Charleston Left in Tatters by Storm; 12 Die in Carolinas

This historic old city was a shambles Friday, battered and rent by a malign wind. Hurricane Hugo made a direct hit on Charleston. It had plenty of muscle left to wallop other places for hundreds of miles.

The sorting began--who was accounted for and who was not, what stood safely and what had surrendered. The gloomy arithmetic will go on for weeks.

At least 11 were dead in South Carolina and one in North Carolina. Earlier, at least 26 people died as the storm surged across the Caribbean, making it accountable for at least 38 deaths in all.

Property damage in South Carolina alone could easily amount to $1 billion or more. At least 1 million people were without power in the Carolinas, Georgia, Virginia and West Virginia.

Among the places most humbled by Hugo’s might were graceful Charleston and its exclusive barrier islands to the east. Ninety miles away, many of the pricey homes near Myrtle Beach, S.C.--along the so-called Grand Strand--were simply scooped up and demolished.

Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley imposed a curfew from 7 p.m. until 7 a.m. every night until the damage is cleaned up. His city is a mess. Power may be out for three weeks. Schools are closed indefinitely. People are lining up to get potable water.

All over, streets are impassable because of felled trees. Snapped power lines curl into tangles. “There’s just destruction everywhere,” Riley said.

“It’s a miracle there were no more dead or seriously injured,” South Carolina Gov. Carroll A. Campbell Jr. said after a helicopter tour of the devastation. “This was the strongest storm we’ve ever had.”

Early Friday, President Bush declared seven South Carolina counties disaster areas, offering them federal grants and loans for the long work ahead. Those counties are Berkeley, Charleston, Dorchester, Georgetown, Horry, Orangeburg and Sumter.

National Guard soldiers stood on every downtown corner in Charleston with M-16 rifles. The troops were there to stop intermittent looting and to assist with the cleanup.

Scavengers followed Hugo right through the blown-out store windows. “We have been fighting it all day,” said police Sgt. Anthony Januszkiewicz. By the afternoon, 27 people had been jailed for alleged looting.

Hugo swept ashore Thursday just before midnight, a 135-m.p.h. monster that dumped torrents of rain. Only 18 hours later, it was no longer even a tropical storm, just a disorganized band of showers heading northward in the vague direction of Pittsburgh.

For a week, Hugo had riveted the nation’s attention, bulldozing through a 400-mile arc of Caribbean islands, including Puerto Rico, establishing itself as a killer tempest.

Day after day, it churned toward the United States, feinting and weaving, then finally aimed at one of America’s most precious locations at a most inopportune time: the developed lowlands of South Carolina at high tide.

A City Frozen in Time

Friday, the hands on a clock tower in Charleston’s historic district were frozen at three minutes to midnight, the moment when Hugo’s wall of wind hit, followed by a 10-foot mound of water.

Peter Connolly, a retired Air Force officer living in one of the handsome gentrified homes in the city’s downtown, tried to ride it out. “By 11, the winds began shaking the house and there were heavy gusts.

“Then, suddenly, the winds just shut down, and we were in the eye of the storm. Then came the storm surge . . . . The water rushed in the house. In 20 minutes it rose above my ankles, and then in no time it was out of the house . . . . I watched it rise above my Buick. I lost my Buick.”

The furious winds blew off the roof and smashed in the windows of the pediatrics unit at the Medical University of South Carolina Hospital. Beds in the intensive care unit were hurled about. Nurses and doctors--six at a time--tried to force sheets of plywood over the windows while children were evacuated.

“We tried to find safe places for the patients anywhere we could--utility closets, hallways, storage rooms,” Dr. John Sperry, chief of pediatrics, said.

Take to the High Ground

Cathy Hanahan and her husband took refuge 10 miles north at the Convent of the Divine Redeemer, up on high ground, surrounded by woods.

“What an amazing night it was,” she said. “One minute we were looking out at this beautiful forested hill, and the next time we looked all the trees had been snapped off, leaving nothing but 20-foot tall stumps.”

Hugo carried a tail of winds that kept people inside nearly till dawn. Police and emergency officials themselves searched for shelter.

“There are no emergency vehicles moving in Charleston at this time,” a National Guard radio operator broadcast repeatedly up to 4 a.m.

When the fierce storm finally began to lift, it left a trail of destruction whose magnitude became apparent only after first light.

Near the county emergency command post, whole sides of buildings had been torn away. Hundreds of power poles were snapped at their roots. Traffic lights were shattered, dangling limply in the leftover breeze.

Everywhere there were felled trees, their trunks split at the midpoint. Trees were stuck into homes; they stabbed into cars. The littered ground carried the fresh smell of a forest.

‘A Neighborhood Scalped’

“It looks like a neighborhood that has been scalped,” said Greg Allen, a real estate salesman.

Century-old oaks stood broken and mostly bare, their leaves stripped away by the wind. Billboards were balled up as if made of paper.

The storm knocked out all local radio and television stations, and what information people had about their own community’s disaster came from a station in Jacksonville, Fla., that had increased its broadcast power.

Trucks lay smashed on their sides. Power transformers were bent like paper clips.

Charleston’s historic, cannon-lined Battery was awash with mud and debris, but most of the graceful antebellum homes lining the area escaped damage even though they stood foursquare before Hugo’s main thrust.

“I thought any house that has been here 210 years is going to survive just fine,” said Jan Buvinger, whose home lost only a single shutter.

“They built houses to last back then,” said Fiammetta Barchiesi, a neighbor.

Not every one of the city’s storied structures did so well. A massive roll of gnarled copper was all that remained of the roof from the six-block-long Market Hall, a 150-year-old national historic landmark.

The roof of the 188-year-old City Hall collapsed. The huge wooden door of St. Phillips Church fell onto the sidewalk.

Only rubble remained of the Old Carriage House, home to the horses and buggies that have so long delighted tourists.

In the city’s historic harbor, buildings at the Charleston Naval Base suffered extensive damage, the Pentagon said. Most of its ships, however, had been moved out to safety before the storm.

The Pentagon reported a “catastrophic” level of damage at the Charleston Air Force Base, 16 miles north of the city. Roofs were ripped from many of the buildings.

Bad as the damage was in Charleston, it paled beside the havoc that Hugo created on the few barrier islands that lie to the city’s east.

Sullivans Island, Folly Beach, Isle of Palms--the recounting was the same: Hugo hit them dead on. Most homes were lost. Boats piled atop boats. Boats flew into homes.

Bridges to the islands were twisted apart like plastic toys. The National Guard ferried in troops in helicopters. They had difficulty making way through the tree-strewn roads.

Some Stay in Condos

Some of the residents of Isle of Palms decided to sit out the storm from their high-rise condominiums. “We don’t really look for them to be still there (alive),” said Fire Department battalion chief T. S. Humbert.

Several posh, multistoried homes on that island were flattened. Others moved, seemingly intact, up to 100 feet off their foundations.

Hugo’s eye may have stared straight into Charleston harbor, but its winds roiled across a swath of land as large as the Carolinas.

In Charlotte, N.C., 200 miles to the northwest, a record 2.91 inches of rain poured down as wind gusts up to 87 m.p.h. left most of the city’s nearly 400,000 residents without power.

Some of the strongest winds smacked the Myrtle Beach area on South Carolina’s north coast.

The worst damage was in Garden City Beach and in Surfside Beach, two towns to the south of Myrtle Beach.

“Garden City for all practical purposes is gone,” said M. L. Love, a Horry County administrator who toured the small unincorporated resort town.

Destruction Widespread

Love said some larger buildings remained standing on the oceanfront, but otherwise destruction extended “as far as I could see.”

Three piers disappeared in North Myrtle Beach, Cherry Grove and Garden City Beach, one of which rolled inland and wedged itself under a home.

The streets along the so-called Grand Strand were sometimes blocked by more than trees. Trailers, boats and even a crushed home--dislodged from its pilings--found themselves inhibiting traffic.

In Surfside Beach, a particularly exposed area, beachside pools lay shattered like shipwrecks in the sand, their surrounding decks splintered and scattered. The storm plucked air conditioners and furniture from homes and threw them to the roadside like discarded junk.

Gary and Linda Blake owned a seaside motel and lounge on the shore nearby. It was stomped. “I figured we’d get flooded, but I never expected anything like this,” he said, adding that his place would make a nice parking lot.

Jack Sellers, a pilot, flew people over Pawleys Island to see if Hugo had hit their property. The slender finger of land was cut in two by a new 200-foot-wide pond. “There are now two Pawleys Islands, if you will,” Sellers said.

Of the 11 deaths in South Carolina, eight were in counties surrounding Charleston; one elderly man was found dead in the rubble of his house in Charleston itself.

One man was killed in Eastover outside Columbia, S.C., when a tree fell on a car. A 9-year-old girl died in a house fire near Myrtle Beach that officials said was storm-related. A 6-month-old infant in Union County, N.C., was killed when a tree fell on his house. On Friday, a power company employee was electrocuted while working to restore electricity.

Many officials agreed with South Carolina Gov. Campbell that the death toll was remarkably low, considering the strength of the storm.

Grant Peterson, associate director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, praised local authorities for evacuating most people on the shoreline. “Their actions have saved literally hundreds of lives,” he said.

Many who were evacuated remained in shelters Friday night. The Red Cross is caring for 25,000 people in the Charleston area alone, said Brian Ruberry, a national spokesman for the organization.

At one point on Campbell’s tour, the helicopter landed on a baseball field in the small coastal community of McClellanville to assist about 50 people who were waving for help. Some, stranded by the storm, were standing atop cars.

“There are a lot of little places like that in this state that just got wiped out,” Campbell said.

Staff writers Melissa Healy in Myrtle Beach, N.C., Robert L. Jackson in Charleston, S.C., and Anna M. Virtue and Barry Bearak in Miami contributed to this story.

MORE PICTURES, Other stories, Pages 18-21

EVACUEES ANGRY--Coastal residents were upset when the governor countermanded the order of Myrtle Beach’s mayor that they be allowed to go home. Page 20