Sanctuary turned into a trap

MCCLELLANVILLE — As 130-mph winds lashed the building and flood waters nipped at her chin, Thomasena Singleton hoisted her 7-year-old son above her head inside Lincoln High School to keep him from the deluge.

Like hundreds of others, Singleton had sought shelter in the school on Sept. 21, 1989, as Hurricane Hugo bore down on the Lowcountry. Everyone assumed the school was a safe and sturdy structure that would protect them from the Category 4 storm's fury. They didn't count on a 20-foot-high storm surge sweeping ashore and swamping the low-lying building.

"Suddenly, there was all this water coming in and you couldn't even see because the lights were out," Singleton said. "All around me, everyone was screaming and crying and praying."

Most of the 400 people in the darkened shelter were in bed when the storm surge slammed into the school about 1:30 a.m. Sept. 22, pushing in window air conditioners and cascading through the openings.

Tim Lockridge, then a Charleston County paramedic, jumped up and splashed into the hallway with fellow paramedic George Metts. Shining a flashlight on the Plexiglas windows, they realized they "were looking into the sea, like a goldfish in reverse," Lockridge said.

They turned to lights shining through the window slats of a set of double-doors beside them and realized it was a car floating toward them, about head-high, with its headlights on.

"I felt like I was in a submarine that had taken a direct hit while the water steadily rose around me," Lockridge said.

People panicked and screamed in the cafeteria. A few hundred people crammed onto the elevated stage or onto tables. One woman climbed onto a window sill, banging on the glass.

Lockridge, the school's principal and a sheriff's deputy struggled down the hall to look for a way onto the roof as Metts tried to calm terrified people in the shelter. Finding no doors, Lockridge and his companions climbed out a window and pulled themselves onto the roof. The winds tore at them, and the rain felt like sandpaper.

Unable to get back down, Lockridge lashed himself to a metal power supply line and lay low as shards of the terra-cotta roof flung past him like shrapnel. The wind sounded like a Boeing 747's engines at tree-top level.

"We lay there for hours, the storm raging and us praying," he said. "While on the roof we felt a sickening sense that we may be the only survivors."

Below, however, Singleton and the others held on, though at one point she nearly slipped into the dark waters and drowned. Then, as if in answer to their prayers, the water slowly began to recede.

When the skies finally cleared and the doors flew open, they encountered a different landscape: Cars piled on top of one another. Houses knocked off their foundations. Utter destruction.

But they were alive.

Twenty years later, Lockridge, 55, doesn't dwell on his Hugo experience. "That was just one day, though it was a very unusual day," he chuckled. "That was the first time I ever had Mother Nature come after me."

For Singleton, 49, the experience is still close at hand, an old wound that aches every year during hurricane season. "Every year around this time, my nerves get on edge and my stomach bothers me," she said. "It was a miracle that we all survived that night. If the tide had been coming in and instead of going out, there would have been a whole lot of dead people at Lincoln High School."