Hugo 20 years later

An old city, like anyone who has lived a bold life, will have many scars. Over its lifetime, Charleston has weathered plagues, wars, fires, storms and earthquakes — events that left the city in ruins and terrified its residents.

Some scars from these traumatic times are still visible today; others healed outwardly but remain part of the city's collective memory and are as real as the morning light.

Twenty years ago, Hurricane Hugo, a dark mass of spinning winds and vapor as big as the state itself, tore into South Carolina.

Those who went through the storm will never forget the rising waters, the freight-train wail of the winds, the Ben Sawyer Bridge tilting in the marsh, the pines snapped halfway up their trunks, the pink insulation everywhere, the convoys of people coming to help, the exhaustion at the end of a day trying to make things normal again.

Many of us weren't here then, of course. One out of every four people in South Carolina today was born after Hugo. Since 1990, 2.4 million people from other states and foreign countries moved to the state, while 1.9 million moved elsewhere.

Some transplants and young people may wonder what all the fuss is about. The trees are tall now and full of Spanish moss. Sullivan's Island looked like a war zone? C'mon.

But Hugo, like any traumatic event, left its marks, both physical and emotional. It remade the landscape in a single night; it killed 26 people in South Carolina alone; it destroyed billions of dollars in property and created a billion-dollar building boom; it made some people stronger, others weaker.

Like an old scar, Hugo is part of this place now, something that burns a little during anniversaries and when the weather in the tropics begins its seasonal stir.

The storm

Hugo was born Sept. 9, 1989, as a cluster of thunderstorms that blew off the coast of Africa. The storms converged and began to spin in the warm waters south of the Cape Verde Islands.

Within a week Hugo was a Category 5 hurricane. It hit the Caribbean first, killing 22 people in tiny Montserrat and destroying 90 percent of its buildings.

It churned through St. Croix and Puerto Rico before spiraling north, a Category 4 storm that in the dry language in forecasters' manuals says "is capable of extreme damage."

The winds rose steadily throughout the night of Sept. 21 as the storm bands moved onshore. Just after midnight the center of the storm plunged into South Carolina's midsection like a cannonball, narrowly missing Charleston to the south.

Highest sustained winds were 135 mph in Bulls Bay, a wildlife refuge 20 miles north of the city. Downtown Charleston felt sustained winds of 87 mph and gusts to 108.

An estimated 3,000 tornadoes were embedded in the storm as it marched through North Charleston and Berkeley and Dorchester counties, and on to Manning, Sumter, Columbia and Charlotte.

The winds were bad and so was the water. In Bulls Bay the storm surge hit 20 feet. In McClellanville the ocean rose 13 to 16 feet, pouring into the village's old wooden homes and Lincoln High School, where people huddled on the stage in the cafeteria and hoisted children above them as the water rose in the darkness to their necks.

When it was all over, 56,000 people were homeless, 29 of the state's 46 counties were declared disaster areas, 43 percent of the state was without power and 1.3 million acres of trees were blown down, enough lumber to build 660,000 homes.

The storm caused more than $6 billion in damage. At the time, it was the costliest storm in the nation's history.

The stress

How do you get over something so devastating? When people are traumatized, their brain functions change; stress hormones are released; activity in the cortex, the place where rational thoughts are made, slows down and moves to more primitive areas in the brain that control feelings of fight or flight.

Amid a disaster's explosion of stimulation, your brain rewires itself to think less and react more.

Some people handle life-threatening stress better than others. Ben Graham's family had lived in McClellanville for six generations. He saw action in Vietnam and was 43 years old when Hugo hit. Was he scared?

"No, I was drunk," he recalled with a smile. He spent the night with one of his brothers and a bottle of bourbon as the water rose to his home's doorknob and knocked his pickup truck around.

The next morning he started checking on friends and family. "I thought people would be dead." Amid the wreckage and debris, he noticed a dining room table from a neighbor lodged high in a live oak across from his mother's home.

He met people as they were leaving Lincoln High. "They had those thousand-yard looks on their faces." He was in a state of shock too. "I kind of staggered around for a few days."

Mental health experts say that we often make sense of traumatic events by telling stories over and over again, and Graham has told his share over the years. "People my age talk about Hugo all the time," he said one recent afternoon, as one of his brothers, Billy, drove up, and soon was telling stories of his own.

Billy remembered how he took his wife and three children to a hotel in Moncks Corner the night of the storm. "The rain hit the door like 10 firehoses were trained against it; the water kept squirting in through the cracks."

When he returned to the village he learned that a dolphin was found in a neighbor's kitchen. He and his brother are builders, and years later they would find shrimp and fish skeletons high in people's walls.

"A lot of old people never did get over what happened," Ben said. "It just knocked the wind out them."

But most people focused on getting their lives together. "It was exhausting. You never felt like you had done enough," Billy said. But within a few years, things began to feel normal again.

"Everyone has bad things happen to them and wonders how they'll get over it," Ben said. "But eventually they"ll start smiling again."

The recovery

Most people recover from disasters, said

Dean Kilpatrick, a psychiatrist at the Medical University of South Carolina who has received national recognition for his research on the effects of disasters.

"A lot of recovery happens in three to six months," he said. "But there's a subset of people who don't recover without some intervention."

Anniversaries don't help; memories flood back, carrying with them those old feelings of anxiety and fright. "My prediction is that most people who went through it will feel a little 'twitchy.'?"

Diane Anglin feels that way these days. She was in Summerville as the winds built; her father, Harold Hutson, was hunkered down on his shrimp boat, the Lady Essie, with his buddy, Robert Page.

They had moved their boat from Shem Creek to what they hoped was a more protected anchorage on the Wando River.

No one knows what happened to the Lady Essie that night. Hutson contacted a friend when Hugo's eye passed through. "We're fine," crackled Hutson over the radio, and said they were making sandwiches.

During the storm Sammy Small was in a boat near the Lady Essie. Giant waves destroyed Small's cruiser, but before he bailed out he strapped on three life jackets, figuring it would help people find his corpse.

He awoke the next morning in the marsh. After waiting for the sun to rise, he trudged through the mud to the riverbank and found Hutson's and Page's bodies.

Anglin remembers trying to drive from Summerville to West Ashley the morning after to find out how her mother was doing.

She remembers how the trees blocked her route mile after agonizing mile, how the sky looked so open and blue because so many trees had been felled, and how the air smelled like Christmas because so many of the trees were pines and had been split in half.

Then those memories merge with others; how she learned of her father's death, how her daughter was born later and how sad she felt that the child would never know her grandfather.

"Hugo scarred everything for so long," and those scars reminded people of the storm's power.

"But now it's beautiful, and a lot of people don't have a clue about what it can do. You can't really understand unless it happens to you. Some people lose property, and that's tragic. It's a big deal. But a real tragedy is planning a funeral."

The present

Sociologists say people tend to remember the worst effects of a hurricane for seven years. Then the memories begin to fade like photographs exposed to the sun. This, of course, triggers heartburn in emergency officials who worry that people won't take the next hurricane seriously.

But it's their job to worry and ours to recover and remember the good memories — the cookouts, the heroes in the hospitals and the relief workers that came to the city's aid — along with the bad.

Hugo is no longer the nation's costliest storm; it presaged the beginning of a period of intense hurricane activity that spawned traumatic hurricanes like Andrew, Charley, Ivan, Rita and Katrina.

Hugo is now the nation's sixth costliest storm. With the passage of time, it has taken its place among Charleston's other tales of trauma and recovery, and begun to feel more like history.

Reach Tony Bartelme at tbartelme@postandcourier.com or 937-5554.