The aftermath of Hurricane Hugo looms large 35 years later
After Hurricane Hugo blew through Charlotte, thousands of downed trees covered homes and roadways, 85 percent of households were out of power and much of the city was inaccessible. Mecklenburg County declared a state of emergency.
The morning of September 22, 1989, Rob Combs said his Duke Power crews had to start where they safely could.
"They redeployed us out into the field for field support," Combs said. "It was rebuilding, quite frankly, a whole lot of the infrastructure we had out there to serve our customers."
Combs said crews would try to make it out to a neighborhood to start working on the power lines, but just getting there would require them to stop and help clear trees from the roads and even from on top of people's houses.
"People were pretty much trapped in their homes a lot of times, homes damaged everywhere," Combs said.
In south Charlotte, Tripp Gabriel said it took about two weeks before power crews could make it out, so as neighborhoods waited, everyone helped each other any way they could.
"If you had a chainsaw, you grabbed it and you helped a neighbor," Gabriel said. "It didn't matter if you didn't even know your neighbors. I met a lot of neighbors at that time that I didn't know."
Without power through much of the city, access to clean water became an issue. Rusty Rozzelle, who worked with the county water quality program, was tasked with meeting the need.
He said he worked with the county to get the municipal water system up and running on a generator but there were still thousands throughout the city who weren't connected.
"Anybody that had a well, they were out of water and that's a big deal," Rozzelle said. "We didn't have tens of thousands of generators to give out to people to power their individual wells, so what we would do was provide them with bottled water."
In Union County, another family was going through the unthinkable, the death of a six-month-old boy. Channel 9′s Suzanne Stevens met with the family the next morning.
"I think about that all the time," Stevens said. "It was just terrible, they had put him into bed, on his crib on the top floor and a tree just came right through the roof and into his crib."
SPECIAL SECTION >> Channel 9 Climate Stories
On its path from the Caribbean through eastern Canada, Hurricane Hugo killed 86 people, including four in the Charlotte area. At the time, it was the costliest storm to hit the United States, but though no Category 4 storm has hit the Carolina coast since, storm after storm has claimed that title over the past few decades.
In the Carolinas, storms, even weaker storms, are getting costlier because more property and more people are in their path.
"The damage to property would be more," Rozzelle said, imagining another storm like Hugo hitting Charlotte today. "The damage to the transportation system would be more, more people. I think it would be really hard."
As our atmosphere and our oceans warm, NASA reports the number of hurricanes we're seeing along the Atlantic Coast does not seem to be increasing, but the intensity of these storms, and the speed at which they intensify is.
When Rozzelle thinks of Hugo, he says he worries about the Carolinas' future. He believes if it can happen once, it can happen again, so we need prepare accordingly.
"People have a way of putting those things out of their minds, but it never did go out of my mind," he said. "I think once you live through it it's something that you don't tend to forget."
On Friday, Channel 9 is looking into the preparations that are being made for destructive hurricanes in the future.
