An Ill Wind Remembered

Listening to locals reminisce about Hurricane Hugo and its impact on West Ashley 25 years ago this week, it’s hard to remember that this part of the Lowcountry dodged a hurricane-sized bullet.
On Thursday, Sept. 21, 1989. Hugo, a category-4 hurricane slammed into this country’s eastern seaboard just above Charleston, bringing with it a maximum storm surge of more than 20 feet, and wind-gusts more than 120 miles per hour.
Houses, trees, history, and lives were uprooted and scattered about by the 11th costliest hurricane in American history, which is down three spots from its 20th anniversary, according to the U.S Geological Survey.
Local longtime television meteorologist Tom Crawford rode out the storm at his West Ashley home.
“A Live Oak, probably three feet in diameter, smacked into the second story of my home, and hung there, stuck on the eve,” says Crawford.
“And then the eye came over and I stepped outside for a moment and saw what was going on. Once the backside of the eye hit, it lifted the tree off the eve and it landed on both a/c units.”
Crawford remembers it taking him and a friend weathering the storm with him nearly eight hours to get to the stop sign at the end of the street, about an eighth of a mile away.
“There was a hellacious amount of damage everywhere,” says Crawford, but nothing to match what McLellanville had endured just to the north.
Crawford likens the difference between the winds that ripped across West Ashley and those that hit McLellanville as the difference between 10 seconds in the ring with Mike Tyson and five minutes in the ring with the former heavyweight champ.
“Ten seconds, he’s going to hurt you. But five minutes …”
West Of political columnist Andy Brack remembers hustling down Interstate 26 to help cover Hugo for the Post and Courier. Forty miles outside Charleston, crossing under I-95, he began to sniff the enormity of what had happened.
So many trees had fallen, the wind smelled like a Pine-Sol factory, says Brack. His worst smell-memory was getting back to his Orange Grove Road apartment and finding the fridge open and everything spoiled.
Both remember the weeks before water and power were reconnected, as well as scalpers selling $6 bags of ice on corners. Telephones were gone, too, as everyone functioned well with landlines at the time.
George McDaniel’s timing couldn’t have been much worse. The Atlanta native had accepted the job to become the new director of the Drayton Hall, a National Trust Historic Site mere days before Hugo came ashore.
McDaniel loaded up a trailer with dry ice and water jugs and headed down to see what he could do to help at the job he still holds to this day. George Neil met him at the main entrance off the highway.
“You couldn’t walk down the alley for all the trees that had fallen over and been blown into the path,” says McDaniel, remembering that on the “high” ground at the former plantation, more than 70 percent of the trees were down, mostly pines.
The grand oaks that welcome close to 65,000 visitors to the property had been largely unaffected. “But the ash, the larks, the sweetgums, they were all down,” he recalls, softer trees without spread-out limbs for high winds to pass through and around like the Live Oaks.
It was months before the number of visitors to Drayton Hall flowed above a trickle, McDaniel says, because the city hadn’t even recovered enough to handle visitors.
McDaniel took over the job for good that November, but credits his predecessors, his coworkers, and volunteers for helping the site rebound. Surprisingly, the main house, where the caretakers took refuge from the storm, only lost a few windowpanes and a handful of chimney caps.
Interestingly, the uprooted trees also gave McDaniel a glimpse into the past. Because the site is 250 years old, the 100-year-old trees that were uprooted had literally sprouted and grown through an archeological site.
There in the root-balls of the upended trees were significant artifacts. McDaniel said workers would cut off the tops of trees and haul them off, allow the historians to examine items in the root-ball, and then push it back into the ground for later, more careful excavation.
“We were doing root-ball archaeology!” exclaims McDaniel.
Editorial note: Everyone interviewed for this story all agreed one of the best things that came from Hurricane Hugo is that West Ashley, and the rest of the region, learned to be more prepared for future hurricanes.