‘Hugo takes no prisoners’

By Bobby Bryant, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net

Thirty years ago, Darlington County was a wreck.

Trees were down on houses. Trees were down in roads. The power was out. Phones were out. Even water service was out in some places.

Grocery-store shelves were stripped bare. Frozen food rotted in dead refrigerators and freezers. Store awnings on Darlington’s Public Square were stripped off. Hundreds of evacuees took shelter at four public schools in the county; all the other schools were shut down.

Some 3,000 homes in the county were damaged; some simply collapsed. Cleanup of the whole mess was going to take two or three months, officials estimated.

This was where we were 30 years ago this week after Hurricane Hugo roared across South Carolina Sept. 21-22, 1989.

“THE LONGEST NIGHT,” the News & Press called it in a headline. Another headline said, “Hugo takes no prisoners.”

“As dusk fell on Sept. 21, a slight wind drifted about and a dancing drizzle dotted car windshields,” the News & Press said in a front-page story recounting how the disaster began. Even though Darlington County “narrowly escaped Hugo’s full fury,” the hurricane still belted the county with 100-mph wind after it made landfall shortly before midnight Sept. 21.

Hugo’s weapon was wind, not flooding (as would be the case with later hurricanes, such as last year’s Florence). “Due to Hugo’s rapid forward speed and relatively large size, hurricane-force winds were able to reach inland areas that almost never see such severe conditions,” the National Weather Service says.

At 2 a.m. Sept. 22, the storm was halfway between Charleston and Sumter, with maximum sustained winds around 100 mph, the Weather Service says. By 5 a.m., Hugo’s center was crossing I-77 between Columbia and Charlotte.

“Winds would eventually gust to an unbelievable 100 mph in Charlotte,” the Weather Service says.

“Hugo’s winds across western North Carolina caused tremendous destruction to a region that virtually never sees such impacts from a tropical system.”

In Darlington County, trees became roadblocks. It was a fallen tree that led to the only death in Darlington County related to Hugo: A Hartsville man, 44-year-old Calvin Jackson, was killed when workers were cutting a large limb off a downed tree and the limb fell on Jackson.

The final tally for Hugo’s destruction, along its entire path, came to about $10 billion in damage and about 80 deaths from the Caribbean to the Carolinas, according to the Weather Service.

“We are like a bunch of ants beneath the feet of a giant,” then-Gov. Carroll Campbell said.

Author: Stephan Drew

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