by Carl Hiaasen
A press conference put out the word. The state attorney is hiring three new prosecutors, an investigator and two secretaries.The state's Department of Business and Professional Regulation is adding a dozen investigators, plus five persons to help take complaints from the public.
Everybody knows the task force that calls itself "We Will Rebuild." This one could be called "We Will Indict."
Lots of folks in South Dade aren't too impressed. They think something should have been done even sooner about crooked builders—before the evidence was trucked off to the dump.
True, Hurricane Andrew's wreckage revealed widespread illegal construction practices and egregious non-enforcement of the building codes. True, these were crimes inflicted on thousands of homeowners, crimes that have caused horrible suffering and financial ruin.
And, true, not one contractor responsible for the damage has lost his license. Not one inspector who approved the shoddy work has been punished.
But that's only because authorities decided to set an ingenious trap, one that required patience.
Sure, it would have been easy to rush in and prosecute a few lousy builders after their Tinker-Toy subdivisions blew apart in the hurricane. It would have been simple to collect the defective trusses and holey shingles, and then show a jury the right way to put on a roof.
It would have been easy, all right. Too easy. And it would have spoiled the secret plan.
Think about it. Indicting crooked builders too soon after Hurricane Andrew might have scared off many of the thieves and con men masquerading as legitimate contractors who stampeded Florida to cash in on the storm.
So authorities shrewdly decided to lie low and pretend they weren't interested in what was happening in South Dade. They knew it would soon be a bonanza of sleaze. They knew that there weren't enough honest builders to go around, that people desperate to have their homes rebuilt would eventually turn to unscrupulous strangers.
And they were right. Each day since Andrew has brought new reports of outrageous rip-offs and incompetent workmanship. Many homeowners have lost all their insurance money to fly-by-night vagabonds. Since August, the DPR's Miami office has logged a 1,800 percent increase in complaints against contractors.
For state investigators, the waiting has paid off. They now have a much larger number of cases to choose from, and therefore a much better chance of actually winning one or two.
Unfortunately, it won't help the thousands of people fleeced by shady operators during the last 11 months. Thousands more won't realize that they also have been conned until another hurricane hits and their roofs fly off like a bad hat.
But don't worry. When that happens, the state of Florida will be there again, ready to swoop in with crack investigators and prosecutors. You might not see them for, oh, the first 10 or 11 months after the disaster, but that doesn't mean they don't care.
No, they're just lying low, waiting for the trap to spring.
Government can't be trusted to enforce codes
December 30, 1993
Finally, thanks to Hurricane Andrew, an insurance company gets wise.
United States Fidelity and Guaranty (USF&G) has announced that it will begin inspecting every home it insures for potential storm losses. In other words, company-paid experts will do the job once entrusted to local building officials.
It makes good sense, given the scandal of Andrew. The wonder is that more insurance companies aren't doing the same thing.
The hurricane tragically confirmed that government cannot be relied upon to enforce building codes, especially in areas of uncontrolled growth. Andrew turned South Dade into a panorama of devastation, much of it caused by lousy construction and a lack of competent code enforcement.
The insurance industry took its worst beating ever, paying out $16.5 billion in claims. We know what happened next: sharp rate increases, and attempted mass cancellations of Florida policies. Most insurers have restricted or even stopped insuring new homes in coastal regions.
That's one way to cut losses, the cold-blooded way. It unfairly punishes people with well-built houses and also punishes honest home builders. The USF&G experiment is more humane and ultimately smarter for the industry: Its own inspectors will rate the houses.
Consider how fussy these firms are about auto insurance. The annual premiums on a new Ferrari are thousands more than those on a 5-year-old Tercel. Why? The sports car is a bigger investment, and statistically a bigger risk.
It seems logical, then, that insurers would view a high-risk house with even greater concern. A house, say, built with no hurricane straps. Or too few nails in the shingles. Or defective gables.
But until Hurricane Andrew, insurance companies seldom asked questions about the quality of construction in most subdivisions. As long as a house passed local inspection, getting a policy was virtually automatic. Everybody made money, everybody was happy.
Andrew spoiled the party. The insurance industry was shell-shocked by the extent of unnecessary destruction, and by its own studies predicting losses would be three times higher if a storm hit Miami directly.
It was evident that Dade County had failed, spectacularly, to make sure its housing was safe from hurricane winds. In several areas, code enforcement had been a costly charade.
One way to avoid future failures is for insurance companies to do the inspections themselves. The advantages are obvious. Private inspectors wouldn't have the ludicrous quotas imposed on county inspectors, nor would they be subject to cronyism and political pressures. Many homeowners would welcome a visit from an independent expert.
Not long after the hurricane, a State Farm executive told me that hiring its own inspectors was a good idea, but too expensive. It's hard to imagine anything more expensive than Andrew.
Say State Farm spent $20 million a year on building inspections.That's only 1/170th of the $3.4 billion that the company shelled out in hurricane claims. In retrospect, inspectors would have been a smart investment.
While USF&G insures less than 1 percent of Florida's homeowners, its new inspection policy covers all customers around the country. If other insurers tried the same program, the quality of coastal construction might improve dramatically. Who's going to a build a house that can't be insured?
The key is incentive. Insurance companies have the most to lose when the next hurricane hits—and the strongest motivation to make sure history doesn't repeat itself. If that means climbing a few roofs and counting a few nails, it's a small price to pay.
How soon we forget what these storms do
June 9, 1994
The governor's special hurricane committee has warned that Florida is flirting with "great loss of life and property in coming years" unless strict construction laws are passed.
The committee's chairman made "an urgent plea that this report not be put on a shelf and forgotten."
The governor was LeRoy Collins. The year was 1960. The hurricane was Donna. Everyone wanted to make sure such needless destruction wouldn't happen again.
But time passed, and people did forget. Just like today.
A hearing examiner says the only Metro building inspector fired in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew should get his job back—a poetic beginning to the new hurricane season.
It was a foregone conclusion that nobody of consequence would be punished for the crimes exposed by Andrew. The builders who slapped together the lousy houses, the developers who sold them and the inspectors who rubber-stamped them had little to worry about from Dade prosecutors, or anyone else.
What modest progress is being made to prevent another disaster comes against powerful opposition. Even now, special interests are trying to weaken hurricane reforms before they take effect.
From a pessimistic Herb Saffir, engineer and nationally recognized expert on hurricane damage: "The only thing I can say is, I hope we don't get an Andrew-type storm coming through the populated areas of Miami."
After Andrew, public outrage and press scrutiny forced the Metro Commission to review buil
ding practices and enforcement. The Board of Rules and Appeals, a lap dog of the building trades, was supplanted by a more independent Building Code Committee.
To the surprise of no one (especially those living at Country Walk or Naranja Lakes), the panel found that much of Andrew's devastation was the result of poor housing designs and flawed construction. Yet virtually every worthwhile reform faced opposition. The industry's recurring argument was that home buyers won't pay a little extra for better shutters, stronger windows and nailed-down roofs. Total nonsense.
Eventually, new standards were approved. Shutters, garage doors and windows would be required to withstand higher winds, high-speed impacts and cyclic "loading"—the push and pull of hurricane gusts.
The Metro Commission's reaction? Delay, delay, delay.
The latest date for the new safety standards to take effect is Sept. 1, a week after Andrew's second anniversary. But some members of the code committee fear the commission will bow to pressure and stall the deadline once again.
If that happens, says engineer Jose Mitrani, "then it's a joke, a fraud being perpetrated on the people of Dade County."
Some builders have taken the initiative, producing solid, medium-priced homes designed to weather most hurricanes. Others prefer to keep cutting corners, pushing Metro commissioners to help the industry regain control of regulation. Hefty campaign donations help.
Each summer that passes without a new hurricane dims the public's memory, and emboldens commissioners to roll back reforms. Many experts fear that if a Category Four storm slams us this year, the damage will be worse than it was in August 1992.
Mitrani advises home buyers to hire their own experts to make sure the construction is sound. The alternative is to entrust your family's safety to politicians concerned mostly with pleasing big campaign contributors.
It would be inexcusable if the dire post-Andrew warnings are "put on a shelf and forgotten." Apparently the only event that will stop that from happening is another terrible storm.
Just the fittest will survive next hurricane
August 25, 1994
Charles Darwin believed that species evolve by survival of the fittest. His theory, slightly updated, will be put to the test when the next hurricane hits.
The smartest will do fine. The not-so-smart will be scrounging for roofers.
Everybody knows what happened two years ago this week, when Andrew ripped South Dade: Many thousands of homes went to pieces.
Lousy construction, inferior materials, poor engineering and a weakened building code all contributed to the devastation.
Aerial photographs told the story: one subdivision in ruins; across the street, another development barely damaged. Facing Andrew's fiercest gusts, some houses held strong; in the storm's weakest wind bands, other houses mysteriously disintegrated.
It wasn't fate. It was the difference between good and bad construction.
On Sept. 1, tougher building regulations take effect in South Florida. Windows and shutters on new homes must be stronger. Roofs will require more straps and heavier trusses. Plywood sheathing will be thicker.
To no one's surprise, some builders are rushing to get permits before the new rules take effect. They say there's a shortage of the new approved materials, and they can't afford delays. Others complain that the hurricane reforms will force them to raise prices on homes, and they'll lose customers.
This, from a developer in Pembroke Pines: "For something that happens once in 35 years, you are charging the public a lot of money."
Now that's the kind of responsible builder I want—someone so ignorant of Florida history that he thinks hurricanes come ashore every three and a half decades. Forget the many destructive storms of the '20s, '30s and '40s. Forget the pair that hit in 1950, and Donna 10 years later.
Go on and cut corners. Why fret about the lives and safety of your loved one, and the security of all your earthly possessions, when you can save a few hundred bucks by using 1/2-inch plywood?
This is where Darwin's theory kicks in. Government can do only so much to save people from their own stupidity. Then Mother Nature takes over.
As hurricane survivors can attest, the price of a house isn't nearly as critical as its structural integrity. For smart home buyers, the priority is finding a place that won't crash down on their heads.
After Andrew and the scandals it exposed, anyone who buys a crackerbox house or condo or trailer surely must know they're in temporary housing.
Believe it or not, Florida has many conscientious builders who make solid homes that stand up well to hurricanes. Finding one takes time, and possibly an independent engineer to help you decide.
If it costs a little more than the houses across the street, so what? The houses across the street will probably be rubble in a Category Four storm.
For those who endured Andrew in shabbily built houses, there's no excuse for making the same mistake twice. For those new to Florida, there's no excuse for not knowing what happened to thousands of unsuspecting homeowners in 1992, and why.
Which leads back to the building reforms that take effect Sept. 1.
Smart people—the fittest, in the Darwinian lexicon—would demand housing made to the stronger specifications. They wouldn't hire a builder who's racing a deadline so he can save on materials.
But not everyone is smart. In each herd are the strong and the weak, the survivors and the doomed. Darwin understood Nature's dramatic style of choosing.
One way is a hurricane.
When homes collapse, best course is court
April 16, 1995
We didn't need Nostradamus to predict this one:
After 2 1/2 years of so-called investigation, the Dade State Attorney's Office has found nobody to prosecute for the shabby construction of the Country Walk subdivision, blown to twigs by Hurricane Andrew.
Residents are disheartened but not stunned, given the state's record in ducking these cases.
Lennar Homes similarly was let off the hook for its crackerbox construction. Now it's Arvida/JMB Partners and the Walt Disney Co., which owned Country Walk when much of the subdivision was built.
Goofy, Pluto and the other construction supervisors are yukking it up today.
Who can forget Country Walk, Land of the Flying Gables—trusses without braces, braces without nails, corners without brackets. Of 184 homes, 147 were deemed uninhabitable after Andrew.
Initially, Arvida blamed Mother Nature, the standard alibi following the hurricane. Yet independent reviews of the destruction in South Dade cited shoddy work, dumb designs, substandard materials and lax code enforcement.
Still, nobody is going to jail. The State Attorney's Office says it cannot prove criminal wrongdoing at Country Walk, though the term "insufficient evidence" seems hollow to those who were knee-deep in it on Aug. 24, 1992.
The companies probably lost no sleep worrying about an indictment. What really grabbed their attention were the lawsuits.
These days it's fashionable to rail about runaway litigation. A key conservative plank is "tort reform," meant to discourage private citizens from suing big companies.
Yet that was the only remedy for customers of Lennar and Arvida who were wiped out by the hurricane. Suing was the only way to get compensation, and settlements provided that.
Insurance companies are also in court with Arvida and Disney over the Country Walk debacle. This is good if it discourages flimsy house building. The larger the cash penalty, the greater the incentive for companies to be more diligent next time.
Eventually, corner-cutting developers will sit down with a calculator and figure out that Andrew was bad for the bottom line. While it's great to sell scads of houses, it's not good business when scads of customers and their insurance companies sue your pants off.
Homeowners were left with few options. The building industry obviously didn't police itself, while government failed at every step in its obligation to protect consumers from such a preventable tragedy.
; Plied by campaign donations from developers, Dade politicians made scarcely a peep as the South Florida Building Code was watered down. Even then it wasn't well-enforced. And those who violated or corrupted it seldom got punished.
So that left the civil courts as the only forum where Arvida, Lennar and the others could be held accountable.
The State Attorney's Office admitted as much. In explaining why it took so long to complete the Country Walk probe, the lead investigator said he was "waiting to see if the civil litigation revealed any smoking guns."
Good thing they don't handle murder cases that way.
For home buyers, the lesson is simple but cynical. If you're looking for a safely built house or condominium, expect no trustworthy safeguards from the state or county. And expect no action when gross abuses come to light.
The way to avoid heartache in the next hurricane is to avoid living in cheesy cardboard subdivisions. Judging by the houses that endured Andrew's worst winds, good builders are out there. The trick is finding them.
Start with the ones who aren't tied up in court.
Novel approach: We build it, we approve it
May 11, 1997
This week's Bureaucracy-Buster Prize goes to Carlos Valdes, chief building inspector for Dade County.
For five years Valdes moonlighted as a roofer and repairman, pulling 31 construction permits from the same agency for which he worked. Twice he inspected his own jobs, and gave final approval on both of them.
At first glance, this seems to be an outrageous conflict of interest, particularly if you're a competing contractor.
And for a building department pilloried after Hurricane Andrew for lax enforcement, it might seem slightly … well, irregular for an inspector to be approving his own construction work.
But from Valdes' perspective, you could make the case that he was merely trying to streamline a cumbersome bureaucratic process.
