COLUMBIA, S.C. — From evacuating hundreds of thousands of people from the coast to live TV coverage in the shrieking wind and rain, 1989’s Hurricane Hugo might have been the first U.S. storm of the modern age.
When it slammed into South Carolina just minutes before midnight on Sept. 21, 1989, Hugo’s 135 mph winds made it the strongest storm to hit the U.S. in 20 years and its $9.5 billion of damage made it the costliest storm in the nation’s history.
The 20-foot wall of water that surged inland just north of where the eye made landfall in Charleston is still an Atlantic Coast record.
Hugo has been surpassed over the past 30 years both in strength and damage by a other hurricanes — from Andrew to Katrina to Harvey and Michael.
But the Category 4 hurricane has few peers, especially in South Carolina where it gouged a wide path of damage from expensive beachfront homes on the Isle of Palms to the thousands of trees toppled in Charlotte, North Carolina.
“I’ll never forget the look on the governor’s face when he got off the phone with the Hurricane Center and they said it wasn’t changing course and was just getting stronger,” said Warren Tompkins, chief of staff for Gov. Carroll Campbell, who died in 2005.
“His face was as white as a sheet. He said ‘It might go to Cat 5 and it’s going to hit the whole coast and we are going to be wiped out. We probably ought to pray,'” Tompkins said.
Hugo had a history before South Carolina. The storm crippled and nearly crashed a Hurricane Hunter plane as a Category 5 east of the Caribbean. It destroyed 85 percent of the buildings on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands and killed 12 people and did $1 billion in damage to Puerto Rico.
Those images were beamed back to South Carolina, where the fear of a growing storm in the warm Gulf Stream waters off the coast led Gov. Campbell to an unprecedented decision. Instead of allowing local beach governments do their own evacuations, he issued a statewide evacuation order.
People had 24 hours or less to evacuate because Hugo was closing in fast. Nearly 250,000 people left. Campbell briefly reversed all lanes of Interstate 26 out of Charleston when it appeared people would be caught on the highway in the storm.
Thirteen people in South Carolina died in the storm. Even though the ocean washed over Isle of Palms none of the barrier island’s 3,700 residents were killed. They had nearly all left.
“We lost more people after the storm than during the storm,” former State Law Enforcement Division Chief Robert Stewart said. “Fires, electrocutions, trying to cut down trees.”
Twenty-two people died cleaning up after Hugo in South Carolina.
