Marking 35 years since Hurricane Hugo ripped through Charlotte

CHARLOTTE — In September 1989, Hurricane Hugo swept through the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm, leaving dozens of deaths and billions of dollars of destruction in its wake. Forecasts said its next stop would be the Carolina coast.

“We were more worried about Charleston,” said Rob Thomas, a lifelong Charlottean. “We started getting the reports that this may come a little more inland but I don’t think anybody had the sense that it was going to be as powerful as it was.”

On the evening of Sept. 21, Thomas and thousands of others in Charlotte watched Hugo make landfall just north of Charleston, bringing with it a 12.9-foot storm surge and wind gusts up to 140 mph.

Suzanne Stevens watched the carnage from the Channel 9 anchor desk.

“Just from what I was hearing from the people we were interviewing live on the air and from people calling in, it was horrific,” Stevens told Channel 9 Climate Reporter Michelle Alfini.

Charleston had some time to prepare. Hundreds of thousands had evacuated the coastal areas, avoiding the worst of the storm, but Hugo’s wrath wasn’t limited to those near the shore.

Just hours after its landfall near Charleston, people began to feel the impact more than 100 miles away.

“We started seeing the outer bands and the winds around 11 [p.m.], 12 [a.m.]; started taking precautions, got some candles out and then went to sleep,” Thomas said. “I woke up 1 or 2 [in the morning] and the wind was howling and then we started hearing the trees start to snap, and transformers blowing up, and things hitting the roofs of houses.”

Stevens was on the air through the night. As the storm continued, the morning team relieved her and she tried to get a little rest before her next shift.

“I wanted to go home, and the producer said to me, ‘You want to go out in that?!’” she said. “We had cots here in the second studio so I went to bed. I had not been in bed 10 minutes and boom, the building shook and [I] jumped out of bed and everybody ran to see what was happening, and our big television tower had fallen smack on top of our building.”

Charlotte saw sustained winds around 70 mph and gusts over 100 mph, knocking down thousands of trees and leaving 85 percent of the city in the dark and much of the city inaccessible.

At the time, Rob Combs was a part of an emergency response team for Duke Energy, known back then as Duke Power. As soon as the wind died down, he said he tried to get to work as quickly as he could.

“Got in my car and started heading downtown and just the devastation of trees. I remember I think it was probably seven or eight times I had to back up on the route I was heading in because there was trees on the road,” he said.

By the time he made it to Duke’s Uptown office, he said the massive scope of the damage was abundantly clear.

“A lot of the windows in the skyscraper were broken out,” he said. “There was about a foot of water in the plaza area.”

With so much damage to the city’s power infrastructure, Combs said Duke Power focused on the transmission systems and substations and worked the lines from there.

It took about three weeks to fully restore power to the entire system.

“For local impact, local news, something that happened right here where we all live, this was the story that I think affected us the most, the deepest and the longest,” Stevens said.

For some, it was months before life in Charlotte could return to normal.

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