Published May 31, 2005

Active hurricane season expected to offer no reprieve from '04

BRUCE SMITH, Associated Press

CHARLESTON -- The hurricane season starting Wednesday may be too soon for South Carolinians who last year weathered the busiest season in more than century.

"This looks like it's going to be another bad year," said John Sweeney, president of Weather Guard Hurricane Protection Inc., who already has a three-month waiting list for people who want hurricane shutters. "A lot of people are taking heed."

Sweeney expects that list to get even longer as another season arrives and he continues to field Internet orders from folks in Florida clamoring for shutters. It's already too late to get shutters installed before the worst of the season hits -- historically late August and September.

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Last year was one of the busiest ever in the state.

For the first time in more than a century, the centers of four tropical systems moved across South Carolina. It was also the first time in almost a half-century that two hurricanes -- Charley and Gaston -- made landfall on the South Carolina coast in the same season.

In all, seven tropical systems affected the state, causing at least $146 million in damage and cleanup costs.

But the damage was nothing like the billions in devastation storms caused in Florida and on the Gulf Coast. There, hurricanes Charley and Ivan pushed past Hurricane Hugo on the all-time list of costliest hurricanes.

Hugo, the storm by which South Carolinians still measure all others, smashed into Charleston in 1989, causing almost $10 billion in damage, and had been second on the list behind Hurricane Andrew.

Forecasters this year are predicting still another active hurricane season.

"It's natural to be nervous and anxious and apprehensive about it," said Dean Kilpatrick, director of the National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center at the Medical University of South Carolina.

"Most people will get a little twitchy, and I suspect people in Florida will be even more twitchy," he said. "But the truth is, nobody really knows what will happen."

Kilpatrick has researched the psychological effects of natural disasters and the 2001 terror attacks and is now embarking on a study of how Florida residents are doing in the aftermath of last year's devastating hurricane season.

His advice for dealing with the anxiety of another busy season is to deal with those things in your control. Put together a hurricane kit and have an evacuation plan.

To ease the anxiety, he suggests, don't be watching the weather every hour just now for signs of a storm out there.

"Limit your exposure, if it's upsetting to you," he said, adding that the odds are it will be later in the season before South Carolina is at risk.

State emergency planners worry some people will get complacent after last year's busy season because, while the state was affected, it was not hit by a major storm like Hugo.

"People may assume that because we went through two Category 1 hurricanes -- I wouldn't say tame but relatively undamaging -- they think they have been through hurricanes and they can survive these," said John Boettcher, the hurricane program manager with the state Emergency Management Division.

"That was a very real problem in other states in previous years," he said.

Officials last year ordered the first mandatory evacuation since Hurricane Floyd in 1999, which turned into a traffic nightmare along Interstate 26.

This time things were a little smoother as Hurricane Charley approached the Grand Strand in last August and lanes were reversed on U.S. Highway 501.

Officers will be out later this month practicing for lane reversals, although no traffic will be reversed. It's part of training and planning exercises emergency officials routinely conduct.

Also this week, the Emergency Management Division will distribute emergency hurricane guides as inserts in newspapers, said division spokesman Joe Farmer.

No only is planning ongoing, but communications will be much better than they were 16 years ago when Hugo smashed into the coast.

Then, because of incompatibility of radio systems, it was hard for police and emergency officials to communicate with each other, let alone with personnel sent in from agencies and utilities in other states.

Since then, Palmetto 800 has been created, the largest single emergency communications network in the nation with about 18,000 users including 200 different local and state agencies and private companies such as utilities.

The statewide 800 MHz system is managed and owned by Motorola and agencies pay the provider like customers contract for cell phone service, said George Crouch wireless technology manager for the Budget and Control Board.

The frequencies are owned by the state or the local agency, he said.

That means the system is constantly modernized and it made more sense than asking the General Assembly to come up with $200 million to have the state build a system which would later need upgrading, he said.

Users can be assigned channels to talk to each other depending on what they are doing.

For instance, he said, if there is a lane reversal on I-26, all the officers from various agencies working the section between I-95 and Charleston can be on the same channel.

Or, if utility crews come in from Georgia to help a hurricane recovery in the Beaufort area, they can be assigned a common channel and keep in touch with each other and emergency officials.

"If an aircraft flew over an area with a traffic bottleneck, they would be able to talk to officers" on the ground, Crouch said. "We are the largest network based on users in the country."