Eddie Marie White walked into the Post newsroom the other day carrying a tote bag full of newspapers.
They all dealt with Hugo, the hurricane that walloped us so hard 20 years ago. She had read the Post was looking back at the storm, and she thought the local newspapers she had saved in the bottom of a dresser drawer might help.
Someone sent Eddie Marie over to my desk, the top of which was filled with clippings from the same newspapers she had saved.
It hurt a bit to tell her I had all the Hugo information I needed ó in fact, the same stuff she had.
Eddie Marie, who is 80 now, recalled how she cooked those days after Hugo hit with LP gas because her home off N.C. 150 didn’t have power. She ate off paper plates and relied on candles, flashlights and kerosene lamps for light at night.
The storm damaged her roof and broke some windows, sending her into a front room. Thankfully, her children, then in their 20s, were with her.
“I wrote in the Bible that was the worst storm I had ever seen,” Eddie Marie recalled.
– – –
Hugo unleashed its wind and rain on Rowan County about 5 a.m. Sept. 22, 1989, and much of the damage occurred over the next two hours.
Reporters, including me, dipped into our supply of dramatic phrases to describe Hugo’s force.
We said it flattened homes, twisted bridges, snapped trees like matchsticks, popped power lines and drove boats aground.
We spoke of its path of destruction with winds in excess of 80 mph.
Driving through the county that morning when it was still dark, Post photographers saw the flashes of blue sparking against the sky each time a tree fell into a power line.
Most of us went to bed Sept. 21 skeptical that Hugo could have much impact on Rowan County. We thought we were too far inland.
The hurricane barreled into Charleston, S.C., at midnight and severely damaged communities up and down the coast. Then it kept going, cutting a northwest swath across South Carolina. By the time Hugo reached Charlotte, it still carried hurricane-force winds.
The storm proved to be relentless, eventually pounding Rowan County and holding together an extremely long time. Old-timers who remembered the high winds and torrents of rain connected with Hazel in 1954 said Hugo was worse. Much worse.
Too far inland? We’ll probably never make that mistake again.
– – –
Linda Shuffler’s family came to her house off Safrit Road, thinking it would be safer than their mobile homes close by.
She and her husband, Gene, had built the house new in 1986, and Gene’s son and his wife, Linda’s sister and her husband and their two small children eventually ended up there to wait out Hugo.
Gene worked for Wagoner Construction at the time and was on a job in Columbia, S.C.
That morning as the storm approached, Linda tried to console her sister, who was petrified. They soon heard the first tree hit the house.
Water came running into a rear bedroom where Linda’s nephews were sleeping, so the whole family moved to a central hallway. The women literally lay on top of the small boys and listened as tree after tree fell around them.
Two more red oaks hit the house. One fell across the garage without hurting two vehicles inside. The other tree hit the front bedroom, breaking out windows.
Linda says the terrible sounds lasted about 20 minutes.
“You could hear the trees falling ó bam, bam, bam,” she recalls today.
The Shufflers lost more than 25 oaks whose trunks were so big two people couldn’t put their arms around them.
“You couldn’t even see our house from the road,” Linda says.
The family was without power for 10 days. The cleanup required 27 dump-truck loads, and repairs to the house cost about $10,000.
“But we were so blessed because no one was hurt,” Linda says.
– – –
Once the storm had moved on the morning of Sept. 22, people emerged to a different world.
I wrote back then it was like God had wielded a giant hair blower.
Hugo hit on a Friday, and Rowan County schools didn’t reopen until Tuesday.
Trees had squashed homes, cars, trucks, outbuildings, porches, decks ó even cows.
Power lines dangled from poles and trees like limp spaghetti. Roof shingles were scattered across the county. Glass from broken windows glistened in the afternoon sun. Crops lay on their sides in farmers’ fields.
Like a can opener, Hugo stripped off countless metal roofs.
Power outages forced local radio stations off the air.
Even Duke Power’s operational headquarters on North Main Street was out of juice.
Salisbury faced a water emergency because of the lack of electricity to its Yadkin River pump station. The city’s biggest industrial water users had to shut down for the weekend until the water supply was replenished.
The back-up generator to the county’s Emergency Operations Center wouldn’t work. And a blown circuit in Charlotte led to the loss of 911 emergency telephone service here.
All of the city’s 84 traffic lights were out.
Pieces of skylights from a $1 million roof at Spencer Shops lay on Salisbury Avenue.
The roof of the Community Building (today’s Rowan Museum) was a tangled heap on West Council Street.
Hurley Elementary School lost a roof over six classrooms.
Some of the at-home patrol cars of sheriff’s deputies were blocked in by fallen trees.
nnn
Gene Watson says it happened one, two, three.
His power went off about 6 a.m., the wind roared in and his cherished white oak tree was down.
The only remnant was a mammoth stump, which from his kitchen window looked like a front-yard statue.
Hugo had taken Rowan County’s oldest and largest white oak, where Confederate soldiers had once sought the shade it provided off Sherrills Ford Road.
By 1989, the tree’s canopy measured 150 feet wide, its trunk 8 feet across and the trunk’s diameter about 28 feet around.
Miraculously, the tree missed Watson’s house and a neighbor’s car by 10 feet.
“I had a mess,” he recalls.
Some neighbors came to his rescue. They offered to clear the debris for free if they could have the wood.
“I put my hand out and said, ‘You’ve got a deal,'” Watson says.
It took them two months of working in the afternoons and on weekends.
– – –
The days and weeks after Hugo were unusual.
The smell of people grilling meats became common soon after the storm. Otherwise, the food would have spoiled in powerless freezers.
Angry yellow jackets were stinging people everywhere because their nests had been disturbed by the uprooting of trees.
There was the understandable rush on businesses for flashlights, batteries, chainsaws, generators, ice, bottled water, candles, lanterns and gas stoves.
Roofers, carpenters, insurance adjusters and tree-cutters were in high demand.
Tankers came into some areas left waterless because power had yet to be restored to wells.
Dairy farmers scrambled to find generators for their milking operations.
As the days without electricity dragged on, many families “vacationed” at local hotels.
Rowan County opened up Dan Nicholas Park’s campground to Hugo refugees for $3 a night.
The Red Cross and churches kept serving hot suppers.
The YMCA allowed people to have free showers.
Because of the destruction in South Carolina, Amtrak’s Silver Star passenger train was rerouted through Salisbury.
And once Rowan Countians righted themselves, they turned their attention and contributions to the more devastated areas of South Carolina.
– – –
It seems impossible now, but it’s hard to find many leftover signs of Hugo.
The massive stump of Gene Watson’s white oak is gone.
It stood for about 10 years, Watson says, but finally rotted away. He filled in the spot with dirt.
Linda Shuffler reminds me that Hugo brought with it a drenching rain. People tend to remember the storm’s high winds and forget that we also had about 5 inches of rain dumped on us that morning.
Linda still has many photographs from the storm. She’s living in the same house. Her husband, Gene, died in 2002, and she has remarried.
The nephews she protected the morning Hugo hit are grown now. One of the boys is married and living next door. The other is a student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
On the day Eddie Marie White came into the newsroom, we talked for awhile, but she didn’t stay long enough to sit down.
She asked whether we were finished. Since I didn’t need her newspapers, she had places to go.
Eddie Marie was a lot like Hugo in some respect. She came and left in a hurry.
But she’s hard to forget.