HUGO'S legacy - South Carolina 10 years after hurricane Hugo

American Forests, Autumn, 1999 by Nancy Anne Dawe

TEN YEARS LATER, CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA. FINDS THE HURRICANE THAT "CHANGED EVERYBODY'S LIFE," CHANGED ITS FOREST - FOR THE BETTER.

When Hurricane Hugo slammed into Charleston, South Carolina, on the night of September 21, 1989, it became - as one observer noted in the Charleston Post and Courier - "an historical marker, a point in time by which we can measure our lives. Because it changed everybody's life. Everybody's."

"Everyone knew there was something ominous about this hurricane," says Danny Burbage, Charleston's superintendent of urban forestry. He flew home from a family vacation when news accounts showed Hugo approaching the Virgin Islands.

Longtime mayor Joseph P. Riley was overseeing the boarding-up of city buildings as Burbage arrived. Riley had planned for this eventuality, readying citizens for the possibility of evacuation and dividing the city into three sections for disaster response. Burbage was placed in charge of one section.

At a site considered safe and equipped with tree-trimming equipment, front-end loaders, and a volunteer staff ready to begin work at first light, "we battened down the hatches and waited," Burbage says.

Along Charleston's outlying Ashley River Road - home to three of Charleston's famous plantations, Drayton Hall, Magnolia Plantation, and Middleton Place - Middleton's horticulturist Sidney Frazier made a note on his desk pad at 2:34 p.m.: "Wind beginning to blow but nothing unusual."

A few miles north of Charleston on Route 17, the rising wind rustled 60- to 80-foot-tall longleaf pines throughout the 252,201-acre Francis Marion National Forest. The stands were so dense then that sight distance into the forest was less than 100 feet.

By 9 p.m., ensconced on the second floor of his building in a windowless interior room, Burbage stared out toward the waterfront as the outside corridor's Plexiglas windows swelled, bubbled, then burst, sending in sheeting rain as humidity rose and barometric pressure fell. Walking out on the roof to look down East Bay Street as the storm started to build, Burbage watched transformers blow one by one in a succession of streaking blue flames. "I've never seen the power of nature like that," he says. "It was frightening."

Relentless winds and rising waters became more vicious, but at midnight all fell still as the storm's eye passed. At Middleton Place, Frazier emerged from his shelter to note, "It was eerie . . . so still, no movement, almost like being deceased."

By daybreak, with the storm over, Mayor Riley pronounced it "a degree of devastation unprecedented in anybody's living memory." Six people died, dozens of houses and buildings collapsed citywide, others afire from natural gas leaks or torn from their foundations and swept out to sea. Electricity was out everywhere. The bridge to Isle of Palms and Sullivan's Island had been ripped from its approaches and dangled in the water. Boats in marinas had been pushed around like matchsticks. They were scattered across roadways and marshes; two rested in the median in front of Charleston Police Headquarters.

At Middleton Plantation many trees were toppled, including one of the nation's largest eastern redcedars, Middleton's oldest southern red oak, and two 90-year-old tea olives. At Drayton Hall, a National Historic Landmark dating to 1738, 60 percent of the trees were downed in public areas. At Magnolia Plantation, owner J. Dayton Hastie crawled through the overarching debris assessing the heartbreaking $1 million damage to his gardens. Among the losses: 250-year-old cypress trees, topped; the world's largest broadleaf holly; and a giant California redwood.

Francis Marion National Forest resembled a war zone. Hugo's winds had wiped out two-thirds of its endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers; felled a billion board feet of lumber, effectively ending the forest's commercial timber production; and destroyed its seed orchard and most recreational facilities.

Back in Charleston, Danny Burbage and crew emerged at dawn, cutting their way down the street. "My first impression was that the Civil War had been fought here again - there were craters in the ground where trees had been. It was impossible to quantify the city's tree loss. They were mixed with roofs, utility poles, and all sorts of things. I felt this 300-year-old city where I was born and where my family had been for 300 years was destroyed. But there was also this sense that 'we've got to get this done!'"

Working seven days a week, 13 hours a day for the first four or five weeks, Burbage's crew cleared a path along the main roads to allow emergency equipment through, then worked with local utilities to clear access to electric lines. Next they created passageways curb to curb, then worked on public areas, such as parks.

In terms of the trees, exotics like fruit trees were the hardest hit. Storm survivors - including palmettos, live oaks, cypress, and hackberry - did well because their genetic precursors had endured hurricanes before.