How Many Hurricanes Have Hit Myrtle Beach?

Since reliable Atlantic hurricane records began in the mid-1800s, the Myrtle Beach area of South Carolina has taken a direct hit or been significantly affected by roughly a dozen hurricanes, though the exact count depends on how broadly you draw the circle. Direct landfalls within the immediate Grand Strand coastline are rarer than many visitors assume, with Hurricane Hazel in 1954 standing as the most devastating example. The more common pattern is a storm making landfall elsewhere along the Carolina coast and still battering Myrtle Beach with destructive winds, storm surge, and flooding rain.

Why the Count Depends on How You Measure

Counting hurricanes that have “hit” a specific city is trickier than it sounds. A hurricane’s center of circulation can make landfall fifty miles away and still drive a life-threatening storm surge and hurricane-force winds into Myrtle Beach. Hugo in 1989 made landfall near Charleston, roughly a hundred miles to the south, yet the northern reaches of its wind field and storm surge still punished the Grand Strand. Meanwhile, a weaker tropical storm that passes directly over the city might cause less damage than a major hurricane tracking well offshore but close enough to push water ashore for days.

The National Hurricane Center typically tracks landfalls by where the eye crosses the coast. By that strict measure, direct landfalls at or very near Myrtle Beach number in the low single digits since 1851. But if you widen the lens to include hurricanes whose damaging effects reached the city, the list grows to somewhere around ten to fifteen storms, depending on the threshold for “damaging.” For Myrtle Beach residents and visitors, the broader count matters more than the narrow one.

Hurricane Hazel and the 1954 Catastrophe

No conversation about Myrtle Beach hurricanes starts anywhere but Hazel. On October 15, 1954, Hazel slammed into the northern South Carolina coast as a Category 4 storm, producing a storm tide that reached 15.5 feet above mean sea level at Myrtle Beach.¹ That wall of water, arriving near high tide during a new moon, obliterated entire beachfront blocks. Hundreds of buildings along the strand were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, and the storm killed dozens of people across the Carolinas.

Hazel reshaped the physical and psychological landscape of the Grand Strand. Before 1954, beachfront development was relatively modest, with many wooden cottages built close to the waterline. The storm wiped that slate clean and triggered a rebuilding boom that produced the larger, more heavily engineered structures visitors see today. It also planted the idea, still alive in local memory, that Myrtle Beach can face the worst the Atlantic has to offer.

Hurricane Hugo and the Near Miss That Was Not

Hugo made landfall on September 22, 1989, near Sullivan’s Island just north of Charleston, packing Category 4 winds. Its center tracked well south of Myrtle Beach, but the storm was enormous. Hugo’s impacts spread across the entire South Carolina coast, and the Myrtle Beach area received tropical-storm-force winds, significant storm surge, and coastal erosion.

Researchers studying sediment cores along the coast from Myrtle Beach to McClellanville found clear physical signatures of Hugo’s passage. At Price Inlet, an eight-centimeter-thick sand layer loaded with nearshore foraminifera confirmed that the storm had transported material from offshore and deposited it well inland. Other nearby sites showed subtler but still detectable evidence of the surge.² Those sediment records matter because they help scientists reconstruct a longer hurricane history than written records alone can provide, giving a better sense of how often storms of Hugo’s caliber reach this stretch of coast.

Hugo’s ecological toll was staggering even at locations not directly under the eye. At North Inlet, a relatively pristine coastal landscape south of the Grand Strand, the storm surge drove saltwater deep into coastal forests. Trees along the forest-marsh boundary died from soil salinization, and salt concentrations remained abnormally high in shallow groundwater up to the three-meter contour for months. The population of benthic invertebrates in blackwater streams dropped by 97 percent, and biomass plunged from 542 milligrams per square meter to just 2 milligrams per square meter. Flying insects and birds returned within weeks, but reptiles and amphibians were still depressed six months later.³ New pine seedlings and understory vegetation were flourishing by mid-1991, a reminder that coastal ecosystems are adapted to periodic hurricane disturbance even if individual events look catastrophic.

Other Storms That Have Shaped the Grand Strand

Between Hazel and Hugo, the Grand Strand weathered several notable storms. Hurricane Donna in 1960 tracked through the eastern Caribbean and up the Atlantic seaboard, bringing tropical-storm-force conditions to the Myrtle Beach area. In 1989, just weeks before Hugo, Hurricane Jerry was churning in the Gulf but reminded Carolinians that the season was active. Gracie in 1959 struck the South Carolina coast farther south near Beaufort as a Category 3 but sent enough energy northward to cause damage along the Grand Strand.

More recently, Hurricane Floyd in 1999 triggered massive evacuations across the coast, including Myrtle Beach, though the storm’s worst flooding hit North Carolina. Hurricane Matthew in 2016 tracked up the coast as a Category 1 after devastating Haiti, driving storm surge and heavy rain into the Myrtle Beach area. And Hurricane Dorian in 2019, after its catastrophic stall over the Bahamas, brushed the Carolina coast closely enough to warrant evacuations and cause moderate coastal flooding.

Hurricane Florence and the Inland Flood Threat

Florence in September 2018 rewrote assumptions about what “hurricane damage” looks like for the Myrtle Beach area. The storm made landfall near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, as a Category 1, which sounds modest. But Florence then stalled, dumping extraordinary rainfall across the Carolinas over several days. The result was not primarily a wind or storm-surge disaster but a catastrophic inland flood event.

Research modeling Florence’s flooding across North and South Carolina found that runoff processes, not coastal surge, drove the bulk of the flood exposure during the storm. The study used high-resolution meteorological data and ocean circulation modeling to separate contributions from rainfall-driven runoff, coastal surge, and compound effects where both acted simultaneously. The conclusion was clear: for Florence, the rivers and overwhelmed drainage systems were the main culprits, and the compounding of coastal and runoff flooding made things worse than either process alone would have predicted.⁴

For Myrtle Beach, which sits at the southern end of the low-lying Waccamaw River basin, Florence was a slow-motion catastrophe. Floodwaters from upstream took days to arrive, swamping neighborhoods well after the storm’s winds had moved on. Communities along the Waccamaw and Pee Dee rivers experienced record flooding. The lesson Florence drove home is that Myrtle Beach’s hurricane risk is not limited to beachfront storm surge. A slow-moving, rain-heavy system making landfall even in North Carolina can send devastating floodwaters south through the river systems that thread through Horry County.

How Myrtle Beach Rebuilt Its Shoreline

Decades of hurricanes, nor’easters, and chronic wave erosion left the Myrtle Beach oceanfront in rough shape by the early 1980s. Nearly 65 percent of the city’s nine-mile oceanfront was armored with seawalls, bulkheads, and revetments, the kind of hard structures that protect property behind them but accelerate beach loss in front of them. Starting in the 1980s, the city launched a three-phase restoration plan. Initial phases used small-scale beach scraping and trucked-in inland sand as temporary fixes while a larger federal project was engineered. The big phase, a 50-year federal beach nourishment project, began in 1997 and continues today.⁵

Between 1986 and early 2018, roughly five million cubic yards of sand were placed on Myrtle Beach at a total adjusted cost of about $70.8 million. The old erosion control structures are now buried beneath sand and fronted by a vegetated storm berm. That berm serves double duty: it absorbs storm surge energy during hurricanes and provides the wide recreational beach that millions of visitors expect.⁵ Beach nourishment is not a permanent fix, though. Each hurricane or major nor’easter can strip away years’ worth of placed sand in a single event, requiring expensive re-nourishment cycles. The ongoing federal commitment helps spread those costs, but the fundamental dynamic is a city fighting the ocean to maintain a shoreline the ocean would prefer to move.

Why Myrtle Beach Gets Fewer Direct Hits Than You Might Expect

Given that the entire southeastern U.S. coast sits in hurricane territory, Myrtle Beach has historically seen fewer direct landfalls than the Gulf Coast or even parts of the Florida and North Carolina coasts. There are a few reasons. The Grand Strand sits along a section of the South Carolina coast that curves slightly inward compared to the prominent capes of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, which tend to intercept storms recurving northward. Storms tracking northwest from the open Atlantic often curve north or northeast before reaching the South Carolina coast, especially if they interact with mid-latitude weather systems.

Large-scale ocean and atmosphere cycles also matter. Research on the connections between the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, Atlantic sea surface temperatures, and hurricane activity has found that La Niña years and years with neutral conditions tend to produce more landfalling tropical cyclones along the U.S. coast, while El Niño years decrease landfall frequency. Warmer phases of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation correspond with higher overall tropical cyclone counts in the basin.⁶ None of this makes Myrtle Beach immune; it just means the dice are not loaded the same way they are for, say, the Louisiana coast. When conditions align, the Grand Strand is absolutely in the crosshairs.

What Climate Projections Say About Future Risk

Climate modeling focused on hurricane storm surge along the U.S. coast suggests that the Carolinas are among the regions facing notable increases in inundation in the coming decades. Projections show that storm surge flooding is expected to worsen along the Atlantic coast, with South Carolina specifically called out as an area likely to see substantial increases.⁷ This is driven by a combination of rising sea levels, which give storm surge a higher starting platform, and the possibility that warmer ocean waters could support stronger storms.

For Myrtle Beach specifically, rising seas amplify the risk in ways that go beyond storms themselves. Even modest sea-level rise means that a storm surge event that would have stayed off the road in 1954 now pushes water several blocks inland. Compound flooding, the kind Florence demonstrated where rainfall and coastal surge converge, becomes more likely as sea levels climb because the baseline water level in estuaries and tidal creeks is higher, leaving less room for rainwater to drain. The Waccamaw River basin’s low elevation makes the Myrtle Beach area especially vulnerable to this kind of cascading flood.

Reading the Ancient Storm Record

Written hurricane records for the South Carolina coast only go back reliably to the mid-1800s, which is a very short window for understanding how often truly catastrophic storms occur. Paleotempestology, the study of ancient storms through geological evidence, tries to fill that gap. Researchers have collected sediment cores from marshes, ponds, and inlets along the coast between Myrtle Beach and McClellanville to see whether individual hurricanes leave readable marks in the layers of muck and sand.²

The results are mixed but promising. In locations where storm surge can carry marine sand and microscopic organisms into sheltered environments that normally accumulate fine-grained freshwater sediment, individual storms can show up as distinct layers. Hugo’s signal was strong at some sites and nearly invisible at others just a few miles away. That variability is a challenge: the absence of a storm layer does not necessarily mean the storm did not happen, only that local conditions did not preserve it. But at productive sites, cores extending back centuries or even millennia can suggest how often major hurricanes visited the area before anyone was writing things down. The emerging picture is that the South Carolina coast has experienced intense hurricanes repeatedly over the last several thousand years, with intervals between major events measured in decades to a few centuries rather than in millennia.

Ecological Recovery After Major Storms

The Grand Strand and surrounding coastal ecosystems are adapted to periodic hurricane disturbance, but “adapted” does not mean “unharmed.” Hugo’s impact on the North Inlet area illustrates both how brutal the immediate aftermath can be and how quickly recovery begins. The coastal forest experienced severe wind damage, with the worst destruction in mixed hardwood stands growing on sandy, low-lying soils. Salt-induced foliage loss and tree death continued to develop for months after the storm as seawater worked its way through root systems.³

Saltwater intrusion also altered soil chemistry, mobilizing stored ammonium through ion exchange with seawater, which disrupted normal nitrogen cycling. Insects and terrestrial vertebrates were virtually absent from the surge-affected forest immediately after Hugo. Yet the turnaround was surprisingly fast for some groups. Benthic invertebrate populations in blackwater streams, despite that 97 percent crash, rebounded to pre-storm density within three months and pre-storm biomass within six months. Pine seedlings colonized the openings left by dead trees, taking advantage of newly available light. This kind of disturbance-and-recovery cycle is one reason coastal forests in hurricane-prone regions tend to be relatively young and species-rich: each storm resets patches of the landscape, creating a mosaic of habitats at different stages of regrowth.

What Visitors and Residents Should Actually Worry About

If you are planning a trip to Myrtle Beach during hurricane season, which runs from June 1 through November 30 with a peak in August and September, the statistical odds of a hurricane disrupting your specific week are low. The Grand Strand averages a tropical-storm-strength or stronger event roughly every several years, and direct major hurricane landfalls are separated by decades. But “low probability” and “low consequence” are very different things. When a storm does come, the consequences can be severe, and they extend well beyond the beach itself.

Storm surge remains the most immediately dangerous threat along the oceanfront. Behind the beachfront, though, freshwater flooding from overwhelmed rivers and drainage systems can be just as destructive and often lasts far longer. Florence’s floodwaters were still rising in parts of Horry County a week after the storm’s eye had come and gone. If you own property in the Myrtle Beach area, flood insurance matters even if you are not on the beachfront, and checking whether your neighborhood sits in a floodplain tied to the Waccamaw or Intracoastal Waterway systems is worth the effort.

Evacuation routes also deserve attention. Myrtle Beach is served primarily by U.S. Route 501 heading inland and U.S. Route 17 running along the coast. During mandatory evacuations, traffic on these corridors can become extraordinarily congested. Local emergency management agencies publish evacuation zone maps and recommend knowing your zone before a storm threatens. The time to figure out your plan is not the day the forecast cone shifts your direction.