After 'double whammy' of tornado and tropical storm, Bamberg County recovers • SC Daily Gazette

BAMBERG — Even though he has lived in Bamberg most of his life, Corey Ramsey couldn’t remember anything quite like getting hit by two major storms in less than a year.

Only seven months after a tornado swept through the small town 60 miles south of Columbia, Tropical Storm Debby drenched the area with rain.

“This is probably the (storm) that will be etched in my memory,” said Ramsey, a Bamberg city councilman.

Tropical Storm Debby didn’t hit the area nearly as hard as some other parts of the state. But the damage was amplified by the fact that Bamberg was still in recovery mode from a Jan. 9 twister.

Estimated to be about 400 yards wide with winds up to 125 miles per hour, it destroyed buildings along the city’s main drag, tearing roofs from businesses and collapsing one home.

No one died during either storm, which officials consider lucky. But residents felt the devastation in other ways.

Bamberg County was already struggling. The poor, rural county in southwestern South Carolina — centered between interstates 20, 26 and 95 and, to the west, the Georgia border — is home to fewer than 13,000 people and lacks any major industries.

Officials have been working to improve downtown Bamberg, the county seat, in recent years. But those plans are on pause as they clean up from the two natural disasters.

And, while locals hope the close-knit community will stay put, some may be forced to move after the storms, further decreasing a dwindling population, Ramsey said.

“It’s not so much that there was a lot of damage, but it’s just the fact that it was a double whammy. It’s the fact that we just came through that tornado in January,” he said.

“Months later, here we are again,” Ramsey added. “That will always shake a community.”

‘Massive economic blow’

Instead of a Main Street, Bamberg has Main Highway.

U.S. 301 cuts through the middle of downtown. Steel bars line the sidewalks, separating pedestrians from speeding trucks.

For years, most of the storefronts along this main drag have been vacant, though at different points in time, the street had a gym, an antique store, a market and a historic movie theater used as an event space.

After the tornado, the vacant shops are now unusable without significant repairs.

Rubble from the tornado remains along the main strip. Through the broken window of an antique store, passersby can still see paintings and pottery mixed with chunks of broken ceiling. Bits of debris and caved-in ceiling sit in a window with a painted sign for Bamberg Fitness Center. The bright red, L-shaped sign that once marked the historic Little Theatre is gone, toppled during the storm.

A blinking “open” sign outside B&B Meat and Fish Market invites people into the deli. The owner keeps the front door locked because no one comes in that way anymore, he said.

“There is no doubt this storm has done much more than property damage,” County Administrator Joey Preston wrote in a letter to Rep. Justin Bamberg, D-Bamberg, in January. “Prior to January 9, Bamberg County was already a poverty-stricken community with its citizens simply trying to stay afloat, but after this massive economic blow, they are faced with an even steeper mountain to climb.”

Engineers determined four of the buildings along Main Highway were unstable and needed to be demolished. For three months, the portion of highway that ran through downtown Bamberg remained closed.

Semi-trucks and cars instead had to detour down a nearby residential road. Few travelers stopped at the gas stations, restaurants or corner stores lining the main strip.

“If it stops traffic, it stops the flow of money,” Ramsey said.

Down the road, a general manager narrowly escaped Oak to Barrel, a whiskey barrel manufacturing company, before the building collapsed. Rumors swirled that the owner would relocate or some of the 40 employees suddenly without a job might move away.

“We need you, and our citizens need these jobs,” Mayor Nancy Foster told owner Eddie Hill soon after the tornado.

Hill told local officials he wanted to stay put. But the company, along with the county’s residents, needs to know there are safeguards in place to keep this from happening again, Preston wrote in his letter.

Losing Oak to Barrel would be devastating for the city, Ramsey said.

“For us to lose that company, it shifts the economics of the area,” Ramsey said.

The county had already lost one of its largest employers in 2020. Rockland Industries, a textiles factory, closed its doors and laid off 133 employees after nearly 60 years in the area. That same year, Tobul Accumulators left the location in Bamberg where it had manufactured hydraulics for 33 years, leaving 40 people without jobs.

“It hurts these areas when those companies go down,” Rep. Bamberg said.

Only six remaining companies in the county employ more than 100 people. Most of the county’s employers have four or fewer workers, according to the state Department of Employment and Workforce.

Tornado recovery

Losing business also means losing tax revenue. And without tax revenue, the county and city struggled to pay for cleanup.

Officials estimate the tornado caused upwards of $3 million in damage. Gov. Henry McMaster asked for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but agency officials determined the damages were not enough to warrant its help.

The agency considers a number of factors in determining whether to grant assistance, an agency spokesperson said in an email. That includes the amount of damage, any casualties, how many people in the area have insurance and what local resources are available.

Based on officials’ evaluation, Bamberg’s destruction did not meet that threshold.

“When you have a natural disaster and now you’ve got to find the money to take care of that, where’s the money going to come from?” Rep. Bamberg said.

The state budget this year included $1 million “so that the town of Bamberg can get back on its feet,” Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto wrote in a letter requesting the funding. That money was meant to supplement what the city might have gotten from the federal agency, the Orangeburg Democrat wrote.

It will help the county recoup some of what it spent on demolishing four buildings along the Main Highway, paying overtime for emergency workers and cleaning up debris, Hutto told the SC Daily Gazette on Wednesday.

“They wouldn’t usually get one (of these storms) in a generation, and they happened to get two of them at the same time,” Hutto said.

‘We’ll get there again’

The traffic along U.S. 301 is only a fraction of what it once was, Ramsey said.

In the 1970s, Bamberg’s location along what was then the main corridor from north to south across the state made it a prime stop for travelers. For most of the decade, the county, though still small, was growing, with more than 18,000 people living there in 1980, according to the Census data.

At the same time, though, crews were building Interstate 95 to the east. After the interstate running parallel to the existing highway opened in the late 1970s, traffic started to slow, Rep. Bamberg said.

“It was the creation of I-95 that really sucked the life out of this geographic region of the state,” he said.

The population dwindled.

In 2023, Bamberg County had just under 13,000 residents. If Bamberg County continues on its current trend, 7,800 people will live there by 2040, according to projections by the state’s Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office.

About 22% of the county’s population lives in poverty. In June, the unemployment rate was 8.4%, compared to 3.6% for the state as a whole, according to the state Department of Employment and Workforce.

The median household income in Bamberg County is $43,920 — just over $20,000 less than the median South Carolina resident makes, according to the Census Bureau.

Local officials want to restore Bamberg to what it once was, drawing tourists and more residents. Ramsey envisions a downtown area filled with local shops and chain stores, sidewalks without fencing and green spaces filled with trees and flowers.

“There are times when I look back at some of the pictures from years ago, maybe long before I was even thought of, and I see the town. I see individuals moving throughout the town, and I know that we’ll get there again,” Ramsey said.

Officials have made some strides toward that goal.

They plan on opening a welcome center and tourism building once the county collects the $150,000 set aside for it in the local penny sales tax that passed in 2018.

Last year, the city opened Bamberg Veterans Park on a lot along Main Highway that was left vacant following a fire.

Any other plans to develop the downtown area, however, went on hold after the tornado.

“Just as Bamberg County was beginning to experience minimal economic growth, this tornado literally ripped the rug from underneath us,” Preston wrote in his letter to state officials.

The same is true after the flood.

“Anything unplanned for here that requires you to immediately address it and costs your local government anything is a setback,” Bamberg said.

Rural revitalization

Ramsey spent about nine years away from Bamberg. After graduating college, he lived in Greenville, then Orangeburg, before moving back home.

He loves his hometown, and he thought he could help turn it into the thriving place he thought it could become, he said.

Unlike Ramsey, though, most people who leave Bamberg don’t come back. What rural counties like Bamberg need to really bounce back is for people — particularly young people — to move there and stay there, Rep. Bamberg and Sen. Hutto said.

To attract people, those counties need jobs. But to attract those jobs, the counties need people.

Few people want to move to an area with few resources, but as residents leave rural areas, necessities tend to go with them. Bamberg’s hospital closed in 2012. The county has one school district after consolidating in 2022. The city’s only grocery store is a Piggly Wiggly that opened in 2020.

Even if people want to move to a rural area, finding a place to live can be difficult. Places like Bamberg have few available houses, and even those are typically not affordable, Hutto said.

“There’s got to be a home for them to live in,” he said. “There’s got to be a grocery store for them to shop in.”

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Major companies often look for buildings that can fit their operations, or at least pieces of land they can start building on right away. But running water, sewer, electricity and broadband out to otherwise unused parcels of land costs money — money that local governments often don’t have to spend, Bamberg said.

Companies that open in the state’s poorest companies can get up to $25,000 in tax breaks per job created. But the state needs to do more to encourage them to consider rural areas, Bamberg said.

He plans to file a bill this coming legislative session that would exempt anyone working as a teacher or health care professional from paying income taxes for the first five years they lived in a poor county. His proposal would also give companies the ability to offer their workers a similar tax break, he said.

The bill would expand on one he filed in 2019, which failed to even get a hearing. But he’s hopeful that next year the idea will get more traction.

“If we can pull that off, talk about a boom of people moving to that part of the state,” Bamberg said.

One major investment from a company willing to open and stay in Bamberg could transform the area, he said.

“At that point, you hit reset on these areas,” Bamberg said. “That would be the spark to get us back to where we were.”

‘Double whammy’

Tommy Axson was washing dishes when the tornado hit in January.

Standing over the sink, he watched the storm roll in through his kitchen window. As the winds picked up, a huge oak tree in a neighbor’s lawn crashed to the street, shaking Axson’s house.

In the end, Axson’s house did not have all that much damage, especially compared to buildings a few blocks away that the storm reduced to rubble. The winds tore some shingles off his roof, so his landlord hired someone to replace them, he said.

When Tropical Storm Debby drenched the area at the beginning of August, water started to drip through Axson’s ceiling. He realized the shingles had not been sealed properly after the tornado.

“I was like, ‘What? What have we done? Who angered the gods?’” Axson said of the double storms.

The rain knocked a fist-sized chunk of ceiling loose in the kitchen and left yellowing stains underneath his chimney, which was the part of the roof the tornado hit hardest, he said. A strategically placed bucket caught most of the water.

“I call it my redneck drain,” Axson said.

A roofer came out and resealed the shingles not long after the storm. Axson is still waiting for the ceiling to get repaired, but at this point, he’s mostly grateful the damage wasn’t worse, he said.

Flooding is typical for Bamberg County, which sits alongside the Edisto River. Tropical Storm Debby dumped more rain than usual on the area, prompting an evacuation alert Aug. 9 for people living in the river basin. Emergency crews had to rescue three people and two dogs.

Even after the tropical storm moved on, the rain continued.

“We probably had about a week and a half straight of rain, just uncontrollable rain, in the night, in the afternoon, in the morning.” said Alisha Moore, the county spokesperson. “That just made it that much more daunting for people, who said, ‘OK, this water is never going to come down.”

The total damage is still unknown, but only a handful of houses had reported issues as of Thursday, Ramsey said.

On one of the county’s roads near the river, Mykie Jean, co-owner of Monarch Ranch butterfly conservatory, said she was grateful the flooding was not nearly as bad as she expected. She hadn’t heard of any major damage, she said.

“We were prepared for the worst,” Jean said. “If we’d been closer to the water, it would’ve been a different story.”

The county’s biggest concern is how it will fix washed-out roads. Portions of 19 streets, mainly rural dirt roads, remained closed through last week. The flooding had receded, leaving behind large potholes and lingering puddles.

The damage will likely cost the county more than $60,000 to fix, Preston said in an email. He expects that to be enough for the county to qualify for federal aid, he added.

The county has only a handful of workers who can fix those roads, so despite their best efforts, progress has been slow, Moore said.

“We are a small county, and we just don’t have the manpower to have several teams out covering multiple roads at the same time,” Moore said.

Moving forward

Moore had only been living in Bamberg for a month when the tornado knocked a tree through her bedroom window.

The next day, before heading to work, she struggled to nail trash bags over the broken glass in an effort to protect her house from the elements. As new as she was to the area, a neighbor noticed and stopped to help, she said.

That sort of small-town camaraderie is what has gotten Bamberg through tornado cleanup and flooding, and it’s what will continue to get Bamberg through whatever comes next, Ramsey said.

“When you’re in a small area, especially a rural area, you’re grateful for Uncle Johnny, if you will, to be able to grab his chainsaw and grab his pickup and be able to aid the young lady down the road or the older couple down the road,” Ramsey said.

Bamberg residents and officials know another storm will hit. The question is when and how much damage it will leave behind, Preston said.

“Following historic trends, we are anticipating at least another severe weather event in the next 12 months,” Preston said in an email. “We expect this trend to continue.”

While Bamberg County can’t stop natural disasters, some solutions can ensure residents are prepared. After two tornadoes in the course of two years — another hit a more rural part of the county in 2022 — officials are considering installing sirens as an extra warning for residents to take cover, Ramsey said.

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Officials are also looking to increase how much water the sewer system can handle and expand existing ditches that help drain water, Ramsey said. He couldn’t provide specifics for any of the projects, saying they’re still in the planning stages. For a county with a small local tax base, though, finding the funds is difficult, he said.

The county sought $11 million from the state for several projects, including fixing the county courthouse, which was in disrepair long before the tornado. It instead got $1.5 million in a budget earmark sponsored by Rep. Bamberg, building on a $1 million earmark in last year’s budget for the courthouse.

For the time being, county officials are waiting to see if another storm hits.

“We’re still in hurricane season,” Moore said. “We hope that we don’t have a repeat of this in a month or so.”

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