Local Hazard History
Charleston's hazards all trace back to water and low ground. The benchmark disaster is Hurricane Hugo, which made landfall just north of the city near midnight on September 21-22, 1989 as a Category 4 storm with sustained winds around 135-140 mph. Hugo drove the highest storm tides ever recorded on the U.S. East Coast - a roughly 20-foot storm tide at Bulls Bay - and all but destroyed the fishing village of McClellanville north of the city; it killed 35 people in South Carolina and remains the last major hurricane to make landfall on the South Carolina coast. Flooding is a chronic, not just occasional, threat here: during the October 1-5, 2015 'thousand-year' rainfall, a stalled system dropped historic totals across the state - 16.78 inches at Charleston's airport and nearly 27 inches just up the road in Mount Pleasant - and 19 people died statewide. The most surprising hazard is underground. On August 31, 1886, the Charleston earthquake - an intraplate shock estimated at magnitude ~7 - killed about 60 people, damaged some 2,000 buildings, and was felt as far away as Boston, Chicago, and Cuba. It remains by far the largest earthquake in the southeastern United States, and the fault zone beneath the Lowcountry is still active today.