Hurricane Hugo came ashore at Sullivan’s Island, just north of Charleston, around midnight on the night of September 21–22, 1989, as a Category 4 storm with sustained winds estimated at 135 to 140 miles an hour. It drove the highest storm tide ever measured on the East Coast, about 20 feet at Bulls Bay, then ran northwest across the state past Lake Moultrie and west of Sumter and was near Charlotte by 5 a.m. Thirty-five people died in South Carolina. The damage ran to about $7 billion, which made it the costliest hurricane in the country’s history at the time. Dorchester County was one of 24 South Carolina counties in the presidential disaster declaration.
When and where did Hugo make landfall?
The National Weather Service office in Charleston puts landfall at Sullivan’s Island about midnight, 0400 UTC on September 22. Central pressure was 934 millibars. The eye was about 30 nautical miles across when it crossed the coast. The strongest winds were likely over Bulls Bay, where there was no instrument to record them. Downtown Charleston recorded a gust of 108 mph, Folly Beach 107, and the North Charleston airport 98.
The storm had peaked as a Category 5 in the open Atlantic on September 15, weakened over the Caribbean, and regained Category 4 strength over the Gulf Stream on September 21. The Carolinas got a hurricane watch 30 hours before landfall. About 264,000 people in eight coastal counties evacuated.
How high was the surge?
Highest on record for the East Coast. The Weather Service lists peak storm tides of 19.8 feet at Bulls Bay, 15.0 at Isle of Palms, 13.0 at Sullivan’s Island, 11.9 at Folly Beach, and 10.4 in downtown Charleston, all above mean sea level. Wikipedia cites 20.2 feet at Seewee Bay south of McClellanville. At Lincoln High School in McClellanville, a shelter believed to sit 20 feet above the sea took six feet of water because the elevation maps were wrong. Rainfall was modest for a storm that size: 10.28 inches at Edisto Island was the most anywhere in the continental United States.
Where did Hugo go after Charleston?
Inland, fast. The Colleton County emergency fact sheet traces the track just north of Charleston, past Lake Moultrie, west of Sumter, through Chester and York counties, and to Charlotte by 5 a.m. It was still a hurricane until just west of Charlotte, where it dropped to tropical storm strength around dawn; hurricane-force gusts reached western North Carolina. Two tornadoes touched down, one in western Sumter County and one near Kershaw.
The track ran up through Berkeley County, which left Dorchester on the storm’s western side, close enough to the center that the whole county was inside the hurricane-force wind field. The power went out everywhere east of Interstate 95, by SCE&G’s account; the utility had 300,000 customers dark and took 18 days to get them all back, and Santee Cooper lost service to 99 percent of its customers.
What did it do in Dorchester County?
The record is thinner here than on the coast, because the coast took the water. Dorchester was among the 24 counties declared a federal disaster area. Of the 24 deaths South Carolina counted in the storm’s aftermath, five were heart attacks suffered by people surveying damage in Dorchester County. A Live 5 News retrospective describes a Summerville couple watching it bear down on their neighborhood from inside their house. Beyond that, the local record is in photographs and memory more than in published numbers, and this page does not invent any.
Up at Four Holes Swamp, the Audubon Society’s Francis Beidler Forest took the wind full on. Audubon’s magazine says Hugo snapped pines in half, uprooted the larger trees including oaks, and smashed long sections of the boardwalk through the old-growth cypress. The staff rebuilt it. One of them said afterward that the storm made them see that a single hurricane changed the forest more than “a thousand years of succession.” The thousand-year-old cypress, mostly, stood.
What were the timber losses?
The largest in the state’s history. The Colleton fact sheet puts it at more than 6.7 billion board feet of timber across 4.5 million acres, about 36 percent of South Carolina’s woodland, valued at $1.04 billion. Wikipedia lists six counties where more than 90 percent of timberland was damaged: Berkeley, Clarendon, Florence, Lee, Sumter, and Williamsburg. Berkeley is the county next door.
In the Francis Marion National Forest, 70 to 75 percent of the marketable trees went down, and the Weather Service says commercial logging there ended for good. Salvage of the downed pine was largely abandoned after pulpwood prices collapsed under the glut. A 1990 SCETV documentary on the loss explains why: fungus discolors the wood within weeks, beetles and termites follow, and after that the trees are only fuel for the next fire.
How many people died, and what did it cost?
South Carolina’s official count is 35 deaths, 13 direct and 22 indirect. Berkeley County had eight, the most of any county in the Carolinas. Five people drowned trying to move boats up the Cooper River. Totals for the whole storm, from the Caribbean north, vary by source from 49 to 107.
Damage in South Carolina was put at $5.9 billion in property by SCE&G and about $6.5 billion by the state; the national figure most often used is $7 billion. The storm destroyed more than 5,000 homes in the state and left about 12,000 uninhabitable; 60,000 people were temporarily homeless and 270,000 out of work. The Red Cross ran 191 shelters holding nearly 90,000 people at the peak and fed people for 30 days. FEMA housed 30,000 storm victims, and the last 243 families stayed in mobile homes until April 1990. Crop losses topped $2 billion.
What changed after Hugo
Afterward the state wrote a hurricane plan it updates every year, built search-and-rescue teams it did not have in 1989, and adopted the FEMA rules that put McClellanville’s new houses on stilts. Berkeley and Dorchester counties together have nearly doubled in population since 1990, to more than 400,000 people.
The pines that came down in Summerville were replaced by pines. The county has not changed its mind about them.
The dispatches on this site are set in a county that still dates things from Hugo. The county history page puts the storm beside the earthquake of 1886, and the county map shows how far inland the water does not reach. See also /history/, /map/, and /the-edisto-keeps-its-own/.
Sources
- Hurricane Hugo – Wikipedia
- Hurricane Hugo, September 1989 – National Weather Service, Charleston
- Hurricane Hugo 25th anniversary fact sheet – Colleton County Emergency Management (PDF)
- Hurricane Hugo struck South Carolina 35 years ago today – Post and Courier
- Timber and Hugo: The Billion Dollar Loss (1990) – SCETV Classics
- The Enchanted Forest – Audubon Magazine, Jan–Feb 2011
- Hurricane Hugo coverage index – Live 5 News
- 36 years later: Remembering Hurricane Hugo – WIS