Since it began in the early 19th century, the University of South Carolina campus has had its share of natural and manmade disasters, including earthquakes, windstorms, fires and floods. Those threats persist in the 21st century, but the modern campus has a facilities team that works around the clock to prevent or at least mitigate the effects of those events.
One hundred thirty-eight years ago in 1886 calamity struck Charleston, South Carolina. A 7.3 magnitude earthquake shook the city for a full 60 seconds. The rumbling was felt as far away as Chicago, and buildings from South Carolina to Virginia were damaged. Sixty people lost their lives in the Great Charleston Earthquake and many more were severely injured.
The University of South Carolina campus didn’t escape the quake. The building on the historic Horseshoe that we now call DeSaussure ended up with cracked walls that had to be repaired with iron rods and reinforcing plates.
I’m Chris Horn, your host for Remembering the Days, and today we’re chronicling the natural and manmade disasters that have beset the Carolina campus from the early 1800s up to the present day. We’ll also talk with Jason Lambert, whose facilities services department at USC does its best to deal with such events on the modern campus.
I mentioned DeSaussure, the second-oldest building at USC, that got rattled by the 1886 earthquake. That actually wasn’t the first time an earthquake had affected that building. In 1811, just three years after DeSaussure was built, an earthquake severely damaged the building, which required an initial installation of iron rods to shore up the shaky walls.
A fire in 1851 destroyed the west wing of DeSaussure, and, four years later, Rutledge, the original building on campus, was so severely damaged by fire that it had to be largely rebuilt.
Flooding in the Congaree River in 1853 didn’t reach the Carolina campus, but it did destroy a shipment of 400,000 bricks that were intended for constructing College Hall, the building we now call Longstreet Theater. The bricks were replaced only after a long delay, and later in the 1850s, a wind storm blew the roof off of Longstreet, which caused more damage inside from falling rain. You can learn more about all of the troubles that affected Longstreet in the episode entitled “The Lecture Hall That Never Was.”
Fire threatened to consume the entire campus in February 1865 when one-third of the city of Columbia burned during Gen. William Sherman’s march to the sea near the end of the Civil War. Two things helped save the campus from the inferno: the 7-foot-high brick wall surrounding the campus served as a literal fire wall to keep the flames at bay.
Also, the 25th Iowa Regiment was stationed at the Sumter Street gate to the Horseshoe — they were there to guard the campus buildings that had become makeshift hospitals for wounded soldiers — and they did double duty by helping fight off the flames and floating embers that landed on campus roofs. I should say the Iowa Regiment did triple duty because they also held off a group of drunken, pillaging soldiers who tried to enter campus the morning after the fire.
With the exception of the fire in 1865, most of the earlier fire damage on campus was due to the inherent danger of using candles and oil lamps for interior lighting. That fire hazard was eliminated in 1902 when campus dorms were wired for electricity. As a result of having that new convenience, students began paying $8 a year for their dorm rooms, which had hitherto been free of charge.
There was notable fire damage in the 20th century, particularly the two fires that destroyed the old university Field House in 1968. Students had helped fire fighters battle the first blaze and rescue athletics trophies from the building on March 24. The second fire was ignited on April 13 by sparks from an acetylene torch used by a demolition crew at the site. In case you were wondering, the old Field House was located on Sumter Street about where the Coker Life Sciences, Earth and Water Sciences and Jones Physical Sciences buildings now stand.
In 1989, a little more than a century after the great Charleston earthquake, Hurricane Hugo roared past Columbia and flattened USC’s indoor athletics training facility known informally as The Bubble. The building had been erected in 1981 with an inflatable fabric cover, but Hugo’s huffing and puffing proved to be enough to blow it down.
A microburst storm hit campus near Capstone House earlier this year, 2024, and uprooted trees and tore much of the roof off of Capstone. Jason Lambert is the associate vice president of facilities services, whose work crews maintain the campus’ 170-plus buildings .
Jason Lambert: “It was windy that day, but it was particularly windy in the area of Capstone. And Capstone, of course, is one of our tallest buildings on campus. And so the conditions were right. And it was a very, very intense storm for a very short period of time. Things like that are just as or can be just as damaging as a hurricane or tornado. And when we think in Columbia, when we think hurricane, our biggest issue is typically a combination of water and wind. But with probably water being our biggest challenge.”
Speaking of water, a so-called 1,000-year rain event saturated Columbia with 12 inches of rainfall over one weekend in 2015. Power was out across campus and backup generators kicked in. Campus staff brought in bottled water and lots of porta potties for students living on campus, and nearly a thousand students volunteered to help out in the surrounding communities, which had been ravaged by flooding from the offshore hurricane.
During the July 4th weekend this year, three inches of rain fell in just 30 minutes on campus, which led to water problems in 35 university buildings.
Jason Lambert: “It doesn't take a hurricane to cause water issues on campus.”
So that’s the broad narrative of how earthquakes, wind, fire and flooding have rocked the University of South Carolina campus over time.
Now, if you stop and think about it, during the fall and spring semesters, about 9,000 students live on the campus 24/7, the equivalent of a small town. The campus becomes a much bigger town when you factor in the total number of students, more than 38,000, who are on campus every week during the academic year.
That got me wondering what USC does to protect the campus and its inhabitants from natural disasters and fire. The vast majority of buildings on campus are equipped with emergency lighting, fire and smoke detectors and fire sprinklers. So I asked Jason about the various natural threats, and he reminded me of another that I’d forgotten — severely cold weather.
Jason Lambert: “In the winter of 2023, we had that horribly unseasonable cold snap where, you know, Columbia is just not built for that kind of weather. And so we had a significant part of campus that had some issues with the weather, whether it was freezing, you know, frozen pipes or air handlers just not working properly because of the cold temperatures.”
Earthquake experts at USC say the quake that hit Charleston in 1886 was something of an outlier and not expected to reoccur for hundreds of years, but potential seismic activity is still very much on the radar for Jason and his team.
Jason Lambert: “Our risk for earthquake is comparatively less here in Columbia than it is, say, in California or somewhere on the West Coast. But it's not none. And so that's something that whenever there's an engineering evaluation on a building, it's looking at can it withstand earthquake? Can it withstand wind loads? And here in Columbia, wind loads are equally as impactful as seismic loads are. Generally speaking, there are no buildings that we would evacuate simply because of wind.”
I should mention that the room where Jason and I talked is located off campus and is called the Facilities Operations Center — kind of like a war room where facilities professionals can prepare for the threat of a looming hurricane or other storm and make decisions to best respond to anything that might befall the campus, from heavy wind and rain to power and internet outages and arctic cold snaps. With its backup power supply, the operations center can operate even if the lights go out.
Jason Lambert: “The reality is, when most of campus can go home, the men and women of facilities don't have that luxury. And all the needs of campus continue whether or not the buildings are occupied or not. So everyone, even on inclement weather days, people show up, we get the business of campus done.”
I should also mention that Jason’s facilities team takes care of the buildings where university research takes place.
Jason Lambert: “When you think university, you think students and classes and things, but the research is very, very critical here in South Carolina. And as a Tier One research institution, there is a lot of really, really critical research that's going on. And if a researcher loses power, or maybe if the temperatures in their lab climb to a certain degree, they could literally lose days' or years’ worth of research.”
Jason told me that the university has stockpiled thousands of gallons of fuel that can be used for emergency generators and steam plants should the university lose electricity for an extended period of time.
The last thing I asked was hypothetical. If he could magically eliminate any particular natural threat to campus, what would it be? Spoiler alert: Jason is a native of Wyoming, the land of interminable winter weather. So here’s what he told me.
Jason Lambert: “That's easy, Chris. That's the reason I moved here to South Carolina. Ice and snow. We are very, very fortunate not to have to deal with ice and snow. But on those extraordinarily rare circumstances where we get ice and snow, it poses some really interesting challenges, because no one in Columbia is used to ice and snow. Typically if you get an ice storm, there are downstream effects of power lines coming down and roads are slippery, and there are a lot of other dangers and hazards. However, I will share we have snow plows and we have salt and we are ready in case we get ice or snow. But I would definitely take ice or snow off the table any day of the week.”
Well, here’s hoping that the USC campus won’t have to contend anytime soon with another hurricane or earthquake or thousand-year flood — or even a freak snowstorm. But if it does happen, Jason and his crew are ready to respond.
Thanks for listening and be on the lookout for another episode of Remembering the Days coming soon. I’m Chris Horn, forever to thee.