When The Hurricane Hits

By Charlie Wetmore

y the time this issue comes out we will have been in hurricane season for a little over a month. The most intense months around here are August and September although we can see a hurricane any time from June through November. In the interest of making sure that the town of Bluffton was as prepared as she could be for a hurricane, some of us recently visited coastal Mississippi. More specifically, we went to Ocean Springs, MS. It is a city that’s sits on a bluff near the gulf, behind some barrier islands. It is a town known for its Arts District and eclectic nature. Sound familiar? The similarities between us were striking.

The officials and city staff were eager to take the time to talk with us. They went above and beyond to help us learn some of the things we might expect when a hurricane hits here. And boy oh boy did we learn. There were so many things that they learned that will help us in preparing for when a hurricane hits the South Carolina Lowcountry.

We got differing accounts of how many people stayed to ride out Katrina when she hit the coast. One estimate was as high as 70% of the people stayed behind. They have a saying in Mississippi: Camille killed and injured more people when Katrina hit than anything else. What they are saying is that the memory of the category 5 storm that hit the coast decades earlier and the lack of severe damage led many to stay behind during Katrina. Even though Katrina was a category 3 storm before it hit the coast, it hit at high tide and it moved slowly over the area. Because of this, the damage was much more severe than Camille.

Ocean Spring’s emergency operations center was based in their town hall – around 1⁄2 mile from shore and about 24 feet above sea level. They thought they would be safe. The water came to the bottom of the building but not into it. Imagine how much worse it would have been if the flooding was one to two feet higher. Recently we found that the operations center that Beaufort County was to use has a roof that is not safe. Now the search is on for a new operations center.

After the storm, the debris piles in Mississippi were everywhere and were huge. Millions of cubic feet of debris had to be carried away from this small Mississippi town. There was no electricity. The people who stayed needed food, water, shelter and more. The people who were coming in to help needed the same.

The challenges ran from how to get supply trucks into town to where to house FEMA workers who showed up with no place to stay. The hotels that survived were housing the residents who stayed but had no housing left. There are many stories of what they went through – from pulling people out of the water during the storm to trips to find food in nearby houses that were still partially standing. Stories of finding refrigerators floating by, still sealed, and using the food from them to survive; stories of rescue missions; stories of the deafening silence; stories of not seeing a rescue helicopter until three days after the storm.

We learned many things about preparation for Bluffton. As an example, when the floodwaters rose above the power lines, they left salt deposits on the transformers. A week later, when the electricity began to be turned back on, the salt deposits caused the transformers to blow. They had to use fire trucks to wash the power lines to keep that from happening. We learned about how to properly stage for distribution of supplies after the fact. We learned what to expect from agencies like FEMA. We learned that the local and national faith based organizations were essential to recovery. And we learned that the recovery will take a long time. Ocean Springs, MS is still rebuilding today and will be for awhile. We learned that recovery will be faster and easier if the people who live in Bluffton actually evacuate for storms, instead of what happened there.

We learned so much from a short trip to a similar coastal town. A town that went through what many people consider to be the worst natural disaster ever to hit the United States. We learned what to look out for and what to prepare for. Along the way, we got to meet some very nice people and hear some wonderful and terrifying stories.

I would like to end this month’s article with two personal calls to action:

First: Check out your flood insurance coverage. Even if you are above the flood elevation and do not officially need flood insurance, it is often a very wise idea to have it. Many people in Mississippi found out the hard way that they should have had this insurance. A category 3 hurricane would put most of our beautiful county underwater – even the houses that are above the flood elevation. And... it is very inexpensive if you are above the flood elevation. It is federally regulated and you can get $250,000 of coverage for a little over $300 per year.

Second: Hopefully we will not have a hurricane anywhere near Bluffton this year but if we do: evacuate if you are asked to. It would be better to evacuate 10 times when it turns out to not be needed than to stay the one time that it turns out you should have gone.

For ideas or comments please feel free to email.
Email address: BlufftonTalkOfTheTown@gmail.com