Hurricane Hugo

We moved back to Charleston,SC in 1988.  It was a homecoming for Mary Anne, and we were thrilled to be back to the town where we had courted. Caroline was born

in June of 89.  MA’s brother Tom was in Mt. Pleasant, so we got to spend time with Millie and him.  My brother Dunn was in law school in Columbia, so he was a frequent weekend visitor (since we had a real kitchen and all).  We had a nice house in Snee Farm Country club.  Sister Piel had lived with us that summer.  Life, as it frequently is for us, was very good.

In September, late in the hurricane season, the weather folks started watching a storm named Hugo.  Early indications had it on a straight line for Charleston.  Charlie Hall had been the TV weatherman forever, so had seen a lot of storms threaten the Holy City, but this one clearly scared him. As well it should have. Check Twitter #HUGO25 for the broader historical perspective. Or if you prefer only images, The Charleston paper, the News and Courier, just ran a retrospective of pictures from Hugo for the 25th anniversary.

I was busy at work as the week of Sept 18th, getting ready for a user conference. We had customers flying in from all over the country and were going to have a meeting at the Isle of Palms. They flew in Sunday. By Monday, prudence dictated that we cancel the conference and send the clients home. We got them all back out on the last Eastern Airlines flight out that had any seats left on Tuesday.  Mary Anne had a new baby, and figured the power would go out with the storm, so she headed up to Orangeburg, where her parents lived. I made an extra backup of the computer at the office and FedEx'd the reel to reel mag tape to Atlanta.

I moved equipment up on tables at the office in case of flooding, and taped windows at the house. Tuesday night on the 11 O'clock news, Linda Lombard, Charleston County chairwoman, basically said that if you were watching her on a local station, you needed to leave town.  I packed and got on the road and made the drive to Orangeburg in the normal 90 minutes.  As the path of the storm became more certain, Wed 9/20/89, Joe Riley (mayor for life of Charleston) got the Highway Dept to reverse the lanes of I-26, making it 4 lanes westbound.  It still took ALL DAY for many folks getting out of town.

We were together in Orangeburg, 90 miles inland, at MA's folks house. Time to hunker down and wait for the storm. It came in with a fury even that far inland overnight Thursday night. A large pine tree fell on the Horton's house.  Hugo was still a category 1 hurricane as it passed through Charlotte. Saturday was clear and beautiful, as frequently happens after a hurricane. We were chatting during the day, when the landline at the Horton's rang. It was Kim Patton.  He had a truck and roofing materials and a chainsaw, and he said he'd hit the road that night and be there Sunday morning.  He couldn't get a generator, even in Cincinnati, but I wasn't worried because I couldn't imagine we would be out of power for too long.

Driving down on I-26 (no longer one-way), there were still trees in at least one lane much of the way down. When we finally got to the subdivision, we cut our way into Snee Farm.  Literally.  A couple of houses were flattened.  Several had near misses.  We got to 1129 Ambling Way, and there were four big trees on the roof.

 

But the house held together pretty well.  We had a 2x12 joist in the roof, and it stood up to all those trees.  There was lots of meat in the freezer that was keeping at least cool, so Kim and I used the grill and cooked over the fire for a couple of days as we began to clean up.

That first week after the storm, every time I stopped to talk a neighbor who stayed in town during the storm, I asked them what it was like that night. Each one of them would stop what they were doing and look at me and say “I thought I was going to die”.

By the next week there were tree companies from a lot of nearby states going around offering to trim trees.  The one we hired managed to get the trees off the roof without any further damage.  I sure would hate leaning like that and operating a chain saw.

We learned a little later that different people grind stumps.  The folks with chain saws just cut down the tree.  So we hired Lloyd Goode.

lloyd the stump grinder

There was no power in Orangeburg, either, so after three weeks, MA brought the girls back home. A couple of days after that, friends of the Hortons found a generator and brought it down. We didn't have it running for a full day when the power finally came back on.

We had had 18 pine trees on our lot before the storm.  Afterward, we had 4. And a couple of those didn't survive for too much longer.

The piles of cut trees got even higher along the street as the neighborhood continued to clean up.  And the piles were there for months.

After the clean up

The TV news used the word “Devastation” so many times a day for so long that we couldn't stand to watch it. Despite the challenges, Charleston bounced back eventually. The aftermath felt then like it would go on forever, so it's hard to believe it has been 25 years.