There was also evidence after Andrew that what the madness of a storm can take away, the sanity of nature may restore. The storm surge from Andrew immersed trees and vegetation near Biscayne Bay -- but some caterpillars that year had crawled higher in the trees than was usual. Scientists from the University of Florida found the survivors the next spring after they had emerged as butterflies -- the last 17 known wild survivors of their species -- all male. They were mated with females that had been collected as captives before the storm by Professor Tom Emmel. Since then, they have helped produce new wild colonies of more than 3,000 Schaus swallowtail butterflies -- nearly doomed to extinction by the storm, and now back to their cycles of metamorphosis.
For families waiting for the inevitable, drastic changes in their lives and the lives of their communities, Morrow said the best advice is to be patient. "This is going to be a long, long process. Some people will never recover, and that's the sad part. Even under the best of circumstances it's going to take not weeks, not months, but years to get back to anything that you might call normal.
"You pull yourself up by your bootstraps and just say, 'hey, gotta do it,' " said Squires. "Either you fall apart or you don't. And you know you don't want to be falling apart."
