Remembering Hugo: The Aftermath

In the hours following the storm, then-County Fire Chief Carter Jones was busy mobilizing his men. “We lost radio contact and when daylight came, we began to get verbal reports of people trapped in mobile homes and houses that were crushed,” Jones said. “We began to gather crews with chainsaws, and cut our way out of the city.” Jones most remembered the goodwill shown to the residents of Clarendon County, and to other communities in South Carolina. In fact, he didn’t have all the manpower needed to distribute aid. “When people began to send in relief supplies, we didn’t have the manpower to unload all of it,” he said. “We had to utilize the firefighters, inmates from the correctional centers and community groups like the Boy Scouts. One guy brought a tractor full of crushed ice, which we needed, but there was nothing to put the ice in. Another guy brought a trailer full of water, but there wasn’t a way to get it out and the firefighters had to make a spout for it.” Dr. Sylvia Clark, then superintendent for Clarendon School District 2, had made a call to close schools for just two days. But it would be at least two weeks before students would return to their classrooms. Clark had been in Charleston with her husband at the Medical University of South Carolina, and had been ordered to leave as “non-essential personnel” as Hugo came barreling into the lowcountry. “Driving home, I had a telephone in my car,” she said. “With the telephone in my car, I talked to the people in the school district, and we agreed to go ahead and shut down school for Thursday and Friday. By the time I got home that afternoon, the school district offices were getting ready to close.” By herself in her home during the storm, she spent her night under a coffee table. “The chimneys fell on the slate roof, and I thought the whole world was coming in on top of me,” she said. “All the schools were badly damaged. It was 11 school days before we opened the schools again. Manning High School’s Ramsey Stadium was hardest hit: Hugo blew down the scoreboard and moved stadium lights and an entire set of bleachers on the visitor’s side. “The one thing that really blew my mind was that the visitor’s side bleachers, which are made out of concrete, had been lifted and moved and we had to have cranes come in to put them back together in the right place,” Clark said. “That was the power of that storm, that it literally lifted up the bleachers on the visitor’s side of the football stadium. The late John Bassard told The Manning Times in 2009 that he spent the majority of the two to three weeks after Hugo at Manning High School, where he was principal in 1989. “We opened the school because people were coming in who didn’t have houses anymore,” he said. “We issued some of the food in the school’s freezer because it was going to go bad without electricity. It was like a campground. The gym was set up as a shelter. The town didn’t have a designated shelter at that time because we had never experienced anything like this before.” When schools reopened two weeks later, some were still without water. “Manning got water back eventually, but when we opened school at Alcolu Elementary, they still didn’t have water service,” Clark said. The National Guard brought in a ‘water buffalo,’ which is a trailer full of water, and that’s what we used to operate the kitchen. We had water containers in the classrooms. We used paper cups and plates because we couldn’t run the dishwashers.” Clark said it was important to get the schools up and running as soon as possible to “get the kids back into a routine and out of their trauma.” Still, attendance dwindled in the first few days back. “The first two or three days after school started back, we only had about 20 to 25 percent of the kids return,” Bassard said. “Many of them had lost so much and it was still difficult for many of them to get to school. The teachers and the students had to adjust to losing so much.” Aside from the human drama left in Hugo’s wake, the storm rendered utter devastation to one of its key products – timber. About 36 percent of South Carolina’s 12.2 million acres of forest were damaged by Hugo, and Clarendon County Council Chairman Dwight Stewart, a registered forester, was in his office just three days after the storm writing a letter to many of his clients. “I am sitting in my office,” he wrote in 1989. “I have no lights or telephone. It has been three days since Hurricane Hugo passed through our area. Everywhere I look there is destruction. No stand of timber has been spared. The remaining standing trees are pointing southwest, cowering like a timid dog before a harsh master. Everyone I see has a look of disbelief. The conversations are all the same: ‘Can you believe it? What are we going to do?’” Stewart knew his business might be in trouble when he spotted felled trees at his own home in Summerton. “Where there were trees, we could not see areas that we couldn’t see before the storm,” he said. “We were walking over to my wife’s sister’s house and there was a big stand of hardwood trees that were completely blown down.” Even an ice storm in 2004, and two just weeks apart in 2014 haven’t come close to making the dent that Hugo did, Stewart said earlier this year after Winter Storm Pax felled trees in February that are still being cleaned-up in May. “There has been a lot of talk that it’s like Hugo, with the electricity being out for days, or in some cases more than a week, for some people, but for the timber industry, it was nothing like Hugo,” Stewart said. He said foresters now take an active role in maintaining their timber banks through clear-cutting and replanting to avoid another disaster like Hugo. “I think that Hugo taught us to look at things differently,” he said. “That’s why winter storms like the ones we saw this year, while they aren’t a good thing, aren’t nearly as devastating.” Hugo also changed the way counties across the state handle emergency preparedness. While 2014 was not forecasted as a busy hurricane season for our area, Clarendon County Emergency Services Director Anthony Mack always stresses that residents should be prepared. “Residents should always hope for the best, but prepare for the worst,” he said. “They need to have adequate shelter, or know where a county shelter is.” During the second ice storm of 2014, the county opened a shelter in the Clarendon County Community Center, the gymnasium behind Weldon Auditorium. Manning Mayor Julia Nelson also has city council looking at shelter options should disaster strike again. While the probability for one major hurricane to make landfall this year is about 35 percent, according to the Colorado State University report, the forecast still calls for nine named storms, three hurricanes and one major hurricane. “People need to monitor weather reports as frequently as they can,” Mack said. “If there is a storm coming this way, they need to make sure they have non-perishable food, water and other badly needed items. If they can evacuate, they should. Precaution and preparation are the two things that will save lives and make dealing with the aftermath of a storm much easier.”