Appreciation Due for Those Ready to Help if Storm had Turned Ugly
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
Though their visits hang in memory like a string of brittle icicles, the truly serious winter storms in Anderson County can still be counted on a pair of hands and a half. Since 1950 there have been 15 snow, ice, and sleet events that rose to the level of real consequence here—storms with names and dates and dollar figures attached, storms people remember by what they lost and who showed up to help.
Ten of those were mostly about snow, those rare days when Anderson woke to a county remade—roads muffled, yards erased, the familiar dairy‑truck ruts on the red clay softened under a clean white grammar. The “Great Southeastern Snowstorm” of 1973 laid down more than a foot across much of the county, turning pasture fences into faint pencil lines and making even the most practical among us briefly consider sleds. Two years earlier, in 1971, 11 inches fell in a single event, proof that even in this corner of South Carolina the sky could still surprise the old‑timers who claimed to have seen it all.
The Ice King, a more insidious visitor, favors a different sort of spectacle. His appearances—in 1999; twice in 2000; again in 2002 and 2004; the twin blows of January and December 2005; then 2015—were measured not in the depth of anything pretty but in downed lines, splintered pines, and the sudden, humming silence when a whole subdivision loses power at once. The 2004 storm alone left roughly $11 million of damage in its wake, a reminder that a quarter‑inch of ice can do what a foot of snow cannot. It is no small irony that most of these ice storms have arrived in just the past quarter‑century, as if to correct anyone who thought winter here had grown softer with time.
Against that long, chilly ledger, this weekend’s event will be remembered—if it is remembered at all—as mercifully modest. In the stores, the usual choreography unfolded: the milk and bread, then the generators and propane, disappeared first, followed by a run on batteries and the sort of flashlights that feel too tactical for a pantry. On television, winter was rendered in superlatives and full‑screen graphics, the familiar hyperbole that manages to frighten more people than it instructs. Outside, though, what arrived in Anderson amounted to more of a bump than a punch, a storm that mostly tested our nerves.
Somewhere in the middle of all that noise, Winter Storm Fern—who names these things, and what rooms do they sit in? —first appeared as a smear on the radar screens of the people whose job it is to take such smears personally. At Anderson County Emergency Management, the alert didn’t arrive as drama but as a calendar entry and a tightening in the workday. More than a week before the first pellet of sleet struck a windshield, they began what they always begin: the slow, unshowy business of imagining the worst so that the rest of us would not have to.
Even now, in an age of models and ensembles and cones of uncertainty rendered in high‑definition color, forecasting the exact track and temperament of a winter storm remains a kind of sanctioned superstition. Early guidance held out the possibility of a respectable snow, the kind that turns social‑media feeds into amateur photography contests. Then, with the maddening drift familiar to anyone who works in the field, the projections slid toward ice—a glaze thick enough to sheathe branches and lines, up to an inch of frozen weight in the worst‑case scenarios. That is the sort of forecast that empties grocery shelves for good reason; it is also the kind that can leave a county like Anderson looking, overnight, like the rest of America did along this storm’s sprawling path: dark, cold, and stuck in place.
Emergency Management exists for precisely that version of events, the one that does not make the highlight reel because someone kept it from happening. The charge is encyclopedic: coordinate shelters; talk with EMS and law enforcement; make sure Roads and Bridges knows where they will be needed first; stay in close, steady contact with AnMed, which on this weekend had extra staff sleeping on cots so the hospital would not lose step with the storm. There is the practical work of carving out space at the Emergency Operations Center for out‑of‑county repair crews and rescue teams, and the quieter work of making sure the generators that power that command center will outlast whatever the grid does. Each task is small enough on its own; taken together, they amount to the difference between a community enduring a storm and merely experiencing it.
The memory of Hurricane Helene still hangs over the building like a framed citation. In the weeks after that storm, Emergency Management staff worked in shifts that blurred into one another, a relay that only ended when power was restored and the last road was cleared. Helene was both trauma and training ground, proof that the systems they had built could flex under pressure without breaking, and it is not incidental that in 2024 the agency was named the best in South Carolina. Awards, in this line of work, tend to arrive long after the adrenaline fades, but they matter: they testify that the nights and weekends and hours spent in windowless rooms added up to something larger than institutional muscle memory.
At the center of this operation during Fern was Emergency Management Director Josh Hawkins, a man whose résumé suggests a familiarity with altitude and risk. He has climbed cell towers—those skeletal exclamation marks on the county’s horizon—and has spent years sketching out what it would mean for Anderson if something went wrong at the Duke Energy nuclear station, a scenario that cannot be met with improvisation. To watch him in this storm was to see someone translate catastrophe from the conditional to the logistical: not “if the power fails” but “when and where and for how long, and who is most vulnerable when it does.”
Behind him, Director Jonathan Fox of Roads and Bridges joined the effort, his crews, like Hawkins’s, training their focus on the invisible tipping points—one more degree on the thermometer, one more hour of precipitation—that would determine whether the county woke to slick inconvenience or genuine paralysis. At AnMed, administrators and nurses accepted that the safest place for many of them to spend the night was on a cot down the hall from their patients rather than in a house across town that might or might not keep its lights. No one named a storm after them, but they were, unmistakably, part of its story.
The irony of good emergency management is that its greatest triumphs look, from the outside, like overreaction. When the worst does not arrive—when the branches bend but do not break, when the ice on the lines never quite reaches the feared inch—it is tempting to chalk it all up to luck and television theatrics. But the calm that settled over Anderson as Fern passed through owed something to more than fortune. It owed itself to the people who had been living with the storm a week longer than the rest of us, the ones who had already pictured every darkened cul‑de‑sac and impassable driveway and then quietly organized the means to answer them.
In the long, thin history of Anderson’s winters, this storm will sit somewhere toward the bottom of the list, far below the great snows of ’71 and ’73 and the ruinous ice of 2004, another entry in the chronicle of close calls. But for the men and women of Anderson County Emergency Management, for Hawkins and Fox and the crews and nurses and dispatchers whose names won’t appear in any headline, Fern was something else. It was a live‑fire drill that never quite turned into a disaster, a test passed in the most ordinary way: by showing up early, staying late, and making sure that, this time, the Ice King’s visit was little more than a story people will tell about how nothing much happened at all.
