Lessons learned

by

Dialogue

I was part of a generation of South Carolinians that thought we were immune to hurricanes. We weren’t around for Hazel in 1954, and a lifetime of experience led us to believe that “hurricane season” (June to November) only  brought backyard barbecues and county fairs, never flooding rain and damaging winds.

That changed for me in September of 1989 with the arrival of Hurricane Hugo. My wife was three months pregnant with our first child and life in Columbia was good. It was, frankly, hard to process the news of a tropical storm brewing out there in the Atlantic even if it was drawing a bull’s-eye on South Carolina. Besides, we lived hours from the coast. How bad could a tropical storm be here in the Midlands?

We found out when the storm made landfall on Sullivan’s Island around midnight on Sept. 21, with 140-mph winds and a 20-foot storm surge on top of astronomically high tides. Hugo then proceeded to churn through the state for nearly 7 hours on its way to Charlotte. By the time it passed over my childhood home in Clover, it was still generating peak wind speeds of 70–80 mph. The storm was ultimately responsible for 21 deaths and $7 billion of damage in the mainland United States alone. The number of homes damaged or destroyed in our state was astonishing—9,500 in Charleston, 7,500 in Myrtle Beach, 5,400 in Sumter and 1,500 in Columbia.

My family was lucky. Our homes were spared, and my pregnant wife and I were without power for only 14 hours. My parents in Clover had no electricity for nearly a week.

As South Carolina moves through yet another hurricane season, your local electric cooperative, the American Red Cross and government agencies like the S.C. Emergency Management Division (SCEMD) are all working diligently to make sure they are prepared to respond to any natural disaster, large or small, and today I’m asking you to do the same.

As we point out in this month’s feature "Preparing for the Worst,” a recent poll shows that only 7 percent of the American people are adequately prepared to survive a natural or man-made disaster, and most people who live in hurricane-prone states haven’t taken adequate steps to prepare for tropical storms. September is National Preparedness Month, a good reminder that while we can’t predict or prevent natural disasters, we can all take simple steps—like making a survival kit and mapping out a hurricane evacuation plan—to be prepared. It might seem silly to “waste” a beautiful, cloudless summer day thinking about disasters, but thinking ahead is the key to being prepared.

I urge you to heed the advice from the experts and take steps today to protect yourself and your family, because I’ve learned the hard way that nature’s fury, once unleashed, is indiscriminate and unpredictable.