"I knew it was a strong storm, and I had seen the tape from Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands," said Mark Pimentel, News Director, WCBD-TV, Charleston.
But, he said what you see on tape from somewhere else and what you live through are two different things. "What I just lived through was a hell of a lot worse than I ever expected," he explained to us several days later.

Pimentel had been News Director only eight days when Hugo hit.

Three remote live locations were established, they became operations centers.
One was in the National Weather Service offices in North Charleston; another live van went to Emergency Preparedness headquarters, which was the nerve center for information; and the transmitter served as a third live location, where they set up a mini-studio.
A group of employees was also sent to a motel in North Charleston to weather the storm.

The news managers stockpiled two days of food and water at the remote locations.
"I bought about 40 gallons of water and stuck four gallons in each vehicle so there was fresh water for the people in the field," he explained.

All staffers packed clothing for at least three days.
"We had a staff meeting where we gave people their assignments, and I told them they were going to have to use their own judgment during the storm," he recalled. There was going to be a point when they were no longer going to be able to communicate, and the crews in the field were going to have to make their own decisions about when to pull back to safe locations.

After the newscast, staffers dispersed in the four groups.
Shortly after 7 p.m., they went back on the air live from the emergency headquarters. They took additional live shots from their weatherman at the National Weather Service where there was live radar, and from an anchor at their transmitter.

"We hot-switched at the transmitter. We had planned this all in advance and had a couple of tape playback machines at the transmitter, too," Pimentel explained.
It was about as rudimentary as you could get, he said. But, it didn't have to be pretty at that point. No one cared if there were glitches between live shots. The important thing was to deliver vital information from those locations.

The wind began picking up later in the evening as the storm moved in.
"At around 10 p.m., the winds were around 60 mph. We could no longer use the live van at Emergency Preparedness. The van was rocking wildly in the parking lot," he said.

It was frightening inside the emergency headquarters, too. Officials told reporters the building was made to withstand 100 mph winds.
"We were expecting Hugo to pack winds at 135 mph!" said Pimentel.

Although they could no longer broadcast live from headquarters, staffers were still able to deliver information by telephone to the transmitter for the anchor to read on the air. The focus then became the weather center and the live radar pictures of Hugo.

"By about 11:15, the winds were so strong --- up to about 100 mph --- we had to bring the mast down at the weather center. The roof was starting to rip off the center at that point," he said. However, they were still able to show live radar pictures just before the storm went ashore.

"Many people still had power at that point and there were areas which had not been evacuated. We told them basically, 'Here it comes! Hold on!'"he said.
By 11:15, the only live shot they had left was at the transmitter. At 11:45, they were knocked off the air when the generators at the transmitter flooded.

"There were seven people staying in the transmitter who leaned their bodies against the steel doors because the force of the wind was so strong the doors wouldn't stay shut. They actually leaned against the door for an hour and a half. Had they not done that, we would have been forced off the air earlier." said Pimentel.

"I was standing in an office at the emergency headquarters when the drop ceiling fell in and the roof blew off!" said Pimentel. The people there moved into the hallway and were "packed in like sardines" when the rain began falling on their heads.
"All of us were humbled by the experience and wondered if we were going to live through it. It was one of the scariest moments of my life," he said.

When the eye of the storm arrived, everyone left the emergency headquarters and went to a brick shelter about 200 yards away.
"We all walked across a parking lot with downed trees and power lines," said Pimentel. The wind and rain finally began to let up around 4:30 a.m. "The devastation was incredible. We had to get chain saws and a backhoe just to get out of the parking lot and onto the road," he said.

By 7 a.m., Pimentel linked up with his other news crews. They had managed to get power back at the transmitter and sign on. By about 10 a.m., they were live again at the Weather Service. They didn't know at that point who they were broadcasting to.
"If there are 10 only watching out there, it doesn't matter. If I'm helping somebody, that's all that counts," he said.

At the station, the back of the newsroom was ripped off and four edit bays were destroyed. So, the weather center became their base of operations. There was a generator there and the weather center was also providing important information.
"We set up two live vans, and that became the TV station for the day," he explained.

The WCBD news crew edited a full half-hour show with eight packages that first day. On Saturday, they made the move from the remote locations back to their station.
"It took six or seven hours to get everybody out of where they were and back in the station," he said. At 3 p.m. Saturday, that day, they ran an hour-long newscast from their own building --- the first show from their own studios since Hugo came ashore.

After Hugo smashed Charleston, it moved northward and inland. It ripped the Florence and Columbia areas before moving up through the Carolinas to Charlotte.

"We've been through hurricanes before, but not ones which maintained their intensity for as long as Hugo did," said Jim Griffin, News Director of WBTW-TV, Florence. They were used to hurricanes hitting and then going out to sea again --- in other words, coming up, hitting, and striking a glancing blow. But, this was different. "Hugo came straight at us, and went right through us," Griffin said.

When the storm hit, WBTW was only off the air for about an hour.
"We have hundreds of gallons of fuel on hand for the generator at all times," Griffin told us.
In a 36-hour period, they aired 72 cut-ins.

People must be warned of the danger, regardless of  accusations of "alarmism."
"We have had stories where people said they had ridden hurricanes through before and they were going to ride this one through as well. Now, they're saying they'll never try to ride another one through," Griffin said.
About an hour before the storm surge, WBTW talked with a man on the coast via telephone who said he was going to ride it out. "An hour later, we called him back. By the time we got him on the air, he said, 'I was going to ride it out. But, after what I'm seeing now, I'm leaving as soon as I hang up the phone!"
They watched it go from a category one hurricane to a category four in just a couple of hours before it hit shore.
"You can't be timid about warning people. I'd rather be called an alarmist, than to come up short," said Griffin.

The station happened to have extra personnel on hand. They were getting ready to start to new news programs. They were going to have rehearsals for a morning and mid-day show.
"Those employees provided much of the extra coverage we needed at the Beach," Griffin said.

WBTW lost a $40,000 satellite dish in Florence. Fortunately, they did not sustain significant damage at a just completed a full- production studio in Myrtle Beach.
The station still had its old facility which was further inland, and a microwave was set up there.

Griffin said the day after the hurricane went through, people tried to get down to the coast.
"We had people tell us they were sitting in their cars and the radio stations were out, and the only thing they could do was tune us in on their Watchman,'" he said.

The managers at WPDE-TV, Florence prepared by stockpiling gasoline and other needed supplies.

They knew live pictures of the coast would be an important element of their coverage. A technical crew put a portable microwave unit on the 21st floor of a beachfront hotel. It sent back a live picture as the hurricane moved ashore.
"We had the last pictures at night and the first pictures in the morning down the beach," said News Director Tim Kenny.

They obtained guidewires for their live trucks and tied the masts down.
"If it hadn't been for that, we'd have been out of business," said Kenny.
One truck was positioned within 30 feet of the ocean at Myrtle Beach.
"We kept it up until about 10 o'clock at night and then moved it further inland until about 11 p.m. when we had to shut down," he said. They had to have five people at the truck to help keep tension on the guidewires as they lowered the mast.

He put extra people in the station's Myrtle Beach bureau and staffed it until about 1 p.m. When the winds became so strong the building began resonating, they evacuated to a hotel about one- half mile inland.

"I wasn't expecting this," Kenny admitted. He had been through Hurricane Diana, which was a category one storm, but Hugo was a category four.

"At one point, we were afraid we were going to lose the bureau. When the building started resonating, I began worrying where I was going to put all our people if we had to get them out of town," he said.
He had 15 people there, and it was a serious responsibility. They eventually evacuated further inland to motel rooms they had reserved.

When Kenny made the assignments for coverage, he told his staff to be flexible. His advice: "Don't yell at your co-workers when no one answers the two-way or when you can't get a call through. Be light on your feet and expect changes." He said tensions were so high, he saw a crew from another station get into a fistfight on the beach.

Towns far from the coast were hit hard

Wind gusts reached 90 mph as far inland (175 miles) as Charlotte, North Carolina. The winds downed trees and power lines, and caused massive disruption.

"It's the worst inland damage in years from a hurricane," said Ken Middleton, News Director of WCNC-TV in Charlotte. Ninety percent of the city was without power and all the stations were off the air at one time or another.

The Charlotte stations had sent several dozen people to the coast. But, by Saturday night had to recall many of them to cover the story at home.

An old radio tower collapsed onto WSOC-TV. Fortunately, it fell on a portion of the building which was unoccupied during the early morning hours and no one was injured. However, it did extensive damage.

At WCNC, personnel had to evacuate their building the day after the hurricane because a radio tower adjacent to the television station had been damaged and threatened to collapse.

Downed trees blocked entrances and exits to WCNC and an engineer had to chop an opening before anyone could enter or leave the station.

Hugo arrived earlier than predicted in Charlotte and some staffers were at home when the storm hit in the early morning hours.
"Some of our people couldn't get out of their driveways because of downed trees," said Middleton.

Because many phone lines were down, news people had to find other ways to communicate with each other. WCNC's main number was not working, but they had direct lines out of the newsroom which were still operable. For reporters in the field and important news sources, the station gave out pager numbers. People could call the pager, and the staffers would call them back on one of the working phone lines.

For employees who had phone service but no electricity, the station made wake-up calls in the days following the hurricane or sent messengers to pick them up if they were stranded at home.

Primitive Conditions

"The one thing we learned was television doesn't have to be fancy to be effective," said Bill Foy, News Director of WBTV, Charlotte.
Although his station didn't have power and was operating off a generator, they kept communicating.
"We got a lot of information out that Friday morning after the storm hit. You don't need fancy graphics and satellite shots to reassure people," Foy said. They put reporters onset to de-brief them about what they'd seen, and after about four hours, they were able to playback videotape.
"We thought that was great! We were up and running then," he said.
"The good news for us was the phones continued to work. We were able to get the Mayor up and get over to the station for a live interview," he said.

However, when the power was out, their computer system was down, too.
"We had to pull out the typewriters!" said Foy. Fortunately, they had the foresight to order extra ribbons before the storm and had kept 6 or 7 typewriters tucked away in a closet.
"When the computer system came back up, that was the biggest relief of all. We gave a collective sigh when that happened," said Foy.

Radio Simulcasts

WSOC simulcast its newscast on the network of 17 radio stations which it had organized a few months earlier. WBTV simulcast on powerful WBT-AM and their FM station. In Florence, WBTW managers offered their broadcasts to any radio station which wanted to carry them. Also, WBTW faxed lists of all the school closings to area stations to be aired on radio.
"We faxed them the information, rather than to try to make them gather the information themselves by making all the phone calls," Griffin explained.

All agreed, the simulcasts were an extremely valuable way to get information out to people who didn't have power.

Re-Playing Video In Specials

Most of the station executives planned specials once power was completely restored to their viewing areas.
"With the power out, a large part of your viewing audience hasn't been able to see your coverage," said WIS-TV's News Director Scott Parks.
"We are sitting inside the station watching all these pictures roll in and all the stories being told by people who survived the storm. But, over a 4-, 5-, or 6-day period, a large part of your audience hasn't seen it," he pointed out. He felt it was important to come back and "scrape it all up into one pile and show people what happened from start to finish."

WSOC and WPDE released their storm coverage on VHS tape for viewers to purchase. WSOC earmarked the proceeds for the Red Cross relief fund. The tape was distributed by Winn Dixie food stores.