Shock Fading, Tension Surfaces in Charleston : Despite City’s Determined Rally, Residents and Officials Quarrel; Some Panic Buying Seen

As they have in revolution and Civil War, and after earthquake and fire, the bells of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church rang out Sunday to celebrate this tattered and torn city’s remarkable survival in the wake of Hurricane Hugo.

“We may have been bent but we’re not broken,” said Christopher Cotton, the church’s choirmaster, who led four parishioners and a visitor up 18 floors of narrow, winding stairs to manually ring the 225-year-old carillon bells, which usually work electrically.

It was but one sign of the determination this old city is demonstrating in the wake of Hugo, a monster hurricane that shredded trees and roofs, blew apart buildings and left more than 900,000 homes and businesses in South Carolina alone without electricity. Hundreds of thousands more had no safe drinking water. In some places, including Charleston, schools will be closed for weeks.

Charleston’s airport was to reopen later today with limited daylight operations.

By Sunday, at least 51 deaths were blamed on the six-day storm that roared ashore along the South Carolina coast Thursday night after tearing though the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. The Coast Guard reported that it was still searching for numerous missing fishing and pleasure boats off the coast here, raising the possibility of still more casualties.

The death toll included at least 27 people killed in the Caribbean area, where the storm hit four days before reaching the mainland. Another 24 deaths were reported in the Carolinas, Virginia and New York.

Hurricane Hugo, the worst storm to hit the United States in two decades, socked this community point-blank with 135-m.p.h. winds and a storm surge of 17 feet of water, then tore northward before exhausting its evil course.

By Sunday, the shock of the stunning storm began to give way to frustration and controversy for the residents of Sullivans Island and the Isle of Palms, two of the most devastated areas.

Angry residents barred by a martial law decree from returning to their off-shore homes crowded into community meetings and threatened to storm the islands if authorities continued to keep them away from their property or what remained of it. In sympathy, an island police official quit in protest.

Late Sunday, officials said they would begin ferrying residents to the battered barrier islands for brief inspection visits today.

“We understand that patience may be wearing thin,” Charleston County chief executive Linda Lombard said in an afternoon radio broadcast, “but if you bear with us, we’ll get you there.”

“Please, those that have lost patience, try to regain it,” pleaded South Carolina Gov. Carroll A. Campbell Jr.

And despite repeated assurances from city and county officials that there are adequate food and fuel supplies, anxious residents queued for hours again Sunday in what appeared to be a wave of panic buying.

‘Plenty of Gasoline’

“If people have a day’s supply of food and water, they’re in great shape,” Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley told a reporter. “There is plenty of gasoline.”

“There is no food shortage in Charleston County,” Lombard declared in the broadcast. “Do not be afraid.”

As some National Guardsmen continued to patrol sections of Charleston to guard against looting, other Guard units joined with utility crews to clear away debris. Convoys of U.S. Marines arrived bringing in electric generating equipment, said Gov. Campbell.

And residents who had fled inland to avoid the storm returned in large numbers Sunday, many shocked by the damage they discovered.

“Coming down I-26, I began to get uptight,” said Anne Nelson, who returned with her family to their Mt. Pleasant house. “We turned the corner and it was as if some mad giant had come by with a weed-cutter and shaved off all the trees. . . . Inside the house, there was yucky marsh mud and marsh grass on the carpets and in the closets.”

Others were luckier. Pharmacist Ida Morea returned to find fallen trees but no damage to the house. “Miraculous,” she called it.

Full power was restored to all five downtown hospitals in Charleston by Sunday night, according to officials with South Carolina Electric & Gas Co. The hospitals had been using generators. But it remained unclear when power would be returned to the rest of the area, with the lack of electricity presenting major problems as the workweek begins today and thousands of businesses attempt to reopen.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington said Sunday that in addition to more than 300,000 persons without electricity in metropolitan Charleston, 300,000 of the state’s 400,000 subscribers to the rural electric system had no power along with more than 200,000 customers in places like Greenville and Columbia.

Four-Week Wait

While power could be restored in some of the western parts of the state by week’s end, it may take more than a week for rural areas to be fully operating and up to four weeks for Charleston to get service, the federal agency reported.

Aid continued to flood Charleston. Semi-tractor-trailers loaded with food and disaster relief stations, many serving hot food, were set up in shopping mall and church parking lots throughout the city. Thousands of displaced residents were being cared for in shelters.

Insurance adjusters began writing checks Sunday while warning about con artists seeking to make a fast buck selling repair services to the storm’s victims.

“They’re like locusts at a disaster,” said Thomas M. Greaney, a corporate affairs administrator for Aetna.

In a crackdown on corruption of a different sort, Mayor Riley joined city police on the lookout for merchants who had defied an emergency decree against price-gouging. There were at least two arrests, a city spokesman said.

Meanwhile, hospitals reported a spate of medical emergencies as the city stumbled through daily life without its electric lifeblood.

Lack of refrigeration contributed to unusual outbreaks of food poisoning, they said. Novices trying to operate gasoline-powered generators suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning. And in a city without traffic lights, auto accidents helped keep emergency rooms full.

With the benefit of three days of post-storm assessment, officials here were able Sunday to present an increasingly complete picture of the destruction the storm had wrought.

Statewide, Campbell said the storm’s financial toll was “in the billions. It’s more than I can ever imagine.”

Hardest hit was the small hamlet of McClellanville, 30 miles northeast of Charleston on the Atlantic coast, where townspeople in a storm shelter lifted small children into air-conditioning ducts to shield them from a wall of flood water.

The residents were left “huddling in 7 feet of water waiting for help,” Campbell reported. He said the town was “virtually destroyed.’

To the south of Charleston, however, Edisto Beach and low-lying oceanfront areas initially feared to have been swamped by the storm were found to have survived surprisingly intact.

Closer to the city, officials reported that Folly Beach and Surfside, where houses three deep from the ocean were leveled, had suffered devastation even greater than on the Isle of Palms and Sullivans Island.

But the controversy fueled by the imposition of martial law on those barrier islands made them the focus of much of the community’s attention.

While armed National Guardsmen continued to enforce the no-trespassing edict, local television crews were permitted on to the two islands to film troubling footage showing monstrous destruction there.

Many beachfront condominiums had been splintered by the storm, with both front and back walls blasted backward by the wind and a wall of water almost two stories tall.

Some houses on the once-magnificent coast were missing completely; others were unrecognizable. Pool tables from an oceanfront tavern lay 200 yards inland. Boats were half-submerged. Sand dunes were erased.

Nine in 10 houses suffered significant structural damage, officials said, and the powerful storm surge nearly swept over the top of the half-mile wide Isle of Palms, whose highest point lies just 14 feet above the high-tide line.

Isle of Palms Mayor Carmen Bunch and other defensive officials said the no-trespassing regulations were necessary to guard against looting in what are some of South Carolina’s most affluent ZIP codes.

They also contended that the damage had been so severe that citizens could not walk the islands safely until emergency crews could steady teetering structures and clear roadways of trees and power lines. Some warned of an island slithering with snakes driven to high ground by the storm.

But in the face of the organized outcry by most of the islands’ 8,000 residents and the abrupt resignation of Isle of Palms Acting Deputy Police Chief James Meade, officials agreed to launch the limited ferrying operation. Campbell also said that National Guardsmen would begin to lay a pontoon bridge to the island.

Adversity is not new to Charleston. Its history is etched with war, tragedy and disaster. Churches mark their places in the city by the events they survived together. Hugo is the latest entry in the ledger.

Sunday at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, parishioners did something they rarely do. They signed each other’s Bibles after making a record of those who shared in an historic service.

“Our faith should not be shaken,” said Emmanuel’s pastor, J. H. Gillison.

Across town in Mt. Pleasant there were tearful embraces on the porch of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church as villagers watched their neighbors appear from tree-choked streets.

“You got any house left?” one man asked his neighbors as they entered the darkened church.

“We have faced death. We have looked death in the face,” said the Rev. Stuart Arnold at the Citadel Square Baptist Church. “You’ll forget many of the things that have horrified you in the last days but please remember, we have been spared.”

INSURANCE COSTS

Hugo may be one of costliest storms for insurers. Page 12