When I was newly married, at 24 years old, we purchased our first home, in March.

Over Labor Day weekend, we decided to go golfing for the first time, to see the new Harbor course on Wild Dunes. It was a gorgeous course, and we had no idea it would be destroyed by Hugo a few weeks later.

In September we bought a new car (Isuzu Trooper) with a boat hitch and bought a Prindle catamaran sail boat.

My coworker said “I bet that storm is going to hit and go inland all the way through to Charlotte, instead of skirt up the coast.” I had never considered that as a possibility. This wasn’t the first time we have had a hurricane threat. So many times we would watch storms that never hit so we would get complacent. We also knew we were overdue for a “big one”.

After work, my husband (now ex) decided to drop off the boat to store at their house in case Hugo hit. They live about 80 miles inland. The boat would never have made it though the storm if we had kept it in our back yard. He was planning to get up early and head back home on Wednesday.

I was still back at the house. I couldn’t sleep and was worried about the storm. I was glued to the TV. I stayed up late cleaning the house, washing clothes, making beds, and taping windows. I took framed prints off of the walls. It was so weird my reaction to get my house “ready” as though we were having an uninvited guest.

As I was preparing the house “just in case” I was glued to the TV paying attention to the updates to figure out what I was going to do. I had a job and didn’t know what would happen, would they give us the day off or what?

As the storm intensified, and as I listened to the TV news, the storm intensified! The newscasters were screaming GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT if you can now. LEAVE NOW! By now it was 2am, 9/20/89.

I am pretty sure I told her, “OK! I am out of here!”

I sprang into action, loaded my car with all my worldly possessions in my small Dodge Omni, and drove to my parents at 3am. I turned AC on full blast and played the music loud.

I pulled in my parents driveway about 15 minutes before my ex was about to leave. I stopped him. He thought I had lost my mind but I convinced him to stay put. I nodded on and off the rest of the day listening to the weather channel.

When I woke up, I called my parents and rattled off typical hurricane instructions: to fill the bathtubs, buy batteries, ice, food that will last and so forth. They laughed, bought raw Hamburger meat, beer and called me the “disaster queen” aka DQ.

Needless to say, right after dinner we lost power. My parents were finally taking me seriously. They regretted not getting ice. We reluctantly went to bed. It started to get worse, the wind was so loud that it woke us all up.

We had a full discussion about which would be the safest room in the house. We picked the living room which had a pull out sofa and we made pallets on the floor. We were afraid the big trees in the backyard would hit the house. Luckily we found a radio and listened to the disaster unfold. We were so hungry for news.

During the night of constant wind and rain,

The next day it looked like a war zone. I can still smell pine sap and hear chain saws. We walked deep in the back yard and spotted the path of a tornado that had come through the back yard between our backdoor neighbors. It didn’t hit the house, but was super close!

There were downed power lines and it was dangerous. I remember listening to the news which said “stay off the roads.” My ex & our neighbor (that evacuated to our house) drove on the roads to check on our houses. I was snappy and very mad that they drove back.

After they left my mom and I discovered a dog that fell in my parents pool. The pool was covered in debris and you couldn’t even tell it was a pool. We helped the black lab out of the pool and then went door to door to find the dogs family. We struggled finding the dogs home. Everyone was in shock and grateful it wasn’t worse than it was. It was a very weird day.

Just as it started to get dark again, my ex and his friend came home. They reported that it was terrible, the entire town is so bad, boats were on the road and we were very lucky. They had to sit at the foot of the Cooper River Bridge to wait to be allowed to go across. While they waited, they took photos of Charleston.

They finally got to cross the bridge and go to Mt Pleasant. We only had a little damage on the left corner of our roof, the ridge vent was torn off and the fence was a mess but we were lucky.

I was out of work for three weeks. I spent most of my time at my parents and came home when the power was restored. Life was back to normal a little faster for them than us. Amazing we had no power for many weeks but it turned we never lost phone service! There is also a real issue when restaurants start to reopen. i remember getting take out from a fast food restaurant and wondering if I could trust that they used fresh food. These were real concerns, food poisoning was common.

Life started to resume and we just got used to debris piles in our yards. It became normal to see snapped pine trees. Life started to rebuild.

That year we had a Christmas miracle, we had snow. It covered up the ugly broken fences and debris piles.

I can go on and on. What a nightmare hurricane Hugo was for us as well as life changing for everyone that were in his path. I will never ever take these storms for granted. To this day I cannot stand the sound of generators or chain saws. Here we are 30 years later and overdue for a big one.