As hurricanes are 'forming like roaches,' doctor remembers biggest one to hit South Carolina

As the 30^th anniversary of Hurricane Hugo approaches, six named storms are swirling over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. As one forecaster put it, “They are forming like roaches out there.”

Medical University of South Carolina professor Fred Crawford is keeping an eye on all of them. He knows their potential for disaster. “You get burned one time and you remember.”

Crawford rode out Hugo at MUSC on Sept. 21 and 22, 1989. He’d been in Charleston for about ten years and had recently become the chairman of the Department of Surgery at MUSC. He’d seen plenty of storms come and go.

 

“In August, September, there’s always a hurricane out there in the Atlantic. You don’t think much about it. And this one kind of gradually came along. Thirty-six hours before, we started to board up the house, but we weren’t seriously worried.”

Then, the chairwoman of the county council spoke on TV about the coming storm. “All I had to do was look in her eyes — that woman had seen the Lord,” Crawford says. “The look in her eyes was terrified. I told my wife, ‘This woman knows something we don’t know. You guys have got to get out of here.’ And so they left. They went to my parents’ home in Holly Hill, and I went to work.”

Crawford parked his truck on the third floor of a parking deck. “I figured that would be high enough. I had a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, a police scanner and a change of clothes.”

The hospital sent home every patient who was able to leave safely, and doctors, nurses and staff prepared to care for the people who needed to stay.

Crawford was in his office in MUSC’s Clinical Science Building when the wind and rain started to pick up. “One of the nurses came in and said, ‘You’ve got to get out of here.’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘The office right below you, the wind just sucked the windows out.’”

He got out just in time. A few minutes later, Hugo sucked out Crawford’s windows, too.

Hugo was a category 4 hurricane when it hit Charleston — the strongest storm in state history. As the sky grew darker, the power went out. “The hospital’s emergency generators were water cooled, and the city lost water pressure, so we couldn’t cool the generators.”

Employees waded through chest-high water to get supplies for patients and shield the emergency power switchgear and generators from the storm.

And the storm kept getting worse. “There was a time, I hate to admit, around midnight, 1 o’clock, where I was not sure we were going to make it,” Crawford says.

More than 200 tornadoes swirled through Charleston County. Floodwater filled streets, homes and buildings. Hugo caused $33 million worth of damage at MUSC.

But the storm eventually moved out, not long before sunrise, Crawford says. “Of course, we had no power, so it was all flashlights. As soon as it was daylight, we got on the roof. You could see the whole city. We couldn’t believe it. There was a big boat sitting on top of Lockwood Drive.”

The storm caused about 35 deaths in South Carolina. Everyone at MUSC survived, Crawford says.

But cleanup was extensive. Power and water outages made life difficult. Electronic patient files were lost. Parts of MUSC had to be hosed out to get rid of the mud. Windows and buildings had to be repaired. And employees had to deal with damage to their homes, as well.

Thirty years later, Crawford says MUSC is better prepared for storms. Generators are in safer places. Buildings such as Ashley River Tower were constructed to withstand powerful storms. And systems are in place to ensure employees know what’s expected in terms of their schedules.

Like most people in the Lowcountry, Crawford doesn’t plan to do anything special to mark Hugo’s anniversary. Well, maybe one thing: “Just hope there’s not another one."