Published: Friday, Sep. 25, 2009 / Updated: Friday, Sep. 25, 2009 10:31 AM

Twenty years ago, reeling from Hugo

On the morning of this day 20 years ago, I probably would have been walking down the street for a cup of coffee.

My neighbors' house was one of the few on the street that still had power after Hurricane Hugo had blown through town, and in the morning, they would put a large percolator full of coffee on their front stoop for wandering caffeine addicts. These rank among the most enjoyable cups of java I have ever had.

Downed trees and limbs still littered the neighborhood. Chain saws were buzzing all over the city.

This day would have been a Monday, four days after Hugo hit. Power had been restored to The Herald by then, and we were printing the paper in house.

The day after Hugo, we worked on computers powered by emergency generators and got around the building using flashlights and battery-powered lanterns. The phones weren't working. The paper was printed — all black and white — at the Yorkville Enquirer in York.

The homes and businesses that regained power soon after the hurricane subsided were the lucky ones. Many others had to wait until crews could get around to putting the city's electrical grid back together.

At our house, we went more than three weeks without power. At first, this was fun, like camping out or living like 18th century colonists.

By day four, however, it was wearing thin. We had no lights, no refrigeration, no hot water, no power, period. Nonetheless, for the first week or so, we would reflexively flip on the light switch whenever we walked into a dark room.

We cooked on a charcoal grill, iced down food in coolers and, at night, used candles for light. Many neighbors were in the same boat, so we pooled the thawing food from our freezers for a communal cookout. We later learned that this happened in neighborhoods all over the city.

Hurricanes can bring out the best in people. We shared precious ice, batteries, coffee, flashlights.

Friends up the street had moved, leaving their house vacant, and they graciously let us use it. It had electricity and, glory be to God, hot water.

On the night of this day, 20 years ago, I took my small portable TV under one arm and a six pack under the other to that house to watch Monday Night Football. About halfway into the first quarter, a power surge demolished my TV, and I marched dejectedly back to my cold, dark home, where the rest of the family already was in bed.

Things have changed in 20 years. Back then, Hugo's arrival in York County came mostly as a big surprise.

I recall standing around, hours before Hugo hit, at the annual pig pickin' The Herald used to hold in the pavilion at the York Electric Co-op. Munching pulled pork and drinking beer, those assembled talked about the weather only if they could think of nothing more interesting.

“Maybe some heavy rain” was the oft-repeated phrase.

For days after the hurricane hit, we were hungry for information. We'd tune in to the nightly network news reports to see if they had a story about the aftermath of the hurricane. We got first-hand accounts from friends and family in Charleston and other areas hit by the storm, and we had newspaper reports. But there was no 24-7 cable news, no Weather Channel, no cell phones, no Internet, no YouTube videos of the damage.

Computer-enhanced photos from space now show us what a hurricane looks like from above: An iridescent cyclops with swirling tentacles making its way across the Atlantic. Forecasters can track the path of hurricanes and predict the time and location of landfall with much more certainty than just a decade ago. If current technology had been available 20 years ago, we might have known earlier that Hugo would roar up the state, all the way into North Carolina, and maybe we would have been better prepared.

Then again, maybe not. Hurricanes can be capricious.

I hate to think what it must have been like to be in Galveston, Texas, on Sept. 8, 1900, when a hurricane — they didn't name them back then — swept over the island with no warning. A 20-foot storm surge sucked 3,000 homes out to sea. More than 6,000 people died in what may have been the worst single natural disaster in U.S. history.

Forecasters had no way of accurately tracking the storm or estimating where it might come ashore. The residents of Galveston never knew what hit them.

A few weeks without power or hot water? Well, we lived to tell about it.