We’re all keeping an eye on Hurricane Joaquin

The anniversary of Hurricane Hugo and Hurricane Joaquin’s now approaching the East Coast don’t precisely coincide. But they’re close enough.

Hugo struck in the early morning hours of Friday, Sept. 22, 1989. Joaquin was declared a Category 4 hurricane Thursday as it tracked toward the Bahamas and, some forecasters predict, on toward the U.S. coast.

The passage of nearly 30 years makes a difference. On the sunny Thursday afternoon before Hugo became a household name, residents of the Upstate weren’t giving much thought to the hurricane that was gathering force and headed for Charleston.

“We might get some heavy rain,” was the most common prognostication among the amateur meteorologists in this part of the state.

Ha! So much for that laid-back attitude.

We began to realize later that night and into the wee hours of Friday that Hugo was packing more than heavy rain. As trees toppled, telephone and power lines fell, electrical transformers blew up and rain whipped at houses like a fusillade of bullets, we knew we were in for something grim. Dawn revealed a hellish panorama that was worse than any nightmares conjured up in the dark.

Now, as we watch the progress of Joaquin, wherever it might blow, we are unlikely to be surprised. The technology of tracking hurricanes has become so sophisticated that we can watch the course Joaquin takes almost minute to minute.

There’s no chance this storm will sneak up on us, and the benefits of this are innumerable. We can plan ahead, take shelter, secure homes, drive inland long before the high winds and flooding make running away impossible.

Or we can breathe a sigh of relief when the storm trackers tell us we no longer are in the path of the hurricane – and murmur a prayer for people in cities up the coast who still could be hit.

When Hugo struck South Carolina 26 years ago, one of the main concerns was communication. The land lines to phones had been wiped out in many areas, so we couldn’t make calls. With no electricity, there was no TV, so we weren’t quite sure how the rest of the region had fared or what the destruction beyond our limited line of vision looked like.

Proud to say, a number of those questions were answered by the arrival of the morning paper on Sept. 23. The Herald, whose power had been knocked out, patched together a paper using emergency generators, borrowed lamps, flashlights and battery-powered lanterns, and printed the day’s edition at The Yorkville Enquirer in York.

These days, it’s cell towers and Internet connections we have to worry about. Ironically, if Joaquin passes this way, many land-line phones might still be working in the aftermath while cell phones could be useless.

Still, even with the technological advances over the years, we’re likely to be in an energy dead zone if another hurricane like Hugo visits. And all our prized frozen food that we were saving for a special occasion will be slowly melting just as it did in 1989.

Once again, we could be forced to resort to the crude daily essentials that Americans relied on centuries ago – candles, wood fires, food cooked on a grill, cold baths and early bedtimes. Those who lived like pioneers after Hugo can attest that it’s fun for a couple of days, but not much longer than that.

We are more knowledgeable these days, thanks to the incessant patter of TV weather people, about the numerous dangers associated with hurricanes. We know that we have more to worry about than heavy winds and hard rains. We also must fear the storm surge, raised tides, dangerous waves and flooding, followed by beach houses toppling into the sea.

Hurricane Sandy, which walloped the New Jersey coast in 2012, showed that the effects of climate change can exacerbate the damage, especially regarding storm surges and flooding. The same could occur wherever Joaquin hits.

But while all this available new information has made us better prepared for incoming storms, it also has set us up for many false alarms. We intently follow the path of a developing hurricane only to see it veer north into the Atlantic, where it goes to die a lonely death without hurting anyone.

That has bred a certain devil-may-care attitude about hurricanes. Since Sandy, the last hurricane to make landfall in the continental United States was Arthur, which hit North Carolina as a Category 2 storm in July 2014, bringing high winds, driving rain and storm surge up the East Coast. While any hurricane warrants our attention, Arthur was not that serious.

Let’s hope Joaquin is a dud. We can do without the excitement.

One major hurricane in a lifetime should be enough, and we had ours nearly 30 years ago.

This story was originally published October 1, 2015 at 4:24 PM with the headline "We’re all keeping an eye on Hurricane Joaquin."