McKim was still anxious when he took off four days later with a crew of 16 hurricane watchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a couple of reporters from NEWSWEEK and CNN. A former Navy flier who had chased Soviet subs during the cold war, McKim, 55, was making what he says is probably his last flight as a hurricane hunter. Ten years ago to the day, he had almost died when his plane hit a tornado in Hurricane Hugo. Two of his crew members quit flying, and McKim almost did. His plane had been shaken the way a dog would shake a sock.
As McKim pushed his red-nosed four-engine turboprop, the Miss Piggy, through the wall of Floyd’s eye at 5:45 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, about eight hours before the hurricane was scheduled to hit the mainland, he sighed with relief. The perfect storm wall had become jostled and sloppy. Clutches of blue-gray cirrus clouds meandered below, partially obscuring the 60-foot-high wave tops. Above Miss Piggy, the sun poked through cottony clouds. “It’s a ragged eye,” said McKim. “The storm is trying to figure out what it is going to do next.” The winds had dropped from 155 mph to 106 mph. The top of Floyd’s spinning cloud wall had been slashed by a current of cold northern upper-level winds. Floyd’s eye was now pushing forward like a wobbling top. Michael Black, a research meteorologist aboard, shouted over the din of the engines, “There’s a battle going on out there, and it looks like Floyd is losing.”
Still, the great exodus had begun. On the highways out of the twin cities of the low country, Savannah and Charleston, a clotted convoy–cars, campers, motorbikes, 16-wheelers, even an armada of secured school buses containing the Savannah prison population–inched inland toward high ground. Abandoned cars littered the shoulder. Gas stations were overrun. “This is the most unruly group of people I’ve ever seen in my life,” Joe Anderson, owner of Po Jo’s Gas ’n Go, just off exit 25 of Interstate 16, told a NEWSWEEK reporter. Two men from a bus walked in one door, marched to the cooler, liberated two cases of beer, and marched out past Anderson. The owner demanded to see a receipt. “I’ll get one later, Cap,” the man said, not pausing. A sheriff’s deputy standing nearby just shrugged. “We can’t control it,” he said. Anderson fumed, “It’s like a bunch of panicky, selfish children.”
The evacuation was not a failure. Most who wanted to leave were able to get out of town and find shelter away from the storm. But the inconvenience was massive, and thousands of frustrated or reckless citizens turned back or stayed put. In the end, Floyd claimed dozens of victims from accidents and flooding up and down the East Coast. Had the storm struck with the fury first predicted, many more could have perished. Along the path of Floyd last week, NEWSWEEK reporters encountered fear and fatalism, good Samaritans and heedless partiers, and grim officials already wondering what they will do about the next storm.
The most mindless gridlock occurred on I-26 out of Charleston. Early Tuesday, Mayor Joseph P. Riley, who has run the city for 25 years, pleaded with his citizens to evacuate. The storm was forecast to hit Charleston with 150-mile-an-hour winds. “It would have made Hugo [which killed 26 people and cost $6 billion in the state] pale by comparison,” said Riley.
Riley was relieved when people began heeding South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges’s order to evacuate coastal areas Tuesday, but the mayor’s joy was short-lived. Heading out of town, I-26 quickly congealed into a vast parking lot. The inbound lanes, meanwhile, stood nearly empty. Riley leaned on the governor and the state Department of Transportation to reverse the flow of traffic on the inbound lanes, but the DOT refused, fearing head-on collisions with motorists who failed to get the message. Riley bluntly accused state transportation officials “of putting our people at risk of dying.” Finally, the Department of Transportation relented, and at around 10 p.m. the inbound lanes of I-26 were opened to drivers heading out, and the logjam eased.
Up the coast, Myrtle Beach was mostly empty by noon on Wednesday. It took Kevin Brece and his wife, Penny, six hours in stop-and-go traffic to drive from their threatened home to Greenwood, 190 miles away. But when they got there, they were glad they made the trip, not only because they felt safe, but because of the warmth and spirit of their hosts. “Every church was open as a shelter,” said Penny, and people were offering “to take into their homes anyone who needed a place to stay.”
The fellow-feeling was more raucous among those who had stayed behind in Myrtle Beach. One ramshackle beach motel, made of stucco and wood, had offered thrill-seekers a special hurricane package: guests paid for a beachfront room–and signed a waiver saying the motel wasn’t responsible if they got killed. Police shut the place down. They couldn’t do much about the media eager to be at ground zero. Along the waterfront, TV correspondents vied for the best positions from which to be battered, on camera, by wind and rain.
The stay-behinds posed a risk to rescue squads as well as themselves. Theoretically, rescue vehicles are grounded once the wind exceeds 55 mph. “Some people will stay, but once the storm really gets bad, they’ll start calling and saying, ‘Can you come get me?’ And we can’t. Because we’ve pulled our cars back in,” said Capt. Mary Grace Morgan of the Myrtle Beach Police Department.
When Floyd finally did wash ashore at Cape Fear, N.C., at about 3 a.m. Thursday morning, C. K. Rust II and his wife, Polly, were ready. Rust is a veteran of “Hurricane Alley” along the Carolina coast. As a boy of 13 in 1954, he saw Hurricane Hazel rip through his hometown, slicing off the top floor of his mother’s mansion in Myrtle Beach. As Floyd bore in last week, Rust and his wife went down their time-honored checklist, packing two suitcases, retrieving photo albums and official documents from the family safe and boarding up the windows.
But when Floyd weakened on Tuesday, the Rusts figured they could rest a little easier. A torrential downpour flooded Wilmington all Wednesday afternoon, and the wind kicked up to 90 miles an hour before midnight. Branches snapped off and landed on the roof of the Rust’s three-story house with a thud, yet through it all, the Rusts seemed unruffled. Sipping scotch and snacking on cheese straws, they compared Floyd to predecessors called Bertha, Fran and Dennis. Rust says he’ll never leave Wilmington. “Hazel taught me never to own oceanfront property,” says the 58-year-old physician. “But this is a great place to live.”
Still, a doubt nagged. No major storm had ravaged Hurricane Alley in three decades before Diana rolled through Wilmington in 1984, and another 12 years went by before Bertha hit in July 1996. Since then, hurricanes have become the rule, not the exception in the Wilmington area. “We’ve got to stop having all these hurricanes,” said C. K. Rust. “It’s quite unnatural to have five hurricanes in three years.” He knew that, even as he spoke, new storms were brewing off the African coast.
