Effects of Hurricane Andrew in Florida
The effects of Hurricane Andrew in Florida proved to be at the time the costliest disaster in the state's history, as well as the then-costliest on record in the United States. Hurricane Andrew formed from a tropical wave on August 16, 1992 in the tropical Atlantic Ocean. It moved west-northwest and remained weak for several days due to strong wind shear. However, after curving westward on August 22, the storm rapidly intensified to reach peak winds of 175 mph (280 km/h). Following its passage through The Bahamas, Andrew made landfall near Homestead, Florida as a Category 5 hurricane on August 24. Eventually, Andrew struck southern Louisiana before it dissipated over the eastern United States on August 28.
List of off-season Atlantic hurricanes
Of the off-season storms that struck land, portions of the Caribbean were affected most. Hurricane Alice was the only of the cyclones to strike land as a hurricane, doing so to islands in the northern Lesser Antilles; it caused locally heavy rainfall and moderate damage. No hurricanes have ever made landfall in the United States during December, although at one point a storm in 1925 was believed to have done this. One century earlier, a hurricane formed in the western Caribbean and struck Florida on or before June 3, which was the earliest date for a United States hurricane landfall. However, there is an unofficial hurricane in 1863 that struck the Florida panhandle, killing 110 people. The deadliest official off-season storm was a tropical storm in May 1948, which killed 80 people in the Dominican Republic.