- A Category 5 hurricane hits Charleston, South Carolina, causing catastrophic storm surge, wave action, and erosion, with entire neighborhoods cut off by falling trees and power lines.
CHARLESTON — It begins with bands of rain, and for a while it looks and feels like a bad thunderstorm.
But the roads are empty. The only people left are holdouts who didn’t evacuate. Emergency management teams and National Weather Service employees are holed up further inland, in buildings designed to withstand major hurricanes.
The storm has grown to be roughly 400 miles across, about the scale of 2025’s Category 5 Hurricane Melissa. It has eclipsed South Carolina in size. A hurricane, especially one of this tier, provides no single moment of clear impact, no dramatic culmination to the days of preparation. It just builds to a frenzied, screaming peak, then slowly subsides…