By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 30, 1992; Page A1

MIAMI, AUG. 29—Amid the ruins of South Florida, people searched today for new ways to say "total devastation."

Cameras continue to pan the wreckage from helicopters, but the little picture on a television screen cannot show the miles of sprawling suburbs, where as far as the eye can see, every house is roofless, windowless, wasted.

Modern America has never seen a natural disaster like Hurricane Andrew. The storm did not just destroy homes. It leveled entire towns. Florida City, a working-class community of almost 6,000, is gone.

Neighborhoods of South Dade County look far worse than did Kuwait City after the Persian Gulf War. The damage here is not cosmetic. It is absolute. The zone of worst destruction stretches 15 miles inland, from Biscayne Bay to the Everglades, and 22 miles from north to south, encompassing about 165 square miles.

To understand Andrew's scope, imagine an area of almost total devastation equivalent to about three Districts of Columbia or to eight isles of Manhattan. While relief officials and politicians knew almost immediately the size of the damaged area, days passed before they fully comprehended the severity of the damage and number of homeless.

The hurricane continues to imbue South Florida with an end-of-the-world aura. Television anchors appear on the screen unshaven and disheveled. Suburban housewives bathe in man-made lakes. Turnpike toll booths are abandoned. Confused old men walk into field hospitals barefoot.

Before the storm, Miami was a high-octane metropolis of migrants on the move, a city fueled by Cuban coffee, a sprawling blend of nationalities whose citizens sped down the Dolphin Expressway, chatting on ubiquitous cellular phones about dinner plans.

After the storm, baboons from the University of Miami primate center ran wildly through the streets. The lush subtropical garden that was Miami is a botanical wasteland. In a place where autumn never comes, it is suddenly fall, the trees leafless and bare, the sun too bright.

The storm focused the fury of its 140 mph sustained winds on the highly populated urban sprawl of South Florida, where building codes were not strict enough. Few structures were made well enough to withstand such intense battering.

Like a giant can opener, Hurricane Andrew popped roofs and windows from tens of thousands of houses. Kate Hale, director of Dade County emergency services, estimated today that 85,000 homes were badly damaged.

After Andrew slashed across the Florida peninsula Monday on its way to landfall in Louisiana early Wednesday, the storm created as many as 250,000 homeless people here overnight, an instant city of homeless with a population roughly equal to that of Las Vegas.

Hundreds of thousands of people found themselves in a Stone Age existence, left to pursue hunting and gathering, forced to forage for food and water. Because many people in the devastated areas had no radios or batteries, the location of food distribution sites has been a mystery. Even when they knew where to get free food, many lacked cars or the gasoline to get there. Each time word spread about establishment of a new relief outlet, people suddenly would swarm forward on foot, and National Guard troops often had to be summoned to keep order.

The hurricane robbed steamy South Florida of the two amenities deemed essential to life here: air conditioning and ice cubes.

"We can't stand this heat any longer," said Rita Larraz, whose house in unincorporated South Dade County was spared but who, like 750,000 customers here, still had no electricity, and therefore no air conditioning in the 90-plus degree heat and humidity today. "The heat is killing us. My husband had open-heart surgery. I had a heart attack in November. We can't take this."

Because cemeteries are closed, funerals have been postponed and mortuaries are becoming overcrowded. Authorities said that 14 deaths were directly related to the hurricane and that more than 10 others were indirectly related. Andrew left four people dead in the Bahamas and went from here to claim at least three in Louisiana.

Dead animals and pets remain buried in rubble. People are complaining of an invasion of flies, rats and snakes. Health officials are expressing concern about outbreaks of typhoid, hepatitis and even cholera as people bathe in and drink tainted water.

Lines have twisted for hundreds of yards around Red Cross relief centers. Women walked the streets of Homestead, near where Andrew came ashore, balancing boxes of food and water on their heads, a Third World snapshot.

Ten miles south of the bankrupt bank towers of downtown Miami and the resort communities of Miami Beach and Key Biscayne, which were largely spared, the less glamorous middle-class towns of Goulds, Homestead, Perrine were flattened.

It was as if Hurricane Andrew were two different storms. In North Dade County, which includes downtown Miami, the loss was limited largely to downed trees, crushed carports and shattered glass. Although the area was a botanical horror, most of its structures stood, and by today, electricity, water and phones were restored to many areas.

In South Dade, whole subdivisions were devastated.

Hurricane Andrew was an equal-opportunity storm. It uprooted the lives of the poorest Guatemalan migrant farm worker living in a ramshackle trailer in Florida City. And it destroyed mansions in Cutler Ridge, where many of Miami's oldest and richest families live.

A Bloomingdale's store lost an entire wall. The posh Dadeland Mall was wasted. But Andrew also hit Wilbur Mabus, who lived a life of utter simplicity aboard a powerless powerboat moored at Dinner Key anchorage. Mabus lost his floating home and camped instead on a mangrove island.

The wealthy and the lucky made their own way. Many moved north to stay in motels or with friends. The poor and many of the middle-class homeowners of South Dade stayed with their homes, fearful of looters and awaiting insurance adjusters.

Throughout the area, residents spray-painted what remained standing of the fronts of their houses with the names of their insurers, the house address and the insurance policy number because street signs and mailboxes were nonexistent. Even directing visitors by citing landmarks, such as turn left at the 7-Eleven, became useless because the 7-Eleven often had ceased to exist.

One emergency official estimated that as many as 90 percent of structures in Homestead could be condemned as uninhabitable. Housing and hangars at Homestead Air Force Base, which harbored 4,000 people, are not going to be rebuilt. They will be bulldozed, and officials said it is unknown whether the base will ever reopen.

Amid acts of great courage and personal kindness, there has been widespread looting and price gouging, as thieves worked to take advantage of a general feeling of lawlessness, particularly before federal troops began arriving Friday.

At night, in darkened streets cordoned by National Guard troops enforcing a curfew, machine-gun fire has been heard. Spray-painted on the side of a house in Perrine was: "I'm armed and dangerous! Looters shot on sight!"

"Everyone is armed, everyone is walking around with guns," said Navy physician Sharon Wood, who worked at a mobile hospital in Homestead, where workers refused to dispense calming drugs such as Valium for fear that word would get out and the hospital might be robbed.

In Kendall, senior citizens sleep at night with revolvers by their sides. A sheriff's deputy with the group International Cops for Christ hands out orange Bibles but carries his sidearm.

Miami and its surrounding municipalities, which have a long history of racial and ethnic tension, were considered a tinderbox.

But private citizens poured into South Dade Friday and today, car trunks overflowing with canned soup and baby food.

So great was the support that relief officials took to the airwaves to beg do-gooders not to drive themselves and their offerings into South Dade because roads were becoming choked with cars, many of them filled with gawkers. What is needed most, Red Cross officials said, is not food and clothes but money.

"It's never, never going to be the same," said Paul Lopez, as he sat in his ruined house in suburban Kendall, a revolver resting on a soggy couch as he awaited his insurance adjuster. "But you got to keep going, you know? What else is there to do?"

Staff writer Mary Jordan and special correspondent Anne Day contributed to this report.