вЂњBut pretty soon people were in the streets shooting them with shotguns. (A rumor soon spread that the roving macaques, which were from a primate-research center, had been infected with AIDS. The majority were rounded up or exterminated. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission estimates that between three and four thousand primates escaped during the hurricane, together with as many as fifteen thousand other animals, including parrots, gazelles, wallabies, six mountain lions, and an Asian pheasant caught loping down the Florida Turnpike.

вЂњWeвЂ™re a biological cesspool of introduced life,вЂќ another biologist told me. Some twelve thousand shipments of wildlife enter the country at the Port of Miami every year, second in number only to Los Angeles, and the state is home to thousands of pet stores, breeders, and animal-research facilities. The escapees that Magill had seen were mostly from private collections.ДЇlorida is an вЂњEllis Island for exotic animals,вЂќ Magill says. Miraculously, though, almost all the animals had survived: the zookeepers had herded them into a few bunkerlike buildings. вЂњIt was like God had come through with a twenty-five-mile-wide weed whacker and just levelled the place,вЂќ he says.

A six-horse trailer had been tossed over a ten-foot fence and into the rhino enclosure, and a new five-million-dollar aviary had blown away. The monorail had been wrenched from its steel stanchions, its tracks twisted like a coat hanger. When Magill arrived at the zoo, it was in ruins. It was as if all Florida had turned, for a moment, into DisneyвЂ™s Animal Kingdom. Elsewhere, a small antelope was found wandering the halls of an administration building, a group of juvenile baboons broke into the weight room of a private home, and a python was found dead on the beach in Miami, with two full-grown raccoons in its belly. Later, the monkeys were spotted wandering through nearby farm fields, gorging themselves on tomatoes. As Magill was driving to the Miami Metrozoo, where he is the communications director, he passed a troop of rhesus macaques scampering up the road, as if on the plains of Kashmir. It was also a brief window on the ecology to come. It was the costliest natural disaster in American history up to that time. When it was over, twenty-five thousand homes had been destroyed and fifteen thousand boats lost, sixty-five people were dead and a hundred thousand permanently displaced. It made landfall near the city of Homestead on August 24, 1992, and cut a swath through some of the stateвЂ™s most populous areas. Andrew was a Category 5 hurricane, small but tightly focussed, with winds of up to a hundred and seventy-five miles an hour. вЂњI went from the color of my living room to the black-and-white of devastation.вЂќДЄcross the street, a van had been flipped upside down and flung against a house here and there trees were stuck in rooftops like toothpicks in canapГ©s. вЂњI remember going outside afterward, and it was like вЂThe Wizard of OzвЂ™ in reverse,вЂќ he says. When the shutters flew off the windows, the pressure fell so suddenly that MagillвЂ™s ears popped, as if heвЂ™d fallen from a great height. TheyвЂ™d propped a mattress and an armoire against the sliding glass door, but could still feel it flexing beneath the bellowing wind. HeвЂ™d spent the night in his ranch house in suburban Miami, huddled in the master bedroom with his wife, who was nine months pregnant with their first child. Just before daybreak, in the eerie hour after Hurricane Andrew struck southern Florida, a zoo worker named Ron Magill went to see what was left of his animals. There are, however, two categories of venomous snakes in Louisiana, which include species like copperhead, cottonmouth, and rattlesnakes.The stateвЂ™s ecology is a kind of urban legend come true-the old alligator-flushed-down-the-toilet story, with a thousand species. Read more: Horrifying video shows dozens of cockroaches fighting to stay above Tropical Storm Barry floodwatersДЄccording to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, most of the state's snakes are harmless. Notably, when Hurricane Florence hit in 2018, officials in South Carolina warned of dangerous snakes from South Carolina's wetlands getting displaced, hiding under debris, and possibly appearing in citizens' homes. 'We've told you about the possibility of interaction with animals during a flood event,' reads the Twitter update. The Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness also re-posted a video from a Louisiana family who found a small alligator under their grill. The message had a collection of images attached, which show snakes on porches and fences.

'If the area you live in has high water, watch out for snakes and other critters who are trying to escape the flood waters as well,' reads the Facebook post from St.

Snake escape hurricane