HOMESTEAD, FLA. — As the sun set and the winds picked up, Cheryl Juarez gathered her family into a closet to ride out the night.

Juarez, her husband, their 9-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son, and Katmandu, the family cat, huddled together as Hurricane Andrew made landfall 25 years ago today. Their battery-powered radio crackled with updates as the Category 5 storm laid waste to this southern suburb of Miami.

For hours, they heard the kids' jungle gym slam repeatedly against the two-story house. They listened as Andrew tore off the roof. Water crept into the closet — not through the gap under the closet door, but seeping in under the walls.

"I thought, 'Well, it's been a good life'," Juarez said. "We were done."

Hurricane Andrew with its 175 mph winds was one of only three Category 5 hurricanes – the highest category on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale – to hit the U.S. and the first since Hurricane Camille in 1969. The fast-moving, tightly-wound hurricane tore through South Florida in the middle of the night, leveling entire neighborhoods, tossing around boats and mobile homes, and leaving millions of people without power or hope.

Andrew's legacy would be far-reaching, as the storm exposed shoddy construction practices in Florida and a broken emergency response system in Washington. The damage from the storm would lead to sweeping changes in the state's building code, the insurance industry and the role of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But on that dark, howling night of Aug. 24, 1992, the residents of Dade County worried about coming out alive.

Joseph Stempien, 15 at the time, took cover with his older brother and sister in a bathroom. They propped a twin mattress against the bathroom door. Their mother, a security guard, was protecting the Turkey Point nuclear power plant nearby, so the three teens rode out the storm together.

"At first, it sounded like any of the bad storms we get down here, with the thunder and lightning," Stempien said. "Then it changed. That sound. I don't even know how to explain it. It was like a train horn. It was just so loud."

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Twenty miles north in downtown Miami, meteorologist Bryan Norcross hunkered down in the basement of WTVJ-TV. A few days earlier, he had taken the unprecedented step of running transmission lines directly to a local radio station so people could hear him if they lost power or if the hurricane knocked down the station's TV towers.

It worked. Norcross broadcast for 23 hours straight, becoming a South Florida legend.

"At about 1 a.m., it became clear (Andrew) was going to hit as a worst-case scenario," said Norcross. "We weren't going to get lucky."

A WAR ZONE

It was just after sunrise when the Juarez family emerged from their closet. While they all made it through unscathed, they awoke to what Cheryl described as a war zone.

The roof over her daughter's room was gone – the 165-mph winds strong enough to peel the Laura Ashley pink rose wallpaper off the wall. They found pink roofing insulation wedged, somehow, behind the glass of picture frames.

Outside, Juarez saw acres of gutted houses and debris. The tree in their front yard stood, but was crooked. She tried to walk to her cousin's house three blocks away.

"I didn't recognize where I was," she said. "I couldn't figure out which house it was."

It was about that time that Bob Graham, the former governor of Florida who was a U.S. senator at the time, got into a helicopter with then-Gov. Lawton Chiles and headed south to survey the damage.

He saw blocks and blocks of splintered homes, and mobile homes stacked on top of one another. Their helicopter landed in a field near Homestead City Hall.

"It was like a scene out of M.A.S.H.," Graham said.

Julie Rochman, who worked for a coalition of insurance companies, tried to reach Homestead by car.

"There was no signage, so directions were, 'You're going to go down to the pile of bricks on the side of the road, take a left at the broken sign...'" said Rochman, now the president of the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety. "It was other-worldly."

Andrew arrived in the days before Facebook or Twitter, before everybody had a cell phone. That's why Stempien didn't hear from his mother for two full days. They listened on the radio for updates from Turkey Point, but heard little.

When she finally arrived, Stempien said she ran straight to them without even looking at what remained of the house. "A lot of crying," Stempien said. "It was awesome."

WHERE IS THE CAVALRY?

The worst was over, but the agonizing work of recovery had just begun. It didn't take long before things started falling apart.

Looters went to work, prompting homeowners to spraypaint "Looters will be shot" signs on their lawns. Opportunists price gouged, wildly inflating prices for generators, food, batteries, and even water.

The hurricane also tore through aviaries, Miami MetroZoo, Monkey Jungle and businesses that peddled exotic animals. That damage unleashed hordes of monkeys, wild birds, llamas, vipers, cougars, gazelles, and, according to some reports, one lion.

Government officials struggled to manage the growing chaos. Officials from FEMA, state government and national relief organizations went on cable news channels to boast of their hard work, but people on the ground didn't see the results.

That frustration led Kate Hale, the emergency management director for Dade County, to unload during a televised press conference. She pleaded for help from Washington. She listed off the requests put in to FEMA that had gone unanswered.

"Where in the hell is cavalry?" she implored into the microphones.

That interview served as a turning point that prompted reporters to get out into the damaged areas and see for themselves what federal officials were doing, or not doing, Hale said.

The lack of federal assistance became so problematic that Graham, the Florida senator, tried to push out FEMA and install retired Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf to run the recovery. The general had retired to Tampa after successfully commanding coalition forces in the Gulf War, and Graham hoped he would come back for one more mission.

"I called him and he expressed his concern and sympathies for the people who’d been injured and damaged by the hurricane, but politely said that he was not the proper person to take over," Graham said.

Still, the military arrived. About 10 days after the storm, there were 30,000 boots on the ground from all branches of the military, Hale said. They patrolled neighborhoods, relieving homeowners who had stayed awake for days to guard their darkened homes from looters. They directed traffic. They delivered water. They staffed makeshift medical clinics.

"The presence of the military gave people a sense of order and control that was just not there before," Hale said. "Those poor guys. They would work and work and work on their schedule and then, when they had a day or two off, they'd go out there and volunteer some more."

LONG ROAD TO RECOVERY

It took months before South Florida attained some level of normal. In all, the storm destroyed more than 25,000 homes and damaged 100,000 others. Fifteen people were killed directly by Andrew, and another 25 died in the hard weeks that followed.

For those people left homeless by Andrew, the recovery felt endless. Thousands of families left the area, never to return.

Andrew annihilated Homestead Air Force Base, forcing hundreds of military families to relocate to bases in Georgia and South Carolina. The base, once the anchor of the suburb, would be rebuilt, but downgraded to an Air Force reserve base.

Stempien's mother sent him and his brother to stay with family near Detroit for the start of the school year. When he returned to Homestead in November, everything was different.

"You lost so many good friends overnight," said Stempien, now a gym owner who owns a home a couple miles from where he rode out Andrew. "Hundreds of people that I knew, the hurricane hit and I never saw them again."

Hale spent three years helping the county put its pieces back together, but was removed from her post and left Florida for good. Now the head of emergency management in New King County, Va., Hale tries to take a day off on Aug. 24 each year to think about what she went through and pray for the victims.

"I don't think I'm ever totally free of it," Hale said. "It changed my DNA. You walk around and see things that other people don't see."

Andrew led to big changes. Florida passed a law cracking down on price gouging and another overhauling the state's building code. Graham, the Florida senator, said Andrew changed the FEMA director's job from a cushy position for political appointees to one that required experienced emergency managers.

For the Juarez family, leaving Andrew behind wasn't so easy. The family didn't want to leave South Florida, but decided to move farther north, closer to Miami.

"We wanted to rebuild a sense of security and safety ," she said.

Their son Jonathan's new kindergarten class brought in an art therapist to help Andrew survivors deal with their experiences. Juarez saved one of his drawings. It depicts a two-story house with two children looking out from their windows, watching as a figure blows away in the wind.

All these years later, Juarez was curious what the drawing represented, so she called her son. The kids in the window were Jonathan and his sister Elisa, Jonathan explained. The flying figure represented a painting that used to hang in Elisa's room that depicted a guardian angel watching over two children crossing a bridge.

The painting was blown away in the storm.

"We had always talked about the guardian angel protecting our children as they walked through each day," said Juarez, 62, now the head of professional development at the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science in downtown Miami. "When we moved to our post-Andrew home, we bought two new prints - one for each child."

Contributing: Rick Jervis, USA TODAY