Tears, Fears Linger a Year Past Hurricane Hugo Fury : Disaster: Repairs continue in areas struck by the 1989 storm. Many suffer something akin to post-war stress.

Whenever thunder rumbles and wind blows, Leroy Cummings gets icy shivers. His wife, Bertha, hides. “I can’t take it,” she says.

The sounds bring back the furious day Hurricane Hugo dismantled their home and lives, along with thousands of others. A year has passed since the storm ravaged coastal South Carolina, but for many residents the fear, pain and apprehension are a lingering, everyday legacy.

The Cummingses--he is 71, and she is 70--now live in a house trailer, with four foster children. Most furnishings were donated. While their physical losses were devastating, the emotional damage seems appallingly larger. Dabbing away tears, Leroy Cummings said he asked himself for days: “By the 21st of the month (the anniversary of Hugo) will it happen again?”

There are other legacies of that fateful day. South Carolina lost $1.4 billion worth of timber, much of which still lies on the ground, rotting and raising fears of forest fires for years to come. Lawsuits involving insurance claims and contractors will clog the court system. Meanwhile, in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, where the storm hit on Sept. 17 and 18, officials say they are rebuilding apace, laying underground telephone wiring and putting up hurricane-proof structures to replace the inferior ones that were destroyed.

“The recovery is going very well,” said Bent Lawaetz, president of the Virgin Islands Senate. Once the rebuilding is completed in a couple years, “we will be in better condition than we were,” he said.

Similarly, in Charleston, “the most extraordinary building boom in the city’s history” is under way, said Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., noting especially the massive refurbishing of the city’s elegant old homes.

For many, however, particularly the elderly, the poor, and those in dusty hamlets outside Charleston, there is no silver lining, only the agonizing task of getting from one day to the next.

“In the rural areas, we still have a good way to go,” said Riley, adding that he encourages people to seek counseling for their fears. “People are not likely to come up to you and talk about it, but you know it’s there.”

As residents pause to remember on today’s anniversary of the storm and ponder the possibility of another hurricane sweeping in from the Atlantic, coping becomes more difficult for some, say officials of the state Department of Mental Health.

Hurricane victims “are going to have an unusually long recovery period” said Nancy Carter, state clinical coordinator for emergency preparedness at the department, which operates a counseling program called Hugo Outreach Support Team.

Some victims say the year since Hugo’s 140-m.p.h. winds swept into the state, killing 29 people and causing an estimated $6 billion in damages, has already been an eternity.

In Mt. Pleasant, James Swinton, 72, who limps heavily and speaks in the soft, lyrical accent of coastal South Carolinians, said, “I don’t feel safe,” expressing a feeling he has had ever since he returned the day after the storm to find his home wrecked. “Things could happen again.”

Most of the people around here who suffered through Hugo had never seen a hurricane before, although coastal thunderstorms were common. Now that they are painfully aware of how powerful and dangerous hurricanes can be, they are more cautious than ever.

“Hyper-vigilant” is what Frederic Medway, professor of psychology at the University of South Carolina, calls this behavior. “I don’t think a large number of people living near the coast are having hurricane parties anymore,” he said, referring to an age-old practice of partying while storms threaten.

Indeed, as the hurricane season progresses this year, many people watch weather reports with unprecedented apprehensiveness. In stores all over the area, there were runs on radios and batteries when a tropical storm headed north toward the Carolinas.

Experts liken problems of hurricane survivors to those of combat veterans who experience post-war stress.

Lee Hartley, professor of social work at the University of South Carolina, said that right after Hugo, peoples’ “initial reaction was shock” at their losses. “Now, there’s a delayed reaction that says, ‘Things can happen to me. We’re all vulnerable.’ ”

Tears are still common a year later.

In McClellanville, Gladys Shepherd, 67, told a visitor that she cried for two weeks after the storm, adding: “Off and on, I cry now. As long as I live, I will talk about Hugo.”

Her husband, James, who is 73 years old, said, “You never forget it.” He compared the hurricane to his combat duty as an infantryman in Africa during World War II, asserting that Hugo was worse than Adolf Hitler’s army. “Those Germans didn’t scare me as much as Hugo did,” he said. “I had a chance with them.”

There is apparently something mystical about the one-year anniversary, as if it signals a need to close out an awful chapter in people’s lives.

Cathy Joyner, who leads a team of 11 mental health counselors working out of a Charleston office, said the anniversary has triggered an avalanche of requests to help fix roofs and repair homes, problems that are stacked on top of the emotional ones her team is supposed to address.

The link between solving the physical problems and emotional problems is inextricable. Thus, the Federal Emergency Management Agency funds both the mental health programs and grants to help people make repairs.

The sense of powerlessness seems to pervade the Hugo victims.

In San Juan, Puerto Rico, Ernestina Villegas, acting director of FEMA’s individual and family grant program, said that the storm “affected quite a few children. When they hear a wave or the sky is too dark, they get very scared.”

Despite the massive rebuilding, Virgin Island residents sense that true recovery is out of their hands.

Bent Lawaetz, the Senate president, noted that rising costs of jet fuel that drive up airplane fares, combined with the slackening U.S. economy, threaten to cut tourism, which accounts for half the employment on the islands.

“My biggest concern is beyond my control: the U.S. economy and the Iraq situation,” he said.

Back in South Carolina, Leroy and Bertha Cummings did not want to live in a cramped mobile home, but on fixed income with a variety of health problems, he said, “I had to turn to a trailer. I had to have some place to live.”

At $29,000, the plain brown trailer was affordable, although it is so hot, he said, that “we have to stay outside ‘til the mosquitoes run us in.”

Christopher Wells, a counselor who makes weekly rounds around this area, told of the single mother who huddled in a corner with her daughter through Hugo, hearing the air conditioner blow out of a window and through an opposite wall.

Now, Wells said, “She reports nightmares. She’s stuck. No motivation. Life had never gotten really tough, then all of a sudden, blam! People who didn’t have good coping skills went under.”

The rest are trying to stay afloat. They do it in different ways.

If you talk long enough, just about everybody who went through the storm will pull out memories of the way life was before Hugo. Many show photographs of the devastation and progressive snapshots of their climb back from it.

James and Gladys Shepherd’s trailer sits next to their storm-damaged house. Hoping to move back in next month, they showed a visitor through the two-story frame home and talked excitedly of having relatives visit again. The good times will be back, they hope.

But something has changed. Like many others, they vow not to ever have as much to lose as they lost to Hugo--even though Gladys is a self-avowed “pack rat.” It is as if they are paring down their things to make themselves small targets for any future tragedy.

“As long as I live,” said James Shepherd, “I don’t ever want as much as I had before.”

Staff researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.