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TAMPA - Even now, when he talks about what happened 11 years ago, Gov. Jeb Bush feels the same panic. In 1992, when Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida, Bush and his family spent the night huddled in the hall of a friend's house.
"When I talk about this with friends, the fear starts rising, my heart starts pounding," Bush said Wednesday. "It's one of the scariest things I've ever lived through."
Bush reminisced about his experiences during the nation's costliest natural disaster as he opened the annual Governor's Hurricane Conference in Tampa. He warned the 2,000 attendees against what he called "the disaster amnesia effect."
Most of Florida's 16-million residents have never lived through a major hurricane, Bush noted, and may not take hurricane season as seriously as they should.
Even those who fled Hurricane Floyd in 1999 - an estimated 2-million people clogged the state's highways, far more than were ordered to evacuate - may have forgotten to prepare adequately for another storm, hurricane experts say.
Bush admitted he was in that category before Hurricane Andrew hit. Although he and his family were living in the path of the storm, he had done little to get ready for it.
"I did not do what I'm asking people to do now," Bush said. "Purchase batteries, stock up on canned goods, plan your evacuation route."
A few hours before Andrew slammed ashore, Bush took his wife, their three children, his mother-in-law and two Secret Service agents over to the home of a friend just north of Kendall.
"It was an eerie feeling," Bush said. As they hunkered down away from the house's windows and Andrew's winds howled outside, the air pressure suddenly changed and the house shook.
"We had a feeling as if the house was going to implode," he recalled.
The friend, real estate broker Carlos Salman, later told the Miami Herald that Bush kept asking him how long the storm would last. "It was no joke. It was no fun," Salman said.
Bush said he went home to find the hurricane had damaged his roof. But that was nothing compared with the devastation in much of southern Dade County, particularly in Homestead and Florida City.
"We were lucky the roof wasn't taken off," the governor said.
Andrew killed 15 people during the storm. Another 25 died later from indirect causes. The hurricane demolished more than 25,000 homes and damaged another 100,000. Of the 1,176 mobile homes in Homestead, all but nine were destroyed. Andrew caused an estimated $30-billion in damage and left 250,000 people homeless.
Bush said that because he didn't stock up on emergency supplies before Andrew stormed ashore, in the days afterward "me and a whole lot of other people in Dade County were trying to play catchup."
But the governor and his family did one thing right: move to higher ground. As a result of the Floyd evacuation mess, state officials now know "there is no possible way we can get every Floridian out of a major metropolitan area and into another."
Hurricane preparedness experts say the smart thing to do is to flee only as far as a friend's house, preferably one with some elevation and away from the coast.
"Make friends in high places," said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center. "It makes absolutely no sense to me why anyone in Miami would want to drive to Orlando or Atlanta. Stay within your own county if you can."
Bush said people "shouldn't be scared. They should be smart" about preparing for a hurricane. It's only a matter of time before another big storm hits.
But Bush declined to make a prediction about this hurricane season.
"I'm putting all that in God's hands," the governor said. "Natural events are above my pay grade."
- Times staff researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.