Clarendon County, S.C., trashed during Hugo, helps the rest of South Carolina deal with Hurricane Fran

Web-posted Sept. 5, 1996

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By Tom Corwin
Staff Writer

Frances Richbourg remembers pieces of tin roof ripping off a mobile home and coming right for her as she ran from her crippled fire department station wagon during Hurricane Hugo.

Now seven years later, Ms. Richbourg and other residents of Clarendon County, S.C. are preparing to be saviours rather than survivors as Hurricane Fran bears down on the South Carolina coast.

In 1989, Hugo blasted through the inland South Carolina county, leveling forests, destroying mobile homes and devastating businesses. Richmond County adopted Clarendon and sent food, supplies and help rebuilding the shattered county seat of Manning. The scars from Hugo are still visible around Manning, said Clarendon County administrator Bobby Boland.

``The forests have never recovered,'' he said. ``You can ride around and tell the tree line is still jagged and uneven.''

But from those scars and from its bitter memories of Hugo, Clarendon County has learned and is better prepared for Fran, Mr. Boland said. The county has purchased a number of additional radios and a shipment of cellular phones arrived Thursday morning so that emergency personnel and volunteers can keep in contact.

The county was divided up into sectors so that after a storm hits assessment teams can fan out and report back to a command center inside the county courthouse, he said.

Four or five planes are also scheduled to arrive after the storm hits so the county can assess damage to the roads, Mr. Boland. Instead of days, the county can have a complete damage report in four or five hours, he said.

But the anxiety level in Manning is lessening as residents watched Fran take a more northerly course that would take the county out of the storm's path. Clarendon, in fact, is preparing to shelter coastal counties who are in danger - schools were canceled for Thursday and Friday and are now opened up as shelters, though only a few people had arrived early Thursday.

One of those refugees was Reba Cusack, 72, of Georgetown, who was staying with her daughter in Manning.

``I would have stayed there if it hadn't been for the water, they were talking about the water surging at us,'' Mrs. Cucsack said. ``The winds, I'm not too afraid of the winds. I don't like the water because I know what it did in McClellanville.''

During Hugo, a friend of hers was asleep in his home in McClellanville when he saw a ``river'' of water flooding into the house. He clung onto a post on his porch as the water reached up to his neck, then subsided, she said.

``That's how close he came,'' she said.

Many of the other refugees in Manning will be mobile home owners heeding the state's call to seek shelter elsewhere, Mr. Boland.

It was a mobile home that sticks in Ms. Richbourg's mind as she thinks back to Hugo. She and another firefighter were answering an automatic alarm at a local factory just as Hugo ripped into Clarendon.

As they drove to the call, a tree fell and pinned the station wagon to the road. Ms. Richbourg, the county's assistant fire chief, scrambled out into a yard and headed toward a mobile home as the rain and wind whipped around her. She saw the people who lived in the home huddled in a car in front and looked up to see pieces of roof tearing off.

``It was right harrowing watching this tin flying around,'' she said. She had only gone out to save the department from sending a truck, and she did accomplish that mission.

``We did get the message across that no one else should come out,'' she said, laughing.

People in Clarendon County can now laugh a little about Hugo while still praying that Fran doesn't repeat history in Manning.