Twenty years ago today, Hurricane Hugo was heading toward the South Carolina coast. It would land as a Category 4 storm on midnight between Sept. 21 and Sept. 22, shattering lives and leaving a long road of recovery in its wake.

Statewide, the hurricane caused an estimated $6 billion in damages and killed 29 people.

Contrary to what Orangeburg County Emergency Management Services Director John Smith says is popular belief, Hugo didn’t stop at the coast.

“All of the state’s assets were going to Charleston. They were getting the immediate attention. A lot of resources were going to Charleston because that’s what you saw on the TV. Nobody knew about Orangeburg,” Smith said.

On the eastern end of Orangeburg County, residents were left without power for weeks.

One man, Samuel Middleton, was killed after the hurricane picked up his mobile home and crushed him. Six people died in fires started by candles after the storm.

n Getting ready

Smith had only been on the job for five years as Hugo gathered momentum in the Atlantic Ocean.

Traditionally, hurricanes are mostly a coastal problem, he said.

“But this was a big one. This was like the Katrina of its time or the Andrew of its time,” he said. “We were right in the sights, right on the path. It was not going to stop on the coast.”

People as far away as the Charlotte area even experienced hurricane-force winds, he said.

It was the public perception that Hugo wouldn’t cause large-scale damage in Orangeburg that worried then-Assistant County Administrator Donnie Hilliard.

“That’s something I can remember today. The (public’s) response was very weak,” Hilliard said.

Orangeburg County officials set up 18 shelters across the county. Smith said they even set up a special needs shelter at Whittaker Elementary School for people with medical conditions. At the time, he said that was an innovation in the field.

“I remember the night of the storm. I was out checking on shelters and whether they were adequate. We were dismayed people didn’t show up to the shelters. We didn’t know if it was us or what,” Hilliard said.

Looking back today, Hilliard said the fact that only one person in the county died during the actual storm was a miracle.

Calhoun County Council Chairman David Summers said the day before Hugo’s arrival featured very pretty, clear skies.

A group of about 20 “old fellas” met at Keith Hildebrand’s gas station on U.S. Highway 601 to eat catfish stew. Summers said the group sat around, ate an excellent stew and discussed the coming storm.

As the day went on, Summers noticed a large group of cars were heading away from where Hugo would eventually hit.

Summers noted those who took U.S. Highways 1 and 176 instead of Interstate 26 saved a lot of travel time that day.

However, he says many didn’t know where they were. Some of those misguided travelers came to Summers for help and he happily obliged.

“They were just so confused,” he said.

The blue skies on Thursday, Sept. 21, 1989, would be replaced with a far different climate very soon.

Hours later back in Orangeburg, Hilliard was making his final check on the shelter in Norway.

As Hilliard and former County Administrator Gary Smoak drove back, the streets were quiet. They came across a large limb in the middle of the highway.

“The tree limb was tough for two men to move,” Hilliard said.

At that point, everything that could have been done had been done. All they could do is wait.

n The storm

Retired Holly Hill School District 3 Superintendent Dr. David Longshore says the fact that Hugo came through the area after midnight probably saved lives.

But he noted that didn’t stop massive devastation to his schools.

Longshore, however, was lucky. He only lost some roof shingles at his Orangeburg residence.

Meanwhile, Hilliard finally went home.

“Individually, I was somewhat concerned,” he said.

With Hilliard and his family bunkered down, they all went to sleep.

He estimates sometime between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. Friday, he awoke to hear heavy rainfall and howling winds.

But then it suddenly become calm with what Hilliard described as “an operating room quietness.

“All of a sudden, it cranked back up again.”

In Calhoun County, Summers recalled, “It seemed like the wind wasn’t going to quit roaring. It was something else.”

During the storm, Summers looked out through his shutters and thought to himself that all his pecan trees would be uprooted by the morning. When he awoke, he discovered three of his four pecan trees were no longer standing in the yard.

Calhoun Academy head basketball coach Scott Weaver was 6 years old at the time. He still remembers when the electricity went off.

“I had this feeling of ‘Are we going to be here tomorrow?’ A real uncertain feeling,” he said.

Meanwhile, Smith and other emergency workers were just beginning their work.

Accompanying Smith and his staff in a makeshift office at the bottom of the Orangeburg County Courthouse were officials from the state Department of Social Services and the American Red Cross.

He remembered one lady frantically called in seeking help.

“She was pleading with us to come get her. We simply couldn’t do it. It was right in the middle of the storm,” Smith said.

Smith said he talked to the woman, told her to go to the bathroom, get in the tub and cover herself with blankets.

Luckily, Smith said he didn’t hear of a fatality involving a woman the next morning.

To make matters worse, Smith said his office started having intermittent power outages. But the office was able to safely make it through the night.

At daybreak, it was time to assess the damage.

“We couldn’t feel a sense of relief at that point because we didn’t know what happened,” Smith said.

n The aftermath

Weaver said, “I do remember waking up and seeing trees down. Everyone’s yard was messed up. We got real lucky, but others didn’t.”

His family’s property got away with having a only few trees uprooted in the backyard. Weaver also recalls power lines being on the ground and going a few weeks without electricity.

“You really didn’t know what was going on. It was pretty much just you and your family with no contact with the outside world,” he said. “I was furious about the TV being off.”

Former state Rep. John Felder of St. Matthews toured every area of his district to assess the situation. He vividly recalls the damage surrounding Lake Marion.

“You’re really talking about a true disaster. ... When the thing hit the water, it picked up speed. That was a true crisis time,” he said.

The morning after Hugo, Summers drove with a friend to Columbia to buy a portable television.

“I got the last one they had. ... As a matter of fact, I still have it,” he said.

A lot of people were scouring for food, Summers said. He thinks that’s because some didn’t take Hugo as seriously as they should have.

In Holly Hill, Longshore faced the difficult task of getting his schools back online. All of the district’s nine schools sustained roof damage. Vance Primary School was never operational after Hugo.

“I think we were all just in awe of the devastation,” he said.

To get the schools back in session, Longshore assembled what he labeled his “Hugo Team.” That team met in Longshore’s office without any lights or air conditioning. He said the cooperation within the community was a blessing in that difficult time.

“It was unfortunate that it takes times like those to bring people together. I remember how well people worked to get those schools back up and get the community back up and rolling,” he said.

Their idea was to bring back students in grades K-12 first and then resume pre-kindergarten classes once the space became available. He said it took two weeks after the storm to do that.

Longshore noted his district had between 3,000 and 4,000 students in it at the time. Even before Hugo, he thought the district had too many schools given the number of students it taught.

While stressing that Hugo was a horrible chapter in the county’s history, he said Hugo did facilitate the reorganization of the district into five schools.

He said things probably didn’t get back to normal until 1995, when all those schools were renovated.

Longshore said most classrooms were being housed in portable trailers up until then.

“It took years,” he said.

The need for relief on the eastern end of Orangeburg County was great, Hilliard said.

He recalled it took him four hours to drive from Orangeburg to Eutawville the morning after Hugo because most roads were impassable. The county got emergency crews to clear roads blocked by Hugo’s debris.

“This was something we never encountered before. To have that many people in immediate need was tough,” Hilliard said.

Smith said the county wasn’t able to gain access to entire subdivisions in eastern Orangeburg County following Hugo.

“Several hundred mobile homes were destroyed. Trees were down everywhere. We had areas where power was out for three weeks. ... We just couldn’t get down roads to check on people,” Smith said. “We were faced with a huge amount of problems. People didn’t have power. People didn’t have food. They didn’t have ice. The public water systems weren’t working. My first day was 72 hours long before I could rest.”

Then an interesting idea dawned on county officials. They contacted the local 4-H chapter and Clemson University Extension officials to obtain horses so they could get relief to those areas.

Hilliard and Smith said the task of managing the relief effort was extensive.

For example, Hilliard noted the line to get assistance from the S.C. Department of Social Services was a mile and half long.

“We were available to those citizens. We prioritized the elderly and young people. Those were some of the pains we went through. Everyone saw themselves as in need,” he said.

Smith said the county had to cope with the fact that a majority of the resources were going to coastal areas. He recalled one trucker carrying supplies stopped in Orangeburg and asked for directions to Charleston.

“We need help down here,” Smith said.

“I didn’t know,” the trucker said.

Hugo caused many sewer systems in the county to become backed up. Smith said he could only find one generator to solve that problem for several towns. Town officials in areas like Vance would have to use that single generator for each sewer lift station to clear up the waste. When one town’s sewer system was fixed, the next town got the generator, Smith said.

Farmers also wanted generators to get their farms operational again. However, Smith noted the state prohibited the use of its generators for private businesses.

“We caught a lot of flak after the storm because we had to do what the rules said. There was a perception then that all we had to do was call the military or call FEMA (Federal Emergency Relief Agency) and they would just shower us with everything we needed. Well, I think 20 years later we all see that still doesn’t happen,” he said.

Hilliard estimated it took six months for things to return to normal. However, he said it was about two years before all the debris was cleaned up.

“I’d be more than happy to retire without another Hugo,” Smith said.

n Cooperation and frustration

One issue facing Orangeburg County emergency officials was not having enough phone lines to handle the enormous volume of calls coming in. Smith said there were only two or three phones working at his office following the hurricane.

Then, Belk-Hudson department store owner E.O. Hudson walked in and asked if there was anything he could do to help. Smith didn’t know who Hudson was at the time.

“About an hour later, he came back with another man and they brought a multi-line phone system from somewhere. They were down on their hands and knees running wires. It created a lot more flexibility,” Smith said.

Felder said such cooperation was seen across the state following Hugo.

He pointed out the General Assembly and the Governor’s Office worked in concert with private organizations and churches to get people the help they needed.

The solid work to get things done between the late Republican Gov. Carroll Campbell and former Lt. Gov. Nick Theodore, a Democrat, really showed how government should operate, Felder said.

But getting relief from the federal government was anything but a smooth operation, he said.

“I remember writing letters and making phone calls. It was frustrating,” Felder said.

He called Hugo “a true disaster” that warranted stronger federal relief efforts. He noted the areas surrounding Lake Marion, particularly Clarendon County, were devastated.

The state was only reimbursed by FEMA for 75 percent of the damage Hugo caused, while the federal government fully reimbursed Florida and Louisiana for Hurricane Andrew’s impact in 1992.

“There were some failures of government in getting money for farmers, housing and getting some of the emergency relief funding down. It was mostly about funding. They would make promises. It took some arm twisting to get it,” Felder said.

It was a very emotional time that did have a small but significant silver living, Felder said.

“We all saw some of the best in government,” Felder said. “It was truly a challenging part of my life.”

Former Orangeburg County Councilman Danny Covington allowed the county to use a few acres of his property between Eutawville and Holly Hill to burn off debris from Hugo.

Hilliard said the county landfill was overloaded with the debris Hugo left behind. He noted the cost to transport debris from eastern Orangeburg County was very expensive. But Covington stepped up to the plate and offered his help.

“We used to call it the ‘Hugo bonfire.’ Without him, I don’t know what we would have done with all the debris,” Hilliard said.

“I’ve never seen a fire this hot burn for this long,” Covington said. “It burned for a couple of months.”

Covington said the county did an excellent job keeping the fire under control. County employees had to go through and separate what could be burned from what couldn’t.

Today, what was the site of the Hugo bonfire has been replaced with pine trees and a soybean field.

n Keeping people in the know

The effort to get an edition of The Times and Democrat published on Saturday, Sept. 22, 1989, was truly a unique endeavor.

With the power out at the T&D on Friday, the effort to get the paper out was orchestrated on two fronts.

T&D Editor Lee Harter led the news side at the newspaper’s Broughton Street office. Meanwhile, then-T&D Advertising Director Cathy Hughes, who is now the newspaper’s publisher, and a few other employees produced the weekend’s advertising copy at her North home.

Both Harter and Hughes recalled leaving The T&D that Thursday night before the storm hit.

“We got Friday’s paper out and those of us who worked days went home and started preparing our homes for the hurricane,” Hughes said.

Harter remembered waking up to a few trees being down in his yard that Friday morning.

“I had to pretty much up and leave my family at the time. I can remember riding to the newspaper and seeing power lines down. Orangeburg was hit pretty bad. There was no power,” Harter said.

He arrived to find a team of reporters ready to work. On the back steps of The T&D, they coordinated a plan to cover Hugo.

“I still didn’t how the paper was going out,” he said.

Hughes said she was surprised there was no power at The T&D that morning.

“Almost casually, I related that I had electricity at my home in North and then we started mobilizing,” Hughes said.

The next move was to load vehicles up with the supplies needed to produce advertising for the weekend editions of the newspaper. That group headed off to Hughes’ house.

Harter said The T&D borrowed a generator from the city fire station next door. That generator powered two computers, a printer and a lamp.

As reporters came in with their handwritten stories, other staffers typed them into the computer, printed them out and pasted them on pages.

The T&D was able to get copy and photos from The Associated Press by sending employees to both Columbia and Aiken.

“We put together a newspaper that was a real hodgepodge of what the normal paper would look like. It looked anything but normal but this was no normal day,” Harter said.

Back at Hughes’ house, her team set up shop on top of a pool table. Hughes’ daughter Holley baked the group some chocolate chip cookies as they furiously produced ads. Her other daughter, Kelley, initially thought Hughes brought people back to the house to pick up limbs that fell during the storm.

“As I recall, we got everything done for the weekend,” Hughes said.

Dean Livingston was publisher of the newspaper during Hugo. Through collective efforts he led, the newspaper was able to print a Saturday edition with the assistance of the Bamberg-based Advertising Herald, which allowed The T&D use of its press.

“These are the times you look back and you’re glad you worked at a newspaper, as hard as it was at the time,” Hughes said.

By Saturday, power was restored at The T&D.

Harter pointed out The Item newspaper in Sumter sent its entire staff over to Orangeburg during the weekend so that newspaper was able to produce a Sunday edition.

“The paper got out. A lot of them, I think, got delivered. It was probably a pretty reassuring thing to people at the time,” he said.

n Not business as usual

Three years after Hugo, Rocks Pond Campground owner Rut Connor highlighted the fact that the storm had lasting effects in the Lake Marion area.

According to a 1992 T&D article, his business received a $500,000 FEMA relief loan at a 4 percent interest rate. Connor said then he could have done a lot more with the money had he gotten it sooner. Debris still remained long after that money was spent, he said.

Connor said his business lost a million dollars in revenue. He had to invest several million dollars to repair the ravaged marina.

Even in the months following the hurricane, business owners near Lake Marion experienced a significant drop in revenue.

An October 1989 T&D article noted that Cypress Shores Marina and Restaurant near Eutawville financially also felt Hugo’s wrath.

“It has discouraged a lot of tourists. ... Some have canceled. ... Some came and complained they couldn’t catch a fish, but others are catching fish,” Cypress Shores co-owner Winnie Noller said then. “We’re not doing well at all. ... Everybody just figures we’re off the map, but we’re not.”

Hugo stirred up the bottom of the lake, causing long-submerged logs to float to the top. Santee Cooper sent three large barges to remove the logs and other debris from the lake, the article said.

False rumors that a majority of the fish on Lake Marion were dead did little to help a bad situation for marinas and campgrounds.

State and local tourism officials vigorously attempted to change the perception that the lake area was closed for business.

At Santee Cooper Country Club, more than 3,000 trees were knocked down on the course. It reopened later that year. Golfers were still able to play at Lake Marion Golf Course, Santee National and then-Sigfield Golf Resort soon after Hugo hit the area.

And farmers didn’t escape Hugo’s destruction either. Prior to the storm, farmers in the state were experiencing a drought.

In an address to the Orangeburg Rotary Club in 1989, former S.C. Commissioner of Agriculture Les Tindal said for many farmers, Hugo was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

He said fewer than 10 percent of South Carolina farmers carried federal crop insurance then due to high premiums.

A Clemson University report put the state’s crop losses at $96 million due to Hugo. Those figures didn’t include an estimated $222 million in damages to farm equipment and buildings.

The Clemson report also said that the storm knocked out 14 percent of South Carolina’s timber, which amounts to slightly over $1 billion.

House Minority Leader Harry Ott, D-St. Matthews, a farmer, said he lost half of his corn crop during Hugo.

“Luckily, it didn’t hurt the cotton crop too much. We kind of dodged the bullet on that one,” Ott said.

T&D Staff Writer Lee Tant can be reached by e-mail at ltant@timesanddemocrat.com or by phone at 803-534-1060. Discuss this and other stories online at TheTandD.com.

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