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Hurricane 15 years ago left damage, memories

Hurricane Hugo makes landfall

On the morning after Hurricane Hugo, 15 years ago, I awoke from a sound slumber and thought to myself, "That wasn't so bad."

For a while before going to bed, I had watched out the back door as the wind bent the trees and the rain whipped down in torrents.

It brought a few tree limbs crashing down, but I deemed it no worse than a severe thunderstorm.

I soon discovered that might have been the case at my mother's house near Walterboro, but as I drove north on U.S. 15, the scene just got worse and worse. In awed silence, I drove past miles and miles of devastation.

The "experts" said Hugo spawned only straight winds not twisters. They must not have seen what I saw: some stands of trees that looked like Hugo had grabbed the top with one hand, held on to the base with the other hand and twisted the trunks until they broke in two.

Just north of Interstate 26 in Four Holes Swamp, the road was completely blocked by fallen trees, so I headed toward S.C. 453.

It turned out to be a lucky guess. That was the only road into Holly Hill that wasn't blocked by storm debris, I was told later.

I made it to The Holly Hill Observer n where I was news editor at the time n only to find more trees blocking the door. We had no electricity, no telephone and no water.

The late Robert C. "Bert" Rickenbacker Jr., who was the editor at that time, accepted an invitation to climb onto the roof of the bank across the street. Unwilling to stay behind, I followed.

We saw damaged buildings and trees in every direction.

Bert, his sons and I then split up and spent the rest of the day after Hugo driving around eastern Orangeburg County, photographing damage and conducting interviews over the whining roar of chain saws.

The subdivisions along Lake Marion seemed to catch the brunt of the storm's force. Hardly a house was unscathed.

As I inched along a residential street in Mill Creek Landing, the Wolpert family flagged me down and showed me where a 10-foot tree limb had speared the roof like a javelin and was resting, upright, on the floor of an upstairs bedroom.

It had been an extremely close call. The family had escaped injury by abandoning the upper floor and huddling downstairs to ride out the storm.

Not only humans found the storm upsetting. Late in the afternoon, while looking for photo angles, I stumbled into a swarm of angry wasps, one of which inflicted a painful sting before I could dash back to the car and roll up the windows.

By then I was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. It was getting late in the day, and I knew I had to conserve enough gasoline to make it back to Walterboro for a fill-up.

I had seen enough in one day to realize it was going to take a very long time for the area to recover. And it did. More than six months later, the storm's aftermath was still making front-page news.

For those of us who experienced it, uneasy memories of Hugo still come to mind every time they tell us another storm is on the way. But when it arrives n if it arrives n it's not nearly as bad as we expected.

We've had so many storms this year that some people n myself included n are worried about when the "Chicken Little syndrome" is going to set in.

You tell people every week or two that the sky is falling n or at least torrential rain and winds n and eventually, many people are going to get complacent.

But they shouldn't. We live in a hurricane-prone area. Sure, Hugo was supposed to be a "storm of the century" or something like that. But the next "Big One" could be right around the corner.

I can't emphasize enough that pictures n in the newspaper or even on television n don't begin to show the widespread damage these storms can, and do, inflict.

Think of those pictures, and then imagine driving for miles and miles and miles and seeing the same kind of destruction over and over.

That's what hurricanes can, and will, do. And that's why every severe storm should be cause for alarm.

No one should over-react and panic or do anything silly or extreme, but when a hurricane looms it's advisable to: