Hurricane expert Jay Barnes who runs jaybarnesonhurricanes.com discusses Hurricane Hugo 37 years later
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It has been 37 years since Hurricane Hugo damaged Charlotte and various portions of South Carolina, including McLean'sville. The hurricane was a category forced with maximum sustained winds of 140 miles per hour. James Barnes has studied hurricanes for many years, and I imagine it's been a little more inactive this year as he usually is. He joins us now. Jay, it's not exactly been the most active hurricane season. I won't have as much to write about for this year as you have in past years. And that's a good thing, Jim. No question. But this one, I heard stories told about it for years, and this is a storm that produced a 16 foot storm surge in McLean'sville, South Carolina. I heard lots of residents in Charlotte telling stories about what this storm did for years and years. What do you remember about it? It certainly ranks as one of the big ones, one of the greatest storms on the history of the east coast of the United States. Yeah, the 16 foot measured there in McLeanville, but the National Weather Service actually recorded close to 20 feet at one of their recording stations nearby, which stands as the highest storm surge we've ever seen on the east coast of the United States. And a little bit higher than Hazel was, even though Hazel in 1954, which struck a little farther north, there were both category four storms, both very formidable hurricanes. But Hugo certainly stands out and I know that there are a lot of your listeners that will remember where they were when Hugo rolled through upstate South Carolina and into Charlotte as well. But the damage that it did to Charlotte in terms of power, I mean, Charlotte was a little different than that it is now. It's not the fastest growing city in the state the way it is now, but it was still plenty big and it sent uptown just completely lights out if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, and it's one of the lessons that we learned from these hurricanes is that you don't have to live down at the coast to get slammed. I mean, we've seen lots of evidence of that with Helene here recently and others, but you know, Charlotte's 200 miles from the coast and the winds from the category four by the time it made landfall and just began to slowly diminish. You still had close to hurricane force winds in the Charlotte area and the hardwood trees that fill the city and all the power poles and so forth. They all just came tumbling down because they're just not not prepared for those kinds of winds that we had back in 1989. Yeah, in fact, Hickory reported a gust of 85 miles per hour and that's got too close to home so much and seven to 12 deaths attributed to the storm. Unfortunately, it was quite something. Yeah, the, you know, one thing about the statistics when you're talking about both the dollar damages and the deaths is you end up getting different numbers from different sources. You know, today, when we measure the deaths in hurricanes, we're looking at both of the direct deaths and the indirect, those that are associated with things like evacuations or maybe to clean up afterwards. And if you, if you total all those up in South Carolina and North Carolina, it was closer to 50 fatalities. But, but still it stands as one of the great storms in North Carolina's history as well as South Carolina. By far, South Carolina's most expensive hurricane to date had about $6 billion in damages in South Carolina. Those about $1 billion in North Carolina and both of those broke records. In 18, in 1989, those
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