crying wolf sometimes. So, I don’t like hurricanes. I mean, I study them, but I don’t wish them on anybody, including ourselves. But it’s been gratifying to see that people … I’ve had a lot of people say “I remember your lecture, and you were right.” Yeah, well, good. That’s nice. But people are acting now, when there are funds suddenly available to take care of the downed trees. They’re using these funds to get rid of the Australian pines. I mean, I’m not the only one that’s been pushing that, but I was one of the voices in the crowd. From that point of view it’s gratifying.

Warzeski: Is there anything else that you’d like to tell us about that we haven’t asked?

Wanless: Well, yeah, if we’re talking about the hurricane. And that is that I’m a person that studies physical processes on the earth: on the land and in the sea, and on the shores. And I include hurricanes in that. This has been a wonderful storm, as a scientist. Because there’s stuff that I never conceived would happen. Like gravel filling mail boxes west of Homestead. Gravel from the fields, not from somebody’s roof. And gravel being embedded up to sixteen or more feet up in pine trees. Somebody just gave me a photograph that a plumber had taken down around 248th street, where there’s a 2x4 stuck right through a palm tree. I mean, you hear about these things in dust storms and tornadoes. But to see these things as part of a hurricane is just phenomenal. I’ve learned many things from what I’ve done and from what my colleagues have done after this storm. I’ve learned so much more about what a hurricane is. Fortunately for South Florida we haven’t had many of these for most my professional career here. But we’ve still had to assess what the role of these storms is. So this was a beginning of turning that geologic interpretation into monitoring a process. That’s probably the reason that I and so many of my colleagues have spent so much time running around this Fall, ruining our weekends, evenings, extra days. Trying to squeeze in observation time to understand how this process works. I’ll predict for the future what’s going to happen. And that is ... well, this storm’s a little different because it affected the job base in the southern part of Dade County, and that’s going to affect Homestead. In a year, people are going to start to forget everything, and people are going to let building codes slip a little bit. Every year it’ll slip a little bit more. And fifteen years from now, we’ll have forgotten most of the things that everybody in Dade County has learned from this storm. It’s amazing how rapidly we forget. I was down at the historical museum yesterday with one of the people from Cape Florida Park. And among other things, we were looking through a book of the hurricane in ‘26, with all the photographs. It’s hilarious. Every photograph could have been taken after Andrew. And every example of walls that blew in, whether it’s because they weren’t properly, structurally supported, just like all the walls that blew in on this one. It was like the song “When will we ever learn?” It seems so unnecessary to keep managing our human environment improperly, so that we have these horrendous bills that we have to pay out in insurance. And ultimately out of our pockets in insurance costs. That’s the most annoying part of this storm for me. You just know we’ll never learn. Because we’re too eager to just cut corners, to save the extra dollar. It’s amazing, the houses like my wife’s. We drove up to it and there were a couple of broken windows. And they’d obviously let some water in because they were on the north side. But the only other thing that happened was the shingles came off and some of the tar paper came off. None of the boards came off. But just that, just stripping the shingles was enough to cause $50,000 in insurance money. And that’s not ripping off anybody, that was the damage that was done. It was absolutely tragic inside. And there’s just no reason in the world that that should be able to happen. If that minor damage does ... we should be able to control things like that. And obviously we can, because adjacent subdivisions had no damage at all. And if you don’t let the roof leak, you don’t have any damage. The cost to insurance companies is probably $500, maybe $1000. If the roof had held, there’s no cost, basically. The government tragedy is that in the day of sending probes to Mars, we have no idea what the bloody winds were in this storm. We don’t know the barometric pressure, we don’t know the winds, and we don’t know the currents that were generated out in the coastal environment. And I fail to understand how we can protect and build for the future. This is the biggest natural disaster in U.S. history, I guess, and we don’t know what the winds were. You look at the time when the Fowey Rocks wind gauge blew over, bent. And you realize it wasn’t the maximum wind. There was more to come. And you look at every one (all the wind gauges, all of which blew down). Every one was before the peak winds. For some reason they are discounting those. I’ve heard a lot, and I haven’t checked it out; there’s a lot of my colleagues in the national parks who have seen and talked to the people who observed the wind gauges at Homestead Air Force Base, and Homestead General Aviation and others. And every one of these have either a gust or sustained winds going up above two hundred miles an hour. Those numbers have nothing to do with what is offered by the official report, and I think this is a horrible tragedy to the future of humanity that’s going to build houses in the coastal zone, where winds are going to get at them. I mean, this storm was a lesson in winds, and we don’t know what the lesson was. That’s a travesty, an absolute travesty. The government should have a hundred wind/pressure gauges that can be installed on a day’s notice anywhere along the coast of the Unites States. And they should maintain a series of installations that will be at suitable height for them to be meaningful. Every observation that we have, that they are using, they are correlating down from a hundred, a hundred fifty feet up in the air. Which is OK, but ... the National Hurricane Center was not sitting at ground level. So those wind levels are important, but most people live in a one or two story house, or maybe a five story apartment building. We should have a series of installations along the coast, perhaps in the open, unprotected areas, to get the real winds that are being provided. But we don’t, and it’s such a simple thing to do. There are excellent wind gauges that go up to whatever speeds airplanes go. And there obviously are or could be excellent barometers. And all these things could be secured, and could be maintained, and could be installed. I haven’t yet seen anything happen. And from the marine environment, which we are, again, going to spend millions of dollars trying to better protect, and are spending hundreds of millions of dollars along all our wetlands and coasts trying to better protect. And we don’t know anything about the currents. We don’t know anything about the wave ... we don’t know much about the wave heights. There were a few installations that may tell us something. It’s just silly, with whatever the damage from this storm was; I keep hearing thirty billion dollars. I don’t know what that is. Does that count the cost of the troops that came down here for a month? There are so many costs here that I’m not sure are included in that. There’s this megacost disaster. At that level, there should be a major contribution that the government is making to “instrument” these events so we know what they are. We blew it on this one, and we’re going to try to reconstruct it from gravel in the mail boxes. That’s probably our best record of what the winds were in Homestead! You have a fetch, and a grain size and a density, and how high they went. It would seem a lot more sensible to just have a wind gauge ... that somebody will accept. None of us can really comprehend what a hundred and seventy five versus a two hundred versus a two hundred and twenty mile an hour wind is. These are all big numbers and faster than most of us drive. I stuck my hand out of an airplane, a Piper Cub, when we were going a hundred, a hundred fifteen miles an hour, and I know that that’s quite strong, but ... .

Warzeski:  Why do you think the Hurricane Center is making an effort to downplay the speed?

Wanless: Well, an official government agency isn’t allowed to guess. I think that’s the problem. All they can say is that Fowey Rock hit whatever speed at however high above water, and then it bent over. Do what you want with that. But these numbers have become the official numbers of the storm. Some people feel they’re trying to hide something, but I’m not sure that’s what’s happening. I have no idea why all these other numbers aren’t suitable. I understand to be a sustained wind speed you have to have a record that the wind stayed above that level for a minute. And that’s the rules. And that’s OK. I don’t know what the situation is, but it just makes no sense (not to have gauges). I mean maybe these things are very expensive. I don’t think so. I’ve even heard Bob Sheets suggest that maybe we should think about doing something like this.

Warzeski: Start an initiative.

Wanless: Well, if I ever get a breather, I would try to put the whole thing together and just do it for the whole United States’ coast. It’s not really what I want to do. It’s a tragedy. It’s a human tragedy that it’s not being done. Because this was not a “big” storm. If the second eye-wall on this storm had started to build about five or six hours earlier, or if the storm had hit Florida about five or six hours later, we would have had an absolutely devastating storm. This one was just winding back up. It looks bad. It looks plenty bad in Homestead, and there was a bad piece of this storm that swung through. So it was unusual.

Warzeski: So it could have been much worse.

Wanless: Could have been much, much, much worse. This was a small storm. Hurricane Donna was a big storm. It was very interesting. In Hurricane Donna, the eye was offshore of the Ten Thousand Islands, I believe, to the south. On Thanksgiving I went up to Corkscrew Swamp which was maybe forty, fifty miles north of the coast. And they lost all their big trees, all their four, five, six hundred year old trees, or most of them in Donna up there, even though the eye was way offshore.

Warzeski: Wider eyewall?

Wanless: That was a storm that also had recognized hundred and sixty mile an hour winds, plus. It wasn’t nearly so tight, and it had a wide path of major downing, and destruction. There was nothing from Hurricane Andrew there (at Corkscrew), and Hurricane Andrew did very little at Everglades City. It did some, but we went looking there over Thanksgiving, and there were a few trees knocked down, and a few leaves were taken off. So the thing is, there’s going to be lots of other storms that hit South Florida and other parts of the United States. And we have learned very little from this storm except that our building code was being abused, and some parts of our building code may not have been sufficient. Maybe that’s good. Maybe Houston ... I have a lot of friends in Houston calling, saying “God, we’re worried because our code is only to be up to eighty miles an hour.” And they’re right in the hurricane belt too, so they’re very worried. I can only hope that they have better building inspectors than we do.

Warzeski: Is there anything else?

Wanless: You, or your professor or somebody in your course should interview Don Heuer, the printer at the Rosenstiel School, at the University of Miami, out on Virginia Key. He’s lived out on Key Biscayne since the fifties. He’s seen a lot of storms. He has a wealth of information. He’s an “educated” person, unlike a lot of the faculty. He reads and interacts with the environment around him. What struck me most about going back to his house was that none of his trees went down. All his neighbors’ trees were devastated, and he has this lush foliage still. And the reason is that he kept these huge trees trimmed vertically, so that they didn’t go much above roof level. Because he knew, from his wisdom, that when the wind blows hard, it’s what’s sticking up that gets trashed. We saw that time and again all around Miami. All the trees were broken at that roofcrest line. So he had almost no damage to his trees. His flagpole got tilted, but he had that up by the time we were able to visit him, with the flag flying. He’d be a great interview.

Warzeski: OK. Anything else,

Wanless: (pause) Yeah. I’ve been thinking about this. What if you were a water droplet in the hurricane.

Warzeski: If you were a water droplet in the hurricane, OK

Wanless: How many times would you go around the storm as it passed across South Florida? This has to do with distribution of Malaleuca pollen.

Warzeski: It has to do with distribution of what?

Wanless: Malaleuca or Australian pine, or any seed. The diameter of the storm was about twelve miles wasn’t it? Let’s say fifteen miles. What’s the circumference of the inner wall? About fifty. Let’s say it has hundred and fifty mile an hour winds. That means that every hour your particle would go around three times. Three times, OK, this is cool. Florida is roughly ninety miles across, and it went across in three hours. So let’s say the front edge of this inner eye wall picked up something ... a bunch of it. And it mixed it up in the storm. Every hour it went around three times, so that pollen could have been spun around nine times as it went across the state. That’s just neat. It’s an interesting thing, I don’t know what you do with it. Well . .. what I was doing, I was looking at where Australian pines were. I don’t know if they were in seed, but certainly their little cone things could have stayed well airborne. And I was trying to figure where they would go. And I was always saying, “Well, it would go this way.” But then I started to realize that it just got homogenized across Florida, just absolutely homogenized. You can’t look at where one seed source is and say “It would go that way.” It would just go completely everywhere. Is it true, then, that we have our exotic species that were in seed just completely spread across Florida? This is an interesting concern. I’m trying to understand that, but I don’t. There are three exotics. There’s the Florida Holly, which is a little brushy thing with red berries. You can see it in all the back areas along the canals. And there’s one with a shaggy bark that grows out on the edge of the Everglades, and is called Malaleuca. It’s another Australian introduction. And it’s a shaggy barked thing; a lot of people are allergic to it. But it’s one that outcompetes the upper marsh environment, and basically sucks it dry. Just like the Australian pine will compete with the black mangrove. It’s one of the three nasty trees. But there’s concern about the seeding of these, because when the forests are down, they will come back faster than any of the mangroves or buttonwoods, or anything else.

Warzeski: And it’s not really practical to send armies of people down there to chop down the Australian pine seedlings or the Malaleuca.

Wanless: Well, the Australian pine’s easier to get rid of. Malaleuca, you burn it; it comes back better. You cut it, it branches into thirteen million. It doesn’t have a shallow root system like the Australian pine, so you can’t just pull it up. Here, they’re just ripping out the Australian pine and it’s gone. All they have to do now is to keep Boy Scouts and garden clubs going through to keep pulling out the seedlings for the next twenty years. Which they won’t do. After ten years, you watch, they’ll be back. But it’s a good step in the right direction. The educated public goes “What are the exotics going to do because of the storm?” That’s part of the big problem. I have other concerns, like what’s sealevel rise going to do to the wetland environments? Is there going to be a way they can transfer to ponds and stuff? I don’t know. But I think that’s (the exotics) the interesting one for the public, because we’ve introduced these things, and they’re so much more widespread than they were when we had our last big hurricane.

Warzeski: O.K. thank you very much.