Aid Slow in Coming to Rural Areas : Small Towns Largely Overlooked in Rush of Relief to Charleston

For three days, Robert Jones labored with his chain saw, cutting a path through the fallen trees to the main road after Hurricane Hugo hit.

He never thought this could happen, not here, not 100 miles inland from the perils of the vulnerable coast. Yet when he looked out at first light the morning after Hugo raged ashore, there was not a tree standing on his land, where the day before there had been 500.

“I prayed for my family and I prayed for my house. But I should have prayed for my trees too,” he said.

Only Now Getting Power

So should a lot of others. This small inland city, where the hurricanes of the past have landed much softer blows, is in shambles. Largely overlooked in the rush to bring relief to Charleston, it and other rural small towns are only now getting some of their power and water supplies restored.

“All the help went to Charleston,” said Gary C. LeCroy, an official of Berkeley County, northwest of Charleston. “Everywhere you turned people said they sent stuff to Charleston. Hell, we need stuff in little Bonneau.”

“All you hear on TV is Charleston and the Isle of Palms,” said Cindy Reynolds, a resident of Moncks Corner who lost the trailer she lived in with her three small children. “You don’t hear about these little places that are just little spots on the map.”

Linda Lombard, who heads the Charleston County council, said: “We are getting all the attention and most of the supplies. But we are sharing. We’re a family. All boundaries are erased.”

Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., who Monday appealed to the nation for help, said that the supplies would be used not only in Charleston and Charleston County but also in nearby Berkeley and Dorchester counties.

Clearly the help is needed. The legacy of Hurricane Hugo in rural South Carolina is virtually everywhere, on every street, in every yard. The wreckage, especially on the northern side of the storm, where the winds were most powerful, is enormous.

Black community leaders met in Columbia to discuss how to spread relief to rural areas.

“My people in McClellanville (a coastal town of 500) do not have water, they do not have food, no clothes. There are those who are sick and who do not have money to buy medicine,” said the Rev. George Thomas.

In Sumter, thousands of trees, many of them as old as the town itself, were snapped in two. Roofs were ripped off houses and businesses, while other buildings collapsed in a heap. Windows shattered and the old First Baptist Church was reduced to a pile of bricks.

The estimate now is that damage to Sumter alone will be more than $100 million, and that does not count the huge losses that will be incurred by the local timber industry. Statewide, timber losses are expected to exceed $1 billion.

In many cases, entire stands of trees looked like they had been sheared off by a giant sickle about 15 feet from the ground. In the 255,000-acre Francis Marion National Park, to the northwest of Charleston, officials estimated that more than 60% of the trees had been lost.

“We knew it was going to be bad, but we had no idea it was going to be this bad,” Jones said. “We weren’t looking for devastation.”

At Lowe’s, a Sumter hardware store, a long line of people stood outside Tuesday waiting to pay more than $400 for generators. The public water supply remained undrinkable and, in many parts of the city, unrestored. Jerry Pruitt, who works for a local car dealership, allowed neighbors to use the water from her swimming pool for baths.

P.J. Maloney, a local contractor, said his company had received 400 calls from people who needed house repairs.

In Manning, just up the road from Sumter, Mayor Pansy Ridgeway was bemoaning the losses in her town. She has been mayor of Manning for almost 20 years, and talked of how Walter Winchell had once described her town as the prettiest place between Miami and New York.

“It’s not going to be the same in my lifetime,” she said. “Sure, we’ll plant new dogwoods and oaks, but it takes years for them to grow again.”

She talked also of the hours during the night the hurricane hit, when she sat in her brick house, listening to what she believed was the roar of tornadoes ripping apart the landscape.

“I don’t believe there is a tree standing in my subdivision,” she said. The mayor also said that for days, she had felt isolated and unable to draw attention to the plight of her town.

“Up until 24 hours ago, we felt a little bit left out,” she said, the same sentiment voiced by other rural officials. “We couldn’t call out and we’re smaller. You have to take care of the places where most of the people are.”