Hurricane Hazel, the Storm That Rebuilt the Coast
Near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
On the morning of October fifteenth, nineteen fifty four, Hurricane Hazel came ashore almost right here, near the border of the two Carolinas, just northeast of Myrtle Beach. It was a Category Four storm, with sustained winds estimated around one hundred thirty miles an hour, and it arrived at the worst possible moment, at the peak of an unusually high lunar tide. The result was a storm surge of roughly eighteen feet that swept straight across the low beachfront.
Along the Grand Strand, something like eighty percent of the front row of oceanfront buildings was destroyed. In Myrtle Beach, hundreds of houses were lost. Up the coast the numbers were staggering, hundreds gone at Ocean Drive, at Crescent Beach, at Cherry Grove.
Piers vanished into the ocean. Across the Carolinas the damage ran to over one hundred sixty million dollars in the money of the day, and the name Hazel was retired forever. And yet the strange legacy of Hazel is what came after.
The old low wooden cottages were gone, and in their place the Grand Strand rebuilt bigger, taller, and bolder. Many people here will tell you that the modern resort coast was, in a hard way, born from that one October morning.
