Daily Press from Newport News, Virginia • Page 8

A3 Thursday, Aug. 27, 1992 ANDREW AFTERMATH PoilflPrtss 8WF urricane homeless face uncertain future Boston Globe unknown. "Right now, I have no job and my house is unliveable," said Herrera. The roof was blown off his Homestead dwelling, which was flooded by torrential rains. Herrera brought his wife, children and whatever they could salvage to the' Wellesley Inn, near Miami International Airport.

"I have never been in this kind of spot before, so, believe me, all I've been thinking about the last couple of days is how my family is going to get through this." had gone to check on her home brought back the news that it had been flattened by Andrew's winds. "I was praying that it was going to be OK, but I didn't have much hope," Sperry said. "And I knew I didn't have a job after I saw television pictures of the mall where the clinic was and it was gone." A few miles away, Gil Herrera pondered his family's future. Herrera worked as an electrical engineer at Homestead Air Force Base, which was devastated by Andrew to the point that its future is called the most destructive storm to hit the United States in decades. The hurricane destroyed an estimated 63,000 homes and left as many as 250,000 people homeless, according to officials at the Dade County Office of Emergency Management.

The storm caused an estimated $15 billion to $20 billion in damages to private property. Perhaps more searing than the loss of property are the human scars the storm has left behind. Wednesday was a difficult day for Sperry because a friend who were dashed. Her trailer home was obliterated, and the mall where the dental clinic was located is now a mountain of debris. "My daddy is going to drive down from Atlanta Friday to take us back up there," Sperry said as her son played nearby inside South Miami Senior High School a shelter where she and hundreds of others left homeless are living.

Like others, Sperry faces an uncertain, and perhaps bleak, future as South Florida grapples with the aftermath of what is being Picking up where Andrew left off I- VcV t4 i -'-its r- sj 1 3 An aerial view of LaPlace, shows a subdivision that took a direct hit from a tornado spawned by Hurricane Andrew. Only one death was reported in Louisiana. Andrew took 19 other lives in Florida and the Bahamas. ap These Items have been requested by the U.S. Jaycees: Nonperishable and canned foods; diapers; paper products; candles; building supplies such as nails, lumber and hand tools; bottled water; generators.

Bulk goods, food staples or paper products. Mail donations to Jaycees, 2005 Northwest 70th Miami, Fla. 33122. Do not send clothes. The American Red Cross requests: Money.

People can send checks or money orders, or contribute by charge card. Bulk goods. Companies with bulk supplies to donate should contact the local chapter. The chapter is referring individual cash donors and small groups to other organizations. If a person or group claims to be collecting for the Red Cross, call the local chapter for verification.

Send money to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund, P.O. Box 37243, Washington, D.C. 20013 or to the Hampton Roads Red Cross, 4915 W. Mercury Hampton 23605. Or charge by calling (800) 842-2200.

Call the local chapter at 838-7320. The Salvation Army requests: Money. Send check or money order, with Andrew Relief written in the memo space, to Salvation Army, P.O. Box 7529, Hampton 23666. Clothing, nonperishable foods and other donations can be sent to Salvation Army, P.O.

Box 270848, Tampa, Fla. 33688, or Salvation Army Andrew Relief, P.O. Box 4857, Jackson, Miss. 39296. Call the local Salvation Army at 838-1443.

The United Jewish Community of the Virginia Peninsula Inc. requests: Money, until it gets instructions for food and clothing donations from its national organization, said Linda Molin, administrative assistant. Make out checks to United Jewish Community, 2700 Spring Road, Newport News 23606. Call the community center at 930-1422. Orcutt Baptist Church In Newport News requests: Nonperishable goods.

Picnic supplies, such as paper plates and plastic forks. Batteries, work gloves, genera-' tors, heaters and hand saws. The church's pastor, the Rev. Jim Doyle, wants to borrow a recreational vehicle for a work trip to Homestead, Fla. Call 249-1280 and 249-1 11 5.

Jean Weaver, Jackie Faaborg and Nlcki French, wives of Lan-gley Air Force Base personnel, are gathering donations. Deliver canned goods, diapers and other aid to the wives' homes at 1889D Braxton Court, 1583B 5th St. or 1591 A 5th St in Langley's Bethel Manor housing area. Weaver can be reached at 865-7846. Cub Scout Pack No.

154 at Langley Air Force Base, which gathered 1 ,700 pounds of canned goods for the Peninsula Foodbank earlier this year, has started a food and clothing drive for the hurricane victims, said Rebecca Whitehurst, a den leader. The Scouts will distribute paper bags to homes in the Bethel Manor housing area Sunday morning. The Scouts will pick up the bags, which can be left outside donors' front doors before 10 a.m. The donations will be distributed to hurricane victims through Seventh-day Adventist churches. Call Whitehurst at 766-2734.

The Newport News Crime Watch Coalition and Amid the Ages requests: Bottled water, nonperishable food. Clothing, towels and linens. Furniture. People can begin dropping off donations Monday at the old bingo hall in the Hilton Shopping Center in Newport News. The organizers plan to take shipments to Florida and Louisiana, said Carole Osserman of Amid the Ages.

Call the business at 591-2606. The United Methodist Church will collect relief funds. Checks can be made payable to the United Methodist Committee on Relief or to any United Methodist church, said Bob Casey, district superintendent for the denomination's Peninsula district. Many of the area's Southern Baptist churches will be collecting Sunday for relief efforts. Compiled by JarwtM Rodriguo MIAMI Yvonne Sperry and her 3-year-old son came to Miami just two weeks ago from Atlanta to start over.

So with all her savings, Sperry bought a trailer home in South Miami and with the help of a friend landed a job as a word processor in a dental clinic in Homestead. In the hours Monday when Hurricane Andrew vented its fury on south Florida before moving toward Louisiana, Sperry's hopes Andrew pounds at Cajim country Bayou spared rage unleashed in Florida Knight-Ridder Newspapers BAYOU LAFOURCHE, La. The green, riverine heart of Louisiana's Cajun country, southwest of New Orleans, acted as a sodden punching bag for Hurricane Andrew early Wednesday morning, absorbing and blunting the full fury of the storm's 140 mph winds. Bayou waters rose and sometimes overbrimmed, flooding low-lying areas. Trees were splintered or toppled against houses, so that a perfume of crushed, fresh leaves lay over southern Louisiana.

Roofs flew away and galvanized sheets of tin spun through the air like eight-foot buzz-saws. Power-lines sagged in crazy cat's-cradles from snapped and skewed poles. But all day long people said over and over again how lucky they felt, how glad they were to be spared the devastation that Andrew wreaked on South Florida. The hurricane spent its force on wide cane fields, thick forests and muddy creeks, far from downtown New Orleans. "It could have been a lot worse," said Louisiana Gov.

Edwin Edwards. "Given what could have happened, we ought to be grateful." One death was reported in the state as a result of the storm, which knocked out electricity in 200,000 homes. Some remote houses in the bayous will be without power for a month, a spokesman for the Louisiana Power and Light said. Today the remnants of the storm are expected to lumber up to the Northeast, bringing drenching rains and possible floods to northern Mississippi, Tennessee and the Appalachians. From New Orleans southward and westward in a wide arc to Morgan City, Andrew left a deep watermark.

Morgan City and Berwick were hardest hit, and both towns wore a crumpled, wadded look, as if a gigantic wastebasket full of tin, plastic, glass and branches had been dumped over them. Sheets of galvanized tin and aluminum siding were tented over sagging power lines in Morgan City. Stoplights dangled like limp puppets a few feet off the ground. In Berwick, across the Long-Allen bridge, the damage was even worse. Filling stations had lost their roofs and bays, stores their windows, people their homes.

Iron and splintered wood prickled from broken buildings in fantastic shapes: spikes, ruffles, fanfolds of tin. "It was terrible, terrible," said Joanne Thomas of Morgan City. "My house is a total loss, roof gone, kitchen gone, everything soaking wet." She and other Morgan City residents spent the evening in the Maurice D. Shannon Elementary School. "It sounded like bolts of lightning," said Clarence Francois Jr.

"We thought the roof of the school was coming off at 3 a.m. A tree fell over and killed my grandfather's 400-pound hog." The powerful storm left images of weirdness. At a gas refinery in Boutte: Winds blowing so fiercely that the flare from the gas refinery was blowing sideways, like a flag made of fire. Near Des Allemands: A cattle egret was flying as hard as it could but backward, unable to make headway against the wind. Telephone poles leaned drunkenly, power lines were down.

In Raceland: The sugarcane fields were flattened, like a gigantic comb ran through the earth all the cane was facing one way. Winds screamed over the high Huey P. Long bridge across the Mississippi, causing cars to shake as they approached the apex of the span. A drowned swimming pool shone turquoise under a wide sheet of floodwater around the Holiday Motel in Houma, near a sign that said "Jesus Is Lord Over Houma." houses and 12 mobile homes, and damaged 45 other dwellings. This was one of dozens of tornadoes spun off by Hurricane Andrew as it cut into Louisiana late Tuesday and early Wednesday.

It was the slashing tornado in LaPlace, not the blunt force of the heralded hurricane, that created the only death and many of the storm-related injuries in Louisiana. "You prepare for a hurricane," said Margaret Webb, 39, who picked through the rubble of her parent's house. "But I don't think you ever prepare for something like this." Amid the debris, she found her wedding dress. The tornado popped houses like balloons, scattering possessions into a communal hodgepodge. One resident, Lucille Perrilloux, said her husband was injured when he was struck by a flying refrigerator.

"I don't know if it was my refrigerator or someone else's." This dead-end street of modest homes built on concrete slabs was the fourth stop on the tornado's tear through the parish, which is bordered by the Mississippi River and lined by sprawling petrochemical refineries and a few antebellum plantation houses. Aubert said the tornado came from the east. "We heard it coming, and we knew what it was," he said. He, his wife and two sons huddled in the corner. It was a strange scene when Aubert pulled himself from the rubble, groping for flashlights.

He heard neighbors screaming, the rain pounding. Help Continued from A1 munity of Homestead was the only; home the fourth-grader had ever; really known. She moved there! when she was in diapers. Went to school there. Attended church; there.

Was a Brownie Learned to swim there. Seeing Homestead's devastation "made me real sad," said Cara. In the days after Andrew hit' Homestead with 140 to 160 mph, winds, Cara watched her father, the Rev. Jim Doyle, frantically attempt to contact friends from Home-j stead's First Baptist Church. Doyle, pastor of Orcutt Baptist Church in Newport News, was First Baptist's pastor for seven years.

"Most of the time it was a busy signal," said Cara of her father's efforts. "Sometimes the operator came on and sometimes nobody picked up the phone." Cara's efforts contacting her Newport News neighbors proved more successful. After about four hours, she and her 12-year-old sister, Charisa, collected 47 cans of food we got beans, all sorts of $3 and some change. They also picked up several pairs of children's shorts and shirts, and even a pink and green bathrobe. Cara plans on sending what she's collected to Florida with her father, who is organizing a work trip to Homestead.

Until Peggy Doyle thinks her daughter; will continue her campaign. "I feel happy about it," Cara said of her work. "They lost their houses. All I'm doing is going out and sweating a lot." "The shelters are too far away, and people don't want to leave whatever belongings they've got left," Florida City Mayor Otis Wallace said. "These people are camping out without the tents." Chiles said officials were having trouble getting food that wasn't spoiled to people in need.

"Right now, a truckload of food gets there, 200 people show up, 50 people get food and 150 people are angry," Chiles said. "We've got to find a way to solve About 600,000 homes and businesses remained without electricity late Wednesday, and officials warned that it could be weeks before everyone gets water and power back. Tornado slashes through La. towns Knight-Ridder Newspapers LaPLACE, La. Roy Aubert had a growing sense of security Tuesday night despite the rain pelting the windows of his three-bedroom house 20 miles west of New Orleans.

The weather report indicated that Hurricane Andrew was bypassing LaPlace by a wide margin to the southwest. The winds outside Aubert's house were gust-ing to only 60 miles an hour. Heck, the electricity was still on. The cable television was working. "We were feeling pretty good," said Aubert, 51.

Then the tornado hit. In about 15 thunderous seconds, Aubert's house was destroyed the roof sucked off the walls as Aubert's family huddled on the floor below. Five surrounding homes were wrecked. The one across the street was hurled past Aubert's house into a soybean field. Nobody on his street was injured.

Not everyone in St. John the Baptist Parish was so lucky. A 63-year-old man was killed and 33 people were injured when the powerful tornado hopscotched on a seven-mile course through LaPlace and the neighboring town of Reserve, damaging houses, hospitals and business wherever it touched down. A woman in LaPlace died of a heart attack in a shelter. The tornado's path was narrow, but destructive.

It destroyed 48 looked as though they'd been peeled away from homes by invisible hands. Uprooted trees and downed power lines littered the streets. "The marshes and the swamps are what took the brunt in Louisiana, and fortunately for human beings, not too many people live in the marshes," said Lee Gren-ci, a meteorologist with the Pennsylvania State University Weather Communcations Group. In some ways, conditions here blunted Hurricane Andrew's blow. There was no suburban sprawl, like the areas south of Miami that took the brunt of the first half of Andrew's 54-hour assault on the mainland.

Unlike Hugo, which battered South Carolina in 1989, Andrew lost force rapidly after hitting land. Still, for those caught in its grip, Andrew was a horror of a storm. "All of a sudden, we had no roof," said Quind Jones, of this historic sugar-cane country town where the wind gauge hit 140 miles per hour before it broke Wednesday morning. "We lay on the floor, got wet, and waited for it to end. I'm still shaking." At Franklin High School, set up as an emergency shelter, the winds broke skylights, showering glass on people below.

Water then soaked most of the building, leaving only a gymnasium dry as people huddled in the dark listening to the storm pound. "It sounded like two trains crashing," said Marsha Rouchon, one of 400 people inside. "People were singing, crying, chanting, praying. Children were screaming everytime there was a sudden noise. It was awful." before the storm, police worried about shootings as frustration levels climbed with the impassable roads and impossible living conditions.

Metro-Dade police reported only 35 arrests, a light day. Ten of the arrests were for thefts. The death toll in South Florida remained at 15, although the hunt for more bodies continued. The victims ranged from an elderly blind man swept off a terrace to a 12-year-old girl who was crushed when a tornado pulled the roof off her house. Gov.

Lawton Chiles visited hard-hit Homestead and Florida City by helicopter again Wednesday. Florida City, where the 8,000 residents didn't have much to start with, was virtually leveled. Dozens were injured and at least 322,000 lost electric power. Seven people from a sinking tugboat were plucked from a cauldron of Mississippi River waters; another seven were rescued from a 70-foot Vietnamese fishing boat that ran aground in the Gulf of Mexico. A dozen barges broke loose from an Exxon refinery and were corraled by the Coast Guard, but a search continued for a mobile offshore drilling rig, the Zapata Saratoga, that disappeared 110 miles south of New Orleans.

The rig had been evacuated and its well plugged to prevent pollution. The Coast Guard also was investigating an oil slick at the mouth of the Mississippi River and five other minor spills and leaks. The hurricane came ashore in St. Mary Parish early Wednesday, heading north up the Atchafalaya Basin and pounding cities and towns on all sides: Morgan City, where the mayor requested National Guard troops and urged residents to stay away for several days; Berwick, where water rose knee-deep; Franklin, where a wind gauge registered 140 mph, then blew away; Jeanerette, where state police reported looting; Lafayette, where a suburban building was pushed onto railroad tracks; Baton Rouge, where a huge rooftop air conditioner was thrown 30 feet off the state insurance building. At a neighborhood in New Iberia, deep in the swampy Cajun country, every yard looked like a lake.

Tile roofs and brick walls ened stores, where employees stood with guns and allowed only a handful of people inside at one time. Pat Klefeker, owner of the Sunshine Builders, drove his Lincoln Towne Car onto the median of U.S. 1 and arranged rolls of plastic and tarpaulins on his roof. The plastic went for $20; the tarps for $150. "I've got three kids; the construction business has been bad," said Klefeker.

"I don't mind making some money now." And if anyone has a problem with that, or tries to steal his goods, the 33-year-old construction company owner pulled his Ruger, a mini-14 semiautomatic rifle, from his back seat. In Miami, a wild-west town even Andrew Continued from A1 sive natural disaster in this country's history. One death was reported in Louisiana, a 63-year-old tornado victim from LaPlace found in rubble Wednesday. Another death was reported in the Bahamas, where three other people died when the storm hit Sunday. That raised the overall toll to 20 dead.

"The destruction from this storm goes beyond anything we have known in recent years," President Bush said Wednesday before flying to Louisiana for an inspection trip of stricken areas of that state and announcing a new hurricane relief effort. The damage in Louisiana, while severe in places, did not compare with the panorama of ruin in South Florida. Officials there said Wednesday that the number of people left homeless by the storm could reach 250,000, including those who have moved in with family or friends. There were no comparable figures available for Louisiana. But as widespread as the damage appeared there, authorities noted that it could have been worse.

The storm had spun itself out a bit and weakened before crossing the coastline. And it spared the state's largest city, New Orleans. All around the low-lying south-central part of the state, houses were ravaged, trailer homes were turned upside down, majestic oak trees in front of antebellum mansions were toppled and several gas leaks were reported. Florida Continued from A1 actions were in cash. In greatest demand were the essentials: chain saws, gasoline, ice, generators, bags of onions, chickens, water, sugar and coffee.

While some stores and volunteer organizations gave away free water and ice, or sold items at pre-hurri-cane prices, many made money off Andrew. Makeshift stands selling candles, batteries and chain saws appeared in the parking lots of demolished stores and on the median strips of highways. Lines formed outside of dark.