Then, a disaster of another sort struck the city: “BRAC,” short for the 1993 US military’s Base Realignment and Closure Commission report. Birthed by the Clinton administration and executed by the Pentagon, the report landed unexpectedly hard on the Holy City. The Charleston Naval Base and Shipyard in North Charleston—a fixture since before World War I and the area’s largest employer—was targeted for closure. In 1996, the base was shuttered, and 22,000 jobs (15,000 active duty and 7,000 civilian) disappeared. “We thought we might lose either the naval base or the shipyard, but not both,” says Mary Graham, the area’s point person for military support for decades. “But it was all the ships, all the submarines, the hospital—everyone was in shock.”
The closure took the state’s Congressional delegation, led by powerful senators Fritz Hollings and Strom Thurmond, by surprise. Scrambling, the lawmakers began cobbling together new missions and expanding existing ones. A subsequent BRAC in 2005 resulted in Joint Base Charleston, which melded the Naval Weapons Station, the former Charleston Air Force Base, and SPAWAR, the military’s East Coast information warfare center. The area began to claw back the lost military jobs.
The base closing also forced regional leaders to come together to develop a strategy. Before then, dealings between counties or municipalities was often downright hostile. “It was the first time we met when there wasn’t a weapons check at the front door,” jokes former North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey, who was Charleston County Council chairman at the time. “The mentality couldn’t be described as united,” adds Steve Dykes, Charleston County’s retired economic development director and chief jobs recruiter for 30 years. “But sometimes crisis is a good convener.”
The three metro counties—Charleston, Dorchester, and Berkeley—formed the Charleston Regional Development Alliance in 1995 to boost existing companies such as auto parts supplier Bosch and cloud computing firm Blackbaud, both in North Charleston, and recruit new ones like steel fabricator Nucor, in Berkeley County. The goal was diversification. “We were lazy before then,” Summey says. Together, Hurricane Hugo and BRAC forced the city and the region to build a new economy for a new century. “They were blessings in disguise,” says Hefner.