Remember that well. I was in Puerto Rico when hit. The entire green island turned brown. It sucked.

Some of my employees and I came back from lunch the day before and one of my
secretaries told us about a hurricane heading for Charlotte. We all laughed. We
all spent the next 10 to 14 days without power and chain sawing large trees.

I had just started at Newberry and just joined both the local volunteer fire department and local rescue squad. Since I had no training I couldn't do anything but I went to the fire station anyway. We didn't get anywhere near the weather that areas east and southeast of us got, but I remember how hard it was trying to sleep that night with the sound of the apparatus bay doors beating like bass drums. For the damage it did I have always felt we lucked out that it maintained it's forward motion speed. Had it slowed once it hit the coast the damage would have been much, much more.

Just SE of us Lexington County lost a fire engine when a huge pine tree fell on it while they were responding to a call. Luckily nobody was hurt, but the engine was totaled.

For the next week I went to the station after classes to bag ice. One of the local businesses parked a freezer truck on our back pad and we packed it with bags of ice twice to send down to the coast.

Hard to believe it's been a quarter century now, and even harder to believe that's the last serious storm to hit our coast.

Hugo .... Destroyed Charleston National golf course. It would have been something very special if it weren't for Hugo.


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I remember that time. I lived in eastern NC at the time and school was cancelled. Cool thing was it was sunny and warm the entire day school was cancelled since the storm went south and west of us. We played wiffle ball almost the entire day. Good times.