The storm before the storm

The wind came before daylight.

Trees cracked and fell across roads and power lines. Electricity disappeared. The sky flashed as transformers blew. Driving became dangerous. Large round hay bales scurried across roads like tumbleweeds.

People who had gone to bed believing a hurricane was someone else’s problem woke to find it at their own doors.

It sounds like Hurricane Helene.

It wasn’t.

This was Hurricane Hugo, which tore through Burke County on Friday, Sept. 22, 1989, after racing inland from the South Carolina coast.

For years, Hugo was the storm people here remembered. Those who lived through it could recall the sound of the wind, the trees coming down, the darkened homes, and the shock that a hurricane could still carry such force this far from the ocean.

Then came Helene.

Thirty-seven years after Hugo, and two years after Helene, Hugo no longer occupies the place in our collective memory it once did. That unforgettable storm has been, well, forgotten by many.

Perhaps that makes this the right time to remember it.

On the day Hugo struck, Bill Poteat, now editor emeritus of The Paper, was editor of The News Herald in Morganton. He wrote the following column about that morning, ending with a prediction about Hugo’s place in our memories. His column was originally published on Sunday, Sept. 24, 1989.

It is worth reading again.

Hugo: Will we ever forget it?As the gold of September twilight began to fade into darkness on Thursday, my mother and I were sitting on her front porch in Drexel, enjoying the quiet and talking about the approach of Hurricane Hugo.

The evening was still, save for the sounds of my children playing inside the house and the crickets chirping in the stand of pine and poplar trees across the street.

Mama was telling me about a neighbor woman, a widow, who was fearful of spending the night alone in her house after hearing a television report that the storm could still be packing 80 mph winds as it moved through the Piedmont.

“Oh, that’s silly,” I said, with all the naivete and ignorance that living more than 34 years without experiencing such a storm can bring. “We’re 300 miles from the ocean. We won’t have any problems here.”

That naivete still had not been shattered Friday morning when I awakened to the sound of wind and driving rain.

“I’ll bet school’s called off for the day,” said my wife Sally, as she sat up in bed and listened to the storm outside.

“That’s silly,” I said, as I headed for the shower. “I’ve lived here nearly all my life and school’s never been called off because of a hurricane.”

It wasn’t until I headed up Highway 70 in the predawn darkness that naivete began to give way to experience and that ignorance began to give way to the realization of just how strong a hurricane can be — even if it is 300 miles from the ocean.

The highway was covered with leaves, tree branches and water. The wind was threatening to toss my little Dodge Colt right off the road.

Many a morning I have driven to work through darkness and swirling snow without a thought of the danger. Friday morning, I was scared.

Reporter Leta Parks and I arrived at The News Herald parking lot at the same time and made a mad dash for the door. Just as we came inside, the power went off and the world went black.

Looking out the front doors into that blackness, I saw the northern sky suddenly filled with a tremendous flash of bright green light. It was, I supposed, a transformer exploding.

During the next hour, the fury of the storm increased as daylight came on. I worried about the windows blowing out on the front of our building and I worried about my employees getting to work through such a storm.

But get here they did. Photographers Alan Marler and Mark Hannan came in to stock up on film before heading back out into the storm. Reporters Julie Ball and Kevin Ellis headed out to check with the Emergency Management Office.

Leta Parks braved the storm to go across to the emergency shelter set up by the Red Cross in the basement of the Collett Street Rec.

And News Editor Sherry Williamson, herself a former police reporter, couldn’t stand waiting around for the power to come back on and grabbed a camera and note pad and headed out into the storm.

Thankfully, that power was restored just after 9:30 a.m. and, even more thankfully, everyone returned safely from the storm with the information and the photographs they had gone out seeking.

The next four hours were filled with the sort of controlled frenzy that happens in newsrooms on such occasions, as we labored to make up for lost time and to pull together the elements of one of the biggest news stories of the year.

That task, which we had feared at 9:30 might take all day, was completed just before 2 p.m., with the first newspapers in carriers’ hands and out on the street by 2:30 p.m., a mere two hours later than normal.

It was, I reflected later, as I sat once again on my mother’s porch, waiting while she packed a bag to come spend the night at our house where the electricity had been restored, a day to be long remembered.

The peaceful view of the night before was gone. More than a dozen pine and poplar trees in the stand of woods across the street had toppled during the height of the storm, bringing power lines down with them.

Another dozen or so pines had fallen above the house but, aside from getting a terrible fright as she watched the balls of fire dance around the fallen electric lines, my mother had come through the storm safely.

So apparently, had all the other mothers and daughters, fathers and sons across Burke County — for all the damage to property, no life was lost in Hugo’s stormy passage.

That damage will be cleared away, of course. The limbs will be sawed, the trees will be cut and the evidence of Hugo will be removed from our physical sight.

But, never, I suspect, will the memories of Hugo be removed from our hearts and minds.