Back in late September 1989 Hurricane Hugo, a category 5 storm, set its sights on South Carolina. It made landfall as a category 4 hurricane just north of Charleston, SC, and people 27 years later are still thinking and talking about it.
To view some photos of the devastation click HERE.
The coastal regions of the Carolinas and Georgia took the brunt of the storm, of course, but Hugo was not satisfied to just destroy the cities on the coast. Hugo went to Charlotte.
I was married with three sons (ages 11, 13, and 15) and living in Blacksburg, South Carolina at the time. Blacksburg sits in Cherokee County on the North Carolina / South Carolina line on I-85 about an hour's drive from Charlotte. The storm raged all night that night and into the day that day and then it became eerily quiet as the eye passed. We thought the worst was over. We were wrong. The back side of the storm was worse than the first. The wind howled and stormed its way through those hills like I had never seen it do before or since. It was a nightmare.
I was home alone with my sons that day and we were scared to death.
Our house was located in the middle of a hardwood forest. You could not see the neighbors from our home. The hurricane force wind that somehow made it so far inland was whipping our trees like they were just hickory switches. Many trees fell in our forest. Everyone anywhere around lost power, which means, since we had well water, we lost water too because our well pump was electric.
We fared better than most. Our house was left intact with no damage. Our cars were okay. We were alive and well.
But that was not the tale for our Carolina lowcountry people and our neighbors to the north and east, York, Rock Hill, Kings Mountain, Gastonia, Belmont, Charlotte. All those cities and areas had major damage.
Once our electricity came back on and we could see the news, I experienced sheer terror. You see, I couldn't reach my brother, Tom, on the telephone and Tom and his family lived in Summerville, South Carolina at the time. Ordinarily, Summerville is a lovely little city just north west of Charleston, South Carolina, but at that time Summerville was devastated.
I tried and tried and tried to call Tom, but all the phone lines were down. We did not have cell phones back in 1989, so we were relying on Southern Bell (BellSouth) whose lines between the upstate and the lowcountry were mostly all cut by fallen trees and such. It took nearly a week for me to reach my brother. By that time I was truly frantic, but he was okay.
Tom, who had been career US Navy, wasn't afraid of storms. He's seen many a storm on the high seas, so he thought he'd go outside to see the hurricane that night, but about the third freight train that came down his street drove him indoors. Those "freight trains" were actually tornadoes spawned by the hurricane. Everyone said they sounded like freight trains.
Tom's neighborhood was in shambles, but his house was spared major damage. His family was okay in Goose Creek, South Carolina as well although their house had roof damage.
I breathed a long sigh of relief once I was able to talk to Tom. I felt like I had been holding my breath for a week not knowing if he and his family were okay.
Six years after Hurricane Hugo I moved to lovely Charleston, South Carolina. Then in September 1999 Hurricane Floyd, another category 5 hurricane decided to visit the Carolinas. It had downgraded to category 2 by the time it made landfall, but made its mark all the same.
But that is a story for another day. I'll tell it to you by and by.
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