From Columbia South Carolina's The State:
30 years after Hugo tore it down, SC coast builds back in the danger zone
When Hurricane Hugo hit Georgetown County 30 years ago, the big storm pounded a barren sand spit at the south end of Litchfield Beach, chewing up dunes and eroding the oceanfront, before cutting through South Carolina on a trail of destruction.
At the time, no one said much about Hugo’s impact on the narrow spit because not much was there.
Then in the late 1990s, construction workers arrived on the property, building the first grand home in a row of new oceanfront houses. Today, about three-dozen houses perch precariously on the sand spit, between the Atlantic Ocean on one side and a tidal creek on the other. Some are fortified by an unapproved seawall, built as protection from the rising seas.
The story of south Litchfield is a familiar one in South Carolina three decades after Hurricane Hugo ripped the state. Despite causing $7 billion worth of damage on Sept. 21-22, 1989, Hugo did little to discourage new or more intense development on many stretches of the state’s coast.
What will happen when:
If a storm like Hugo hit today, smacking the coast directly and plowing through the state to Charlotte, it would cause an economic loss of $16 billion, according the University of South Carolina’s hazards research institute. That’s mainly because of the increased population and residential development on the coast, USC researchers say.
A long and well written article citing lots of data. People fail to grasp what a disaster can be like in terms of physical and economic impact. Stuff like this will happen again, it is just a matter of time.
Leave a comment