COLUMN: Sleepless night when Hurricane Hugo hit

The night Hurricane Hugo hit in 1989, I didn’t get much sleep, frequently getting up and looking around to see if there were any problems. I mean, other than the fact that the storm was raging outside.
In the early morning hours I looked out the kitchen window at the height of the storm and saw the inside dome light glowing in our next door neighbor’s car. Who in the world would be going out to the car in this kind of storm?
When daylight finally came, I had my answer. Nobody. What I found was a pine tree relaxing across the car that had been totaled by the tree’s attack. When the tree landed atop the car, the door was thrown open. That was why the dome light came on.
It sounded like guns being fired when trees broke and went down, and there were lots of pine trees around us. The howling of the wind was fiercer than I had ever heard, and our power blinked but stayed on deep into the night. Finally, it went off for good.
We heard that the eye went over the Santee Cooper lakes, and passed near us. We were on the right side of the eye, so winds were enhanced by both the cyclonic whirl and the overall storm’s forward motion as Hugo came through.
My recollection, and from 20 years that might be faulty, is that there really was not a lot of rain compared to the wind.
Our yard looked a little like a war zone when daylight revealed Hugo’s handiwork. There were nine trees down, but the trees were polite enough not to hit the house. It left a big cleanup job, and my public service that morning was taking down a broken tree limb from the street’s median and getting it out of the way.
One former Morning News staffer lived in Bishopville, and she had relatives from Charleston come up and spend the night with her to escape the storm. As it turned out, the eye of the storm passed over Bishopville, and winds were still hinting at 100 mph if not quite reaching that level when Hugo blew through that Lee County town.
Not only that, a big tree it toppled in the Bishopville yard came down on the Charleston refugees’ car and ruined it. When the visitors returned to their home, they found Hugo had done no damage to their Charleston property, so their car would still live if they had stayed at home.
Going downtown about 9 a.m., I found an unusually large police presence on downtown streets. There was not heavy property damage in the downtown, but it appeared a small tornado had gone through Timrod Park and left a path of broken and leveled trees.
Utilities were damaged and electric power outages, as I recall, were the biggest post-storm problem. In our neighborhood Carolina Power and Light Co. quickly got lights back on — except for one corner of the neighborhood. That, of course, included us. A transformer had blown, and they could not fix it that day, so over the next night, we were without power.
It took a day or two to get Florence back to normal, but businesses quickly got going again. However, the Florence Little Theatre run of “Mame” was broken by Hugo. The final four performances were postponed until the following Friday through Sunday. It reminded me of the break in FLT’s performances of another show when the great snowfall of 1973 started on an FLT opening night.
Naturally, Hugo was compared to Hazel, the famous 1954 storm that devastated the Grand Strand and did more as it swept inland. Observers said Hazel did more damage up into the Northeast, but it seemed that Hugo still had surprising strength and did unusual damage as far inland as Charlotte.
Lem Winesett wrote in a 1989 Marion Star column that “compared to Hugo, Hazel was a soft breeze out of the east on a hot summer’s evening.“
Charlie Walker, who now writes a Morning News column, wrote in the Kingstree News that on his TV “Hugo looked like a rotten egg that somebody threw on the screen.“
Yeah. Hugo acted like a rotten egg, too, and would not be welcomed back.

— Thom Anderson is a retired journalist who has 40 years experience with South Carolina newspapers, including the Morning News. He can be reached at .