Hurricane haunts Homestead 10 years later

A concrete tie beam demolished an unoccupied car during Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

HOMESTEAD, Florida (CNN) -- A decade after Hurricane Andrew struck southern Florida, Joanna Munoz can't forget it. She relives it, every single day.

Munoz's home is almost exactly as Hurricane Andrew -- the costliest hurricane in U.S. history -- left it on August 24, 1992.

"Just the roof would cost me lots of money," she said. "There's a crack that goes from here to there. And the water comes in there."

Fly-by-night contractors gladly took her money but didn't do the work. Now she has no insurance and no money to fix the house.

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"Let me tell you, I am in a bad situation. It's very depressing for me to live in a house when it's like this," she said.

Munoz's story is not unique, said Florida International University professor Betty Hearn Morrow, who has spent the past 10 years studying the Andrew legacy.

"Sometimes people talk about disasters being equal-opportunity events," she said. "We know that's far from the case."

The southern end of Dade County bore the brunt of Andrew's fury. In its wake, 126,000 homes and 10,000 businesses were destroyed and 180,000 people left homeless.

The storm took a psychological toll, too. Research shows men may have suffered most early on.

"We certainly hear people say men, at the onset, at the very beginning, often were very profoundly affected, often in tears because of not being able to play the protector role," Morrow said.

In the first two months after the storm, divorce rates were up 30 percent.

A file photo shows the eye of Hurricane Andrew resting on the southern tip of Florida's mainland.

Researchers found that how well you made out depended not only on how good your insurance was but where where you lived.

In the Naranja community, the poverty rate soared from 18 percent to 50 percent after Andrew. Research shows that areas with the strongest leadership did the best.

For the hard-hit city of Homestead, it's been a tough 10 years. After Andrew, the Homestead Air Force Base was closed, a baseball team backed out on making the city its spring training home, and the majority of the middle class left.

Recovery has been a long time coming, says Anthony Buscemi, who stuck it out and rebuilt his restaurant.

"It's starting to get better," he said. "More people are starting to move here, starting to buy homes. We have a Wal-Mart here and a Home Depot here. Still don't have a movie theater."