Andrew was only the third Category five hurricane to hit the United States, the previous ones being Hurricane Camille, which hit Mississippi and Louisiana in August 1969, and the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, which struck the Florida Keys in September 1935.

As with all high-intensity storms (categories four and five), the worst damage from Andrew is thought to have occurred not from straight-line winds but from vortexes, or embedded tornadoes. This was the conclusion of T. Theodore Fujita, a University of Chicago meteorologist who devised the Fujita scale for measuring the strength of tornadoes, after he surveyed Andrew's destruction in the Homestead area. There were thousands of these vortexes in Andrew; many of them could be traced for several miles, as they usually destroyed every building in their paths.