In the eye of the hurricane IV

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN, Times staff writer
©St. Petersburg Times, published June 13, 1990

On a cold, clear night in January, Thomas Williams drove to his house for the last time.

His father had built it in the 1920s, long before Thomas was born, and until Sept. 21, 1989, it had held mostly good, happy memories. Now, four months after Hurricane Hugo, it was a pathetic shell. Hugo had filled it with seven feet of water and knocked it 15 feet off its foundation. All he'd been able to salvage was a few pieces of furniture and some aluminum siding.

It wasn't worth repairing and he couldn't afford to have someone knock it down. So now, on the night of his oldest son's birthday, he took a 5-gallon can of gasoline and went inside. He soaked a wad of papers, lit it and moved into the next room. Four stops, four little fires.

It burned for hours. Williams watched the sparks drift upward, until he couldn't tell them from the stars hanging over McClellanville. At midnight, he left as he had come. Alone.

"I can't go over there and see it go up in smoke," his wife had told him. "I just can't look at that."

* * *

In the first three weeks after the storm, the Williamses felt like vagabonds. First they went to a shelter on Pawleys Island. Then to a school in Georgetown. Finally, a Baptist church took them in. They seemed to spend a lot of time standing in line.

Once Williams and his wife thought they were applying for a cash grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. They waited almost three hours before they discovered it was a line for food stamps.

Williams blew up.

"What do I need food stamps for!" he shouted. "I ain't got no house to put food in."

It was well into October before the family returned to McClellanville. The U.S. Forest Service, Williams' employer, let them move into a tiny house normally used by trainees. They had to clean it up first -- it, too, had been flooded.

Hugo's storm surge had gone into McClellanville far higher than anyone expected, including the experts. Even new houses in coastal areas of South Carolina are built only above the level of a 100-year flood. The water in McClellanville, a town with many older, ground-level homes, reached levels projected to occur just once every 500 years.

Stories of the near-drownings at the local high school drew national attention and help poured in from all over the country. Clothing and food, furniture and appliances, lumber and roofing materials -- hundreds of thousands of dollars in donated items found their way to the town of 1,500.

The Williamses, who lost almost everything, got almost none of it.

Williams, a timber-marking foreman, had to work long hours in the Francis Marion National Forest, where Hugo snapped millions of trees. He always seemed to be off in the woods when they unloaded the relief trucks. His wife couldn't pick up anything because she had no way to get there. Hugo had wrecked her car.

When the weather turned cold, Williams had to buy a heater for $150. A family he knew with minor Hugo damage got two identical units absolutely free.

Whatever he did, it seemed to cost him. A lot.

Their house was a total loss, and they had no insurance. Although he supports six people on a $21,000-a-year salary, Williams made too much to qualify for a disaster grant. Instead, he had to apply for a loan from the Small Business Administration.

He had lots of questions, but he could never get through to the SBA office in Atlanta because so many other Hugo victims were calling the toll-free number. He finally got the regular number and spent $100 on long-distance phone bills.

Then Williams had to get clear title to the property on DuPre Road. There was no proof that his late father had left it to him. He had to hire a lawyer and run a legal ad seeking other potential heirs. That cost him more than $2,100.

Finally, Williams was approved for a loan to build a three-bedroom, one-bath house. Even though construction has yet to begin, he immediately had to buy flood insurance for more than $500. He also had to start paying $414 a month on the loan. He's paying another $210 a month in rent on the Forest Service house.

Before the hurricane, Williams hoped to retire in 11 years.

Now, he faces working another 30 years -- until he's 71 -- to pay off his loan.

"It takes a young man to leap across those trees and stump holes," he says. "I know there's no way I'm going to work that job for 30 years."

There are other legacies of Hugo.

Everyone in the family has suffered from skin rashes -- probably, the doctor says, because they spent so much time covered with mud and sewage. His wife and kids get nervous in thunderstorms. Williams talks to himself, something he never did before. A counselor said it's because he talked to himself so much during the hurricane, afraid to let the kids know how worried he was.

The months after Hugo were especially hard on 16-year-old Salena Williams. Lincoln High was badly damaged, so she and other students had to get up at 5:30 every morning and ride a bus 35 miles to a school in a well-to-do suburb of Charleston. The students there didn't think much of the kids from McClellanville.

Lincoln mud, they called them.

When the School Board announced it would close Lincoln permanently, Williams and other parents got up a petition. Repairs were made. In April, the students went back.

"You never appreciate what you got "til you go somewhere else," Salena told her mother.

It's hard, but Williams tries to stay optimistic. This spring, a few months after he burned the house, he noticed the vacant field was full of petunias. He couldn't figure out where they came from -- they had never seen petunias in McClellanville before.

"This is a sign of blessing for us," Williams says. "I'm looking at it as a miracle."

An engineer took one look at the place and said: "Bulldoze it."

* * *

It was a tired and angry crowd that gathered at Patriot's Point the Tuesday after Hugo. Normally, the boats carried tourists to Fort Sumter; now they were ferrying Isle of Palms residents to see what, if anything, was left of their houses.

Bill Kulseth had a good idea what he'd find. That weekend, he had sneaked onto the island and gone to the Windjammer, the oceanfront lounge of which he was part-owner. The hurricane had all but demolished it.

Three days later, in a cold, hard rain, Kulseth was going back legally. The plan was to take residents over in groups, according to street address. From the time they left the boat, they'd have three hours to go to their homes and businesses, collect what they could and come back. For those who lived far from the dock, as many of them did, there wasn't much time to do anything but walk.

Like the Windjammer, the Kulseths' house didn't look too bad from the front. Then Kulseth went inside. It, too, was wrecked. The water had gone almost three feet high on one side of the house, 27 inches on the other. The carpet was full of mud.

Their insurance covered only the structure, not the contents. Nor did it cover the cost of renting an apartment in Mount Pleasant for six weeks. To save money, Kulseth decided to do much of the repair work himself. Long ago, he'd bought a set of Time-Life home-improvement books, and now he got them out, reading up on how to hang windows, lay tiles, install plumbing.

The work went well, and it kept his mind off the Windjammer. An engineer had taken one look at the place and said: "Bulldoze it." The lounge would take months to rebuild.

He and Norma moved back into the house the second week in November. They didn't have lights or phone service. The water was so heavily chlorinated they couldn't stand to drink it.

At Thanksgiving, 7-year-old Will came home from North Carolina, where he'd been staying with his grandparents. The Kulseths were surprised at how chubby he'd gotten. They also noticed some behavior problems. Few other kids had returned to Isle of Palms, and he had no one to play with.

It was hard for all of them living on the island. The restaurants were closed. The only grocery store had been heavily damaged, and they had to drive five miles to Mount Pleasant to shop. That could take hours. The Ben Sawyer Bridge was back on its pedestal, but only one lane was open from Oct. 8 to Dec. 9.

Then came the holidays.

There were no parties. No lights or decorations. Money was tight because most people had yet to receive their insurance settlements. The Kulseths decided to have a get-together Christmas Eve, to salvage what they could of this dreary holiday season. They invited several friends.

It snowed. Nine inches. Almost no one showed up.

That was the low point. The snow stayed on the ground for days, turning gray and depressing everyone even more.

Today, while hundreds of Isle of Palms residents are still in temporary housing, the Kulseths' lives have returned to something approaching normal. Will has slimmed down, and the house shows little evidence of Hugo. A few restaurants are back in business, and the Red and White grocery store reopened Ash Wednesday, with a wine party. The Kulseths have noticed its prices are 20 to 30 percent higher than they were before the storm.

Work is going well on the new Windjammer. Just last week Kulseth and his partner got a check from their wind-insurance carrier. With that and their flood-insurance settlement, they were able to pay off the mortgage on the old place and apply the balance to the new one. Still, they will have to borrow almost $400,000 before it's finished.

The Windjammer is now 23 feet above sea level, eight feet higher than required by coastal building codes. It's scheduled to reopen next week.

If a hurricane threatens again, the Kulseths won't be anywhere around. They'll go to South Dakota, they joke.

"I'd put more stuff up high and pack more than two pairs of shorts," Norma says. "I don't think I'd be as optimistic everything is going to be all right."

At school, she drew a picture of the family with flashlights.

* * *

John Maybank phoned his wife at 11 p.m. Sept. 21, shortly before Hugo hit. It would be 36 hours before he heard from her again.

She and their daughter Marion had gone to stay with a friend in Moncks Corner, thinking Hugo would fizzle out by the time it got 30 miles inland.

Instead the storm knocked down 47 of the 50 trees in the yard. It took them all day Friday, working with chain saws and a backhoe, to clear the driveway.

Hugo had badly damaged the ground floor of the Maybanks' own home in Charleston, so they moved to a family farm 50 miles south of the city. They felt lucky to have a place to stay, but the commuting was a strain. Traffic, rarely smooth in the best of times, was swollen with hundreds of out-of-town utility trucks and construction vehicles. Maybank found himself getting up at 5:15 a.m. for a trip to the office that used to take five minutes.

It was a month before phone service was restored to the house, and mid-November before the hot water was on. They moved back shortly before Thanksgiving. The front door was still nailed shut, so Marion, 6, climbed through the window each morning to catch her ride to school.

Repairs went slowly. Some contractors refused to give estimates. Others made notes, then disappeared. The windows and doors on the 60-year-old house were not standard size, and it took until mid-April, 61/2 months after the storm, to get new ones made. The first floor is not painted yet -- crews are so much in demand that painters who used to earn $5 an hour are now getting $10 and $12.

Prices soared for all construction work. The waves knocked down a concrete block wall that Maybank had built for $1,300 in 1987. Two years later, it cost $4,200 to replace.

The wall wasn't covered by insurance, but almost everything else has been. Maybank felt lucky his mortgage lender had required him to get flood coverage for the full replacement value, not just the depreciated value, of the house.

Still, as did thousands of others, the Maybanks initially had problems with insurance adjusters. He finally hired an architect to do a detailed damage survey of the house. A supervisor for his flood-insurance company took one look at the 13-page report and settled in a day -- probably, Maybank thinks, because the survey was professionally done.

Today, Maybank, a stockbroker, considers the disruptions to his life only minor ones. His daughter seems to have suffered no lasting problems although she clearly remembers the storm -- at school, she drew a picture of the family with flashlights.

"I think kids react to what parents do," he says. "If parents hype it up, kids read it."

Maybank is annoyed, and a bit bored, by the endless discussion about Hugo. It still dominates the talk at cocktail parties, and people tend to blame every cold or virus on strange germs the hurricane purportedly blew in.

"You can't go anywhere without the conversation turning to Hugo," Maybank says. "There's no conversation that doesn't touch on it."

She stared and thought: "This is where my life was saved."

Karen Geiger's 4-year-old son Adam was too young to express it, but it was obvious he had been terrified by Hugo. After all, he had seen his house almost destroyed and a huge tree fall on his mother.

A few weeks after the storm, his father decided to take him to the movies. Maybe that would get his mind off trees and disasters.

They went to see The Bear. It sounded like a cute, happy movie.

It opened with a mother bear dying -- crushed by a falling tree.

Karen Geiger survived, despite injuries that would have been fatal to most other people, her doctors say. She had six broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a broken pelvis and lacerated kidneys. Surgeons had to remove her spleen and reconstruct her right foot.

For 30 days she lay in Charlotte Memorial Hospital, much of the time flat on her back. Before Hugo, she was constantly on the go, traveling all over the eastern United States in her job as director of career development for NCNB Corp. Now she was completely dependent on others. The nurses were nice, but they rarely had time to chat. She liked the doctors, but whatever they did seemed to hurt.

"I've got to get out of here," she told Damon, her husband.

The tree that nearly killed her was a white oak at least 135 years old. It had badly damaged the house, and for three weeks after the storm, Damon had to stay in a friend's basement with Adam and Michael, 2. Then they moved to a rented house.

In late October, Karen was released from the hospital and moved in with them. The bank sent dinner every night for 90 days. She had round-the-clock nursing care, and she became close friends with one of the nurses. They laughed and chatted as they watched Oprah and the soaps.

Damon felt a little left out. It irritated him that the nurses did the laundry but never put it away. At first Michael refused to acknowledge her presence. The hospital bed she had to sleep in apparently scared him.

At Thanksgiving, they all went to Fire Station No. 2. Chris Christenbury, the Charlotte fire captain who had cut her free, hosted a chili lunch. Adam worshiped him and the other firefighters. He made up a game:

"I'm dead, come save me."

At the end of January, Karen Geiger went into the house for the first time since the storm. Despite all that had happened, she loved the place. She and Damon had bought it shortly after they were married, and Michael had been born on the front porch.

She went in the back way and up to Damon's office. It had not been damaged. She could hear a tarp flapping in the wind, and it gave her a creepy feeling. At last, she mustered the strength to go downstairs and look in the bathroom. She found herself staring at it, though not in horror.

"This," she thought, "is where my life was saved."

* * *

Today, they are still in the rental house. They are fighting with their insurance company, which refused to pay rent beyond the middle of May. It claims that Damon, a contractor, is taking too long to repair their home.

"They showed no sensitivity to the fact he was in the hospital with me and couldn't go ahead with the work," Karen says.

Karen is back on the job, spending two days at the office and three at home. She likes having more time with the kids. They sometimes talk about Hugo and draw pictures of the hurricane.

A few weeks ago, when a thunderstorm blew up, Adam got out a bat. "If a tree comes, I'm going to hit it," he told her.

Michael is fascinated by his mother's scars and says he wants to be a doctor. She still has pain in her right foot and parts of her leg are numb. Her liver has been acting up, but doctors aren't sure why. She has to go to physical therapy five times a week.

Before the storm, Karen considered herself a pessimistic person. Now, she realizes, she could get through anything. She is less concerned with career, more with satisfying her family and herself. She wants to learn to play the piano and maybe write a book.

"It's a lot easier to value my time," she says. "It's a lot easier to say no to certain things. It made me very aware of my priorities and gave me permission to live by them."

Damon thinks their relationship has improved, probably because they've been together so much. But for a long while, he was haunted by the helplessness he felt when he saw her pinned beneath the tree. At one point they even went to see an expert on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

"It's like your bucket is filled, and it doesn't take much to make it overflow," he says. "Whereas before you could take a lot more stuff in your life, the least thing is overwhelming now."

* * *

Meteorologist Jim McFadden expected to die when an engine quit on the Lockheed Orion, the first plane to fly into Hurricane Hugo. But McFadden had been on other turbulent hurricane research missions, and the very next week he went back into the storm.

Some others aboard were so terrified they vowed never to fly again.

Last month, the Orion underwent a complete overhaul in preparation for the 1990 hurricane season. It now has 43 little red hurricane symbols on its fuselage -- the first for Bonnie, in 1976, the last for Hugo, in 1989.

What will be the 44th hurricane?

Who, and where, will it hit?