Hurricane Andrew, which struck the Miami Metropolitan Area (Dade County) in August 1992, is regarded as the most costly natural disaster the nation has ever experienced. Damage has been estimated at 32 billion dollars, most of it to the county's southern half. The scale of the long-term loss of shelter to its inhabitants has sometimes been compared to that which followed the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, and certainly is the greatest loss to a United States city since that disaster.
