Memories of David - Hurricane David

As I have been watching the weather reports with Labor Day weekend approaching, and having just returned from visiting family in Beaufort, it struck me that 33 years had passed since the Labor Day weekend when Hurricane David came calling.  I was a young reporter at the Beaufort Gazette that year, my first year as a reporter after putting in apprenticeship time as a copy clerk at the St. Petersburg Times and the weather and obituary writer at The Charlotte Observer.  After a summer of quiet weather, the first wild breezes that heralded the oncoming storm brought me back down from a visit to friends in Charleston.

Zipping down Highway 17 I had my first real inklings that the storm really was coming – in the four or five miles of road near the Combahee River bridge, I spotted a small alligator and a number of other animals – turtles, snakes and a deer - crossing from the east side of the river toward the landward side.  Not a skeptic when it came to the wisdom of animals, I pushed on into Beaufort, stopping to gas up my bright blue Karmann Ghia and stock up on apple juice and granola bars at the A & P. 

I stopped at my little rental on Mossy Oaks, glanced at the live oaks that overhung it and said a word of prayer that they wouldn’t come down in the storm.  I rolled up my living room carpet and put the couch up on blocks and stacked the rug on top of that, cranked all the windows shut and made sure my cat Minerva had food, water and clean litter.  Dumping my grocery purchases in the car, along with a sleeping bag and a change of clothes, I drove out to the Gazette offices on Salem Road.  I was almost immediately dispatched out to St. Helena, Fripp and Land’s End to check on evacuation progress, making a fast stop to make sure everything at my parent’s house on Fripp was closed up and that the fulltime resident neighbors were packing up and heading out.

Driving across St.. Helena, I was reminded of a history account I had just recently found in the Beaufort County Library talking about the Sea Islands hurricane of 1893 which had happened at almost the same time of year and had resulted in several thousand deaths from the massive storm surge in coastal Georgia and South Carolina.  The book had recounted that skeletons were found decades later flung up in trees from the wind and the storm tides.  I knew Hurricane David might be just as bad and that even though we had satellite weather forecasting and modern communications, none of those could stem the forces of wind and water.

As the afternoon progressed, the winds whipped harder and harder and the rain, at first sporadic, started ranging from heavy to torrential.  At times, in the Gazette office, we could not see cars parked in the side lot less than 10 feet from the door.  The US Weather Service kept reporting the storm’s progress as it hit the coast and seemingly came to a halt for hours.  The electricity flickered off and on inside the brightly-lit offices at the Gazette as reports came in from the county disaster preparedness office and the Beaufort and Port Royal police departments.  Around 9 or 10 p.m. after hearing reports of ball lightning and St. Elmo’s fire on the power lines near the old bridge to Parris Island, I drove to the bridge and hanging on to the jacket of a Port Royal policeman named Officer Angell, pushed against the wind to the Port Royal side of the span.  Unfortunately, the electrical light show was almost over and my efforts to capture it on film were in vain. That was the old metal trestle bridge, later replaced after Hurricane Hugo damage.

I went back to the Gazette through steaming rains and winds pushing my little car around and ran in, soaked to the skin despite my yellow raincoat and dried off as the reports continued to come in that the Hurricane was barely moving.  Around midnight, I fell asleep in my sleeping bag on the floor of the publisher’s office to awaken to clear skies – shortly after I’d been sent to sack out, David had started moving inland and I’d been left to sleep to take on the “mopping up” coverage first thing in the morning.

Getting back in my car, I headed out as far as Highway 21 would take me and checked with the police at Fripp.  The damage to the beaches was bad, and the last mile of road – the unpaved part, was still knee deep in brackish water, so I put on sneakers and slogged down to talk to one of the people who had ignored the evacuation orders.  Making my way back to town, I stopped at Hunting Island, where possibly the worst damage had been sustained – the old beach road was completely washed out in places and park rangers were assessing the damage and trying to see how and when they could reopen the park.  At one point where the old road had washed out, it was at least 10-12 feet from the sand to where the road ended at the washout.  The amount of debris on the beaches was incredible as well.

St. Helena and Frogmore had fared better, although the power was still off and people were driving back from the mainland – and the electricity was still off on Lady’s Island and most of downtown.  The new marina was a wreck – floating slips damaged beyond repair and a general mess, but none of the great trees on Bay Street had fallen and the oldest buildings had beaten back the storm with little or no damage.

 I took my film to the office and wrote my morning after piece and then, finally, headed home – as I drove down Ribaut Road, the power came back on and I turned in at my rental, drove around a few small fallen branches and opened the door to get soundly berated by my cat.  Then I took a long shower, made a cup of coffee and collapsed.  There was no amount of caffeine that could have kept me awake one more minute.

I was so grateful that the storm had not been a recap of that horrible 1893 storm I had read about.  And I was grateful, as a young and inexperienced reporter, to have had a storm like David during my first year.  I left Beaufort in 1980 for Greenwood and then onward, ending my reporting days 12 years later as I faced the shrinking pool of reporting jobs and my growing fascination with computers and made a career change.  I come to Beaufort still, regularly, and I never drive over the bridge at Whale Branch without remembering that Labor Day weekend and the storm clouds whipping in and the smell of wind and rain across the marshes.

A lot has changed in Beaufort in the intervening years – Fordham’s is no longer a hardware store where you could find almost anything;  the Gazette has moved from Salem Road.  City Hall, which had moved into the old Post Office Building, now has an even more imposing home on Boundary Street, Koth’s where you could track down attorneys for comments during courtroom breaks and get a Coca-Cola is gone.  So is the A&P and the little house I rented was torn down the next year and replaced with an apartment building.  But the city itself remains so much intact that as I drove away a few weeks ago, I found it hard to believe that a third of a century had gone by.