Hurricane Hugo: What’s Different 25 Years After The Storm

Sept. 21--Bulls Island

Stats: Wind speed, 100-120 mph; storm surge, 16-20 feet; few structures and no human inhabitants, so damage was reflected in the natural landscape.

Two of the most striking episodes of SC ETV's "NatureScene" detail trips to Bulls Island shortly before and shortly after Hurricane Hugo devastated the coastal region just north of Charleston. The once thick understory vegetation had been wiped clean. Most major trees that hadn't blown over had snapped 20 or 30 feet up.

The landscape of the island was altered remarkably ... but not permanently. Nature, especially in a place like Bulls Island with no human inhabitants, is amazingly resilient.

"What everybody expected to happen has happened," said naturalist Rudy Mancke, who returned the island almost annually for more than 20 years after filming those "NatureScene" episodes.

The year after the storm's high winds and storm surge destroyed many of the largest canopy trees, the acorn crop was abundant, Mancke said. So was sunlight, which encouraged fast growth of new trees and, especially, vines.

"Every time I went back, you could see that nature was beginning to put the pieces back together," Mancke said.

After his most recent trip, Mancke noted that the major difference from pre-Hugo is the height of the pines. Hugo snapped all of the tallest pines, and they take longer to reach that height. "They're going up now though," he said.

Isle of Palms/Sullivans Island

Stats: Storm surge 15 feet on Isle of Palms, 13 on Sullivans; hundreds of houses destroyed, including 100 on IOP that had to be demolished by the city after storm as unsafe; 15 percent of home on Sullivans destroyed, another 40 percent severely damaged.

Jimmy Carroll had a burgeoning real estate business on the barrier islands just north of Charleston before Hugo hit. A member of local volunteer fire department, he had planned to stay on the islands during the storm, but his then-fiance talked him into retreating to a friend's house in Mount Pleasant.

The next day his business was gone. The roof blew off the former gas station he had converted into an office on Sullivans Island, and half of the building had been knocked down by storm surge. At his apartment on Isle of Palms, he had placed his important belongings on the top of a dresser, hoping to keep them dry. Instead, everything on the first floor of the building had been swept away by the storm surge.

"Everything I own is post-Hugo," Carroll said.

Every home on both islands had some damage. Some were completely gone. It took five years for Carroll's business to recover, but many island property owners used insurance checks to build bigger homes that boosted rental or sales income for realtors.

"As painful as it was, and I hate to say this, it was probably one of the better things that happened to me professionally," Carroll said.

While new homes are built better to withstand storms, Carroll still thinks some people are building too close to the ocean. He hopes newcomers will listen to those who were around in 1989 when the next storm approaches.

"I never thought a storm would do the damage it did," Carroll said. "I thought they were crying wolf. They weren't. I wouldn't stay in Mount Pleasant if another one comes."

Manning/Summerton

Stats: Eyewall passed over Clarendon County with winds still at hurricane strength more than 80 miles inland; One report noted 87 percent of trees were knocked over or snapped; 84 percent of structures damaged; parts of the county went more than a month without electricity.

Jim Darby, then director of the regional council of governments, said local leaders gathered for a briefing as Hugo neared the coast. "The general attitude was it wasn't going to be as bad we thought it could be," he recalled 25 years later.

He began hearing trees fall around his home on Lake Marion near Summerton around 11 p.m. Three hours later, the eye passing gave a chance to see some of the damage. Then the back side of the storm pounded the area for four more hours.

Between Darby's house and his brother-in-law's house nearby, he counted 38 huge trees across the road. Power was out everywhere. Fish were floundering in his azalea bushes.

Darby's family didn't have power or running water for 28 days at their home. They pulled buckets of water from the lake to flush their toilets. "We greeted the power company workers like they were the soldiers going into Paris at the end of WWII," Darby said.

Darby believes the region is better equipped to handle another Hugo. Emergency managers have better tools, from vehicles to radios. People older than about 35 have vivid memories of what Hugo was like.

"Most everybody has a chain saw now," Darby said. "If they see a storm coming, they'll have gas in their four-wheelers and their generators."

Camden

Stats: Seven times during the storm, wind gusts topped 100 mph at the DuPont plant in Camden; 60-75 percent of corn crop destroyed in county, 50 percent of soybean crop.

Joan A. Inabinet remembers feeling safe in her Camden home when she heard that Hugo was going to hit South Carolina. "We felt sorry for the people it was going to hit, but we never thought it would come here," she said.

A few hours later, she knew better. She and husband Glen and their two young sons hunkered down as their house shook in the pitch black of powerless 3 a.m. They went outside the morning after, "relieved that the house was still here," she said. "You looked around at all the trees down and felt it was a miracle you survived."

Inland residents closer to cities such as Camden had power restored more quickly than rural areas, but several days without power was more than enough to leave an impression. "Until you lived through that, you don't know how slowly those minutes and hours passed," Joan Inabinet recalled.

Their daughter, Julie, was in college in Atlanta, and like so many with family in the storm's path, tried to hustle home only to wait for hours while trees were cleared for major roads. Now Julie Putnam, she recalls the first Sunday church service after the storm. People didn't care if their hair was mussed or their clothes were wrinkled. They were just glad to be there to thank the Lord for making it through the storm.

Many of the historic homes in Camden had major roof damage. Joan Inabinet remembers insurance adjusters showing up with checks to pay for repairs, but homeowners having trouble finding roofing supplies. More than a few old homes ended up with shingles that didn't match the rest of their roof.

That Christmas, plenty of Kershaw County residents bought chain saws, generators and flashlights as family gifts.

But the true long-term impact of Hugo in that area "has been that we take very seriously the idea that storms can come here," said Joan Inabinet, who along with her husband recently wrote "A History of Kershaw County." "And anyone who lived through that has more sympathy for other places when storms hit."

Timber industry

Stats: 21.4 billion board feet of timber damaged; dead or downed trees represented three times the annual timber harvest rate in state; enough saw timber destroyed to build 660,000 homes

In the immediate aftermath of Hugo, timber growers in the swath leveled by the storm were walking around in a daze. What do you do when entire forests of trees are toppled or snapped? They didn't have access to enough people and equipment to harvest all the downed timber, and there was little market for it anyway.

"It was like having 300 pounds of steak and having no refrigeration," said Dwight Stewart, whose forest management firm, Dwight L. Stewart Jr. & Associates, is based in Manning.

It took two years to salvage the majority of the pines, and some damaged pines were salvaged even later. Around 1992, "it was a relief to quit focusing on the salvage effort and to move on to reforestation," Stewart said.

Many timber farmers treat their crop like a savings account, cutting trees when they need to send a child to college or make a down payment on a new home. Hugo wiped out many of those savings accounts. Hugo also killed a few mills equipped to handle the high-quality timber that took longest to regrow. But most timber farmers rebounded financially and replanted, and trees remain the major farm crop in the state.

A quarter-century later, the industry is different, and in better shape than pre-Hugo in many ways. More pines now are cut earlier for use as low-grade wood, thereby cutting the typical growth rotation by about eight years. Genetic research also has improved, along with overall use of technology in the industry. But Stewart noted those changes happened throughout the Southeast, not just in the swath hit by Hugo.

The main impact of Hugo on the forestry industry 25 years later is psychological. "Anybody in a hurricane area who has lived through a storm like that is always worried another one could come," Stewart said.

Emergency Management/National Guard

Stats: Thousands of S.C. National Guard personnel were called to duty during Hugo, not only to help with the pre-storm evacuation, but to aid in the recovery efforts. They were much more likely to wield chainsaws to clear fallen trees off houses than guns to protect businesses from looters.

Robert Livingston, now the state's adjutant general, had to juggle two roles during Hugo. He was in the National Guard, but his full-time job was with SCE&G, and restoring power to the hard-hit inland counties took priority in the first few days after the storm. When he finally got to the coast, he was stunned.

"We had rehearsed, but I don't think we had any concept of the amount of damage that storm was going to cause," Livingston said.

But he also believes the state emergency management officials, including the State and National Guard, did their jobs well.

"I think we pre-positioned people where they needed to be," he said. "I think we made the public very much aware, and we were very proactive in keeping the public informed. And that saved lives on the front end, but it also set the stage for the recovery that occurred afterward. And I think the recovery was really the amazing part."

Everyone, from every walk of life, pitched in to help restore the state.

"We have people that are very self-reliant and they are concerned about their neighbor," Livingston said. "They're concerned about their own family. And they're just going to take things into their hands and do what is right -- not take this as an opportunity to go down and loot downtown Charleston. They said: 'How's your house? Can I come over and help you?'"

Hugo changed emergency preparation. Multiple state agencies get together every year for hurricane practice sessions. The state has many more aircraft available to help with rescue and restoration efforts. They have a mobile air traffic control unit that can move in quickly if a local airport is wiped out.

The State Guard now has an engineering company that can build temporary bridges. Guard units' frequent deployments to Afghanistan have given them experience building communications systems from scratch.

But equally as important, Livingston said, is what the public learned from that storm. "It changed the thought processes for all South Carolinians who were there," he said. "What I'm concerned about is the citizens who have moved in since Hugo, they may not remember just how devastating that storm was."

He suggests newcomers talk with Hugo veterans. They'll hear similar stories of perseverance and cooperation.

"If we'd have had riots, if we'd have had people trying to take advantage of the situation, if we had had people that just sat on their rear ends and waited for somebody to help, it would have been very difficult," Livingston said, "and it would not have been the picture that we remember now."

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