A personal account

My feet were getting wet, and it woke me up. The rain was being driven through the screen on the window, near the foot of the bed. I was a heavy sleeper, and it took a lot to wake me up. Now that I was awake, I got up and closed the window. Even in the dark I could see that there was a torrent of rain outside, and the wind was whipping the trees back and forth. There wasn't anything I could do, so I went back to bed and back to sleep.

The power had gone off around 11 o'clock that night, and I went to bed. It was muggy and warm, so I had kicked the covers off and put the window up to get some of the cooler breeze. I had drifted off to sleep before the storm roared over.

My wife woke me at daylight. She had been up all night. I had slept through the whole thing. The "thing" was Hurricane Hugo.

"You need to look outside," she said.

Nobody thought that a hurricane would be much of a problem so far inland. There had been hurricanes that swiped the coast and even a few that had pushed inland, but they lost power rapidly and only caused minor damage in the Midlands.

I had gone to work that day in Orangeburg County. We had a final inspection scheduled for a DOT resurfacing project on Interstate 26. The westbound lane was almost a parking lot, with traffic moving inland and away from the coast at a crawl. We canceled the inspection.

In 1989, nobody had home computers. There was no social media or cellphones. In Paxville, where I lived at the time, there was no cable or satellite TV. Nobody had a generator.

I remember thinking that we might get some trees down and probably lose power. But I didn't think it would be bad. After all, the other hurricanes weren't so bad. That was my experience at the time. I was woefully unprepared for what was to come.

The hurricane made landfall as a Category 4 and was still a Category 2 when it pushed through the Midlands during the night. The devastation was unbelievable.

When I got up the next morning, the first thing I noticed was that the floor was covered in green leaves over the entire house. Our house was in a pecan grove, and the leaves had been stripped from the trees. Only one small window pane, about 8 inches by 10 inches, was blown out. It was in a panel of small windows by the front door. All those leaves had come through that small window. The wind coming through the window pushed the leaves throughout the house. Several big pecan trees were blown down in the yard. Only one had fallen against the house, and our chimney had caught it, without much damage. I had parked our cars out in the front yard, and they were undamaged. The trees that didn't topple lost many large limbs. Of course, we had no power, no water, no ice, no phones. I didn't even have a chainsaw.

I got dressed and walked outside. Our neighborhood looked like a war zone. Most of the nearby houses were damaged, and some were destroyed. I noticed the power poles snapped off at the ground, with the wires and poles lying across the road. All the road signs were bent or broken off at the ground. People were out walking around like zombies, just staring at all the damage. We were in shock.

There was a small pond near our house, and we collected 5-gallon buckets of water to use for flushing the toilet. I had a small camp stove to cook on. We had some candles and a flashlight. Our freezer kept some items frozen for several days. I knew where a hand pump was, at a pond out in the country. My brother David and I took his chainsaw and my pickup filled with 5-gallon buckets out to the pond. We had to cut trees out of the road to get there, but we made it and filled all the buckets with good, clean drinking water. Some of the water splashed out on the way back, but we still had some to use for drinking, cooking and bathing. We made many more trips in the days ahead out to the hand pump. When I went back to work in Orangeburg, I could buy ice over there.

I borrowed a chainsaw and started pulling limbs into piles in the yard. People all over town got to work cleaning up. We didn't wait on the government or anybody else.

I wondered how any of the wildlife could have survived the storm. Almost all of the big pines were broken and snapped off. The bigger hardwoods were tipped over, with the roots pulled up out of the ground. Most of the smaller trees were damaged but survived. I knew it would take years for the woods to recover. I was hopeful that the wildlife would also recover.

We got power back in our neighborhood after 10 days. Some areas went longer. Nowadays, when we hear about a hurricane, my wife, Ginger, and I take it very seriously. We get ready.

Reach Dan Geddings at cdgeddings@gmail.com.