The weather for NC State’s 1996 football opener couldn’t have been more beautiful. Temperatures in the low 90s. Bright, sunny skies. Only a few wispy clouds floated over Carter-Finley Stadium.
The enthusiasm of the 41,500 fans there on the afternoon of Sept. 7 — 20 years ago this week — had little to do with the Wolfpack, the visiting Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets or the end of another long summer.
The excitement was over electricity, running water, hot food and cold drinks, all commodities that were rare in Wake County that particular weekend.
Two days before the season began, late on a Thursday night, Hurricane Fran slammed into North Carolina, a full-force Category 3 hurricane when it hit Cape Fear. It came straight up the Interstate-40 corridor from Wilmington and hit waterlogged Raleigh early Friday morning with the full force of 65-mile-an-hour sustained winds and almost nine inches of rain, the most ever recorded at the RDU International Airport.
More than a million residents in Raleigh and eastern North Carolina lost power, at the time the largest outage in state history.
Hundreds of thousands of trees were uprooted in ground already softened by Hurricane Eduoard, making all 891 square miles of Wake County look like a war zone. Every traffic light in the city of Raleigh went out.
When grounds supervisor Ray Brincefield arrived at the stadium at 5 a.m. Friday, only about a half inch of the field’s famous two-foot crown was sticking out above the standing water. Hundreds of trees were down in the parking lots. Most of the roadways were washed out. Several glass panels in the press box were shattered and had to be replaced. Each of the 300 fixtures in the stadium light banks were blown askance and needed to be re-aimed at the field.
There seemed to be no way to host a football game the next day. The only saving grace was that the stadium was on the same power grid as nearby Rex Hospital, which meant most of the complex still had power.
“We discussed not having the game all day Friday,” recalled Brincefield, who is now NC State’s assistant athletics director for facilities.
For newly appointed athletics director Les Robinson, it was the first big decision of his administrative career.
“Chancellor [Larry] Montieth called me that morning and said ‘What are we going to do about the game?’” Robinson said. “I had trees all over my house and on St. Mary’s Street, and my daughter drove two cars up from Charleston to avoid the storm and one of them was totaled when a tree fell on it.
“We had so much going on at our house, I forgot that I was the athletics director.”
Robinson dispatched his top two lieutenants to the stadium to check on the situation — he couldn’t leave his neighborhood to see the damage for himself. He spent the next 10 hours sitting in the front seat of his car, his cell phone plugged in and charging while talking to Gov. Jim Hunt’s office, the state highway patrol, Wake County emergency services and his people at Carter-Finley.
He talked to the athletics directors at Georgia Tech and South Carolina, two teams who played in Columbia in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo in 1989, and they told him playing that game had been a spirit-lifter for South Carolina’s devastated community. Plus, Georgia Tech was already en route to Raleigh.
It took six hours for the water to drain off the field. The paint that had taken two days to apply earlier in the week was gone. There were no yard lines, no hash marks, no midfield or end zone decorations of any sort. After the water drained, it took another eight hours to remark the field.
Some 500 staff, family, friends and volunteers — many of whom had major damage at home — helped clear the parking lots, fix the field and get everything ready for kickoff in less than a day.
“We cut 162 trees along the field house road, just to be able to get all the football equipment down to the field house by 4 p.m. on Friday,” Brincefield said. “It was a massive effort just to pull this game off.”
At noon Saturday, just 33 hours after the worst hurricane to ever hit Wake County blew through town, NC State’s Alvis Whitted and Torry Holt were standing in the south end zone awaiting a kickoff to start the season.
ABC needed several generators to power their camera equipment for the regionally televised broadcast, but all the bathrooms worked and concession stands were fully stocked with pizzas, hot dogs, nachos and Chick-Fil-A sandwiches.
Almost to a person, the spectators attending the game said it was a respite from the misery they were suffering after the unexpected sucker punch from Fran, whose diagonal trek across the state and through Virginia caught forecasters off guard.
They gobbled up every hot dog on the east side of the stadium before halftime, and many left for home with bottled water and a free bag of ice, Raleigh’s hottest cold commodity.
Unfortunately for State fans, the game didn’t offer much satisfaction. Georgia Tech’s C.J. Williams ran through the Pack defense for two touchdowns and 148 yards, plus he caught a 21-yard touchdown pass from freshman quarterback Joe Hamilton.
Georgia Tech’s defense — guided by NC State’s current defensive coordinator Dave Huxtable — forced a pair of fumbles that were converted into touchdowns, spelling the Wolfpack’s ultimate demise.
Some, including NC State’s own student newspaper, wondered if the game should have even been played. After all, classes were canceled on Friday and Monday following the storm, even though the campus had its own power grid and lost power only briefly.
Fans driving to the stadium from all over the state had to weave through downed trees. Hundreds of police officers were pulled off of emergency duty to help direct traffic around the stadium. The National Guard operations center at the NC State Fairgrounds — where 1,800 guardsmen camped out for weeks in a tent city with military equipment, bucket trucks and other recovery vehicles — was surrounded by tailgaters.
“But we also took more than 40,000 people off the streets, provided them with water and ice, and gave them something to think about besides the storm,” Robinson said. “I think it ended up being a positive for the community.”
Wolfpack players were not spared. At that time, head coach Mike O’Cain did not take his team to a hotel the night before a game, as most teams do these days. His staff struggled to find enough food on Friday and for a pregame meal on Saturday morning.
Sophomore starting quarterback Jose Laureano, making the first of his four starts that season, waded through an inch of water in his Stroud Center apartment to get to the game. It wasn’t dangerous, though — there was no electricity in the entire complex. Defensive back Rodney Redd’s car was destroyed by a fallen tree.
“We have 105 players spread all over,” O’Cain said after the game. “There were guys with trees falling on their apartments and on their cars. We found out they were all okay.
“The next thing was to get their minds on the game. We had a meeting at 4 o’clock [Friday afternoon], and all they were talking about was falling trees, not football. That’s not what you want them talking about the day before the start of the season.”
None of the 17 or so games NC State has played in the aftermath of a significant hurricane or tropical storm have been canceled because of the foul weather. The Wolfpack hosted Florida State five days after Hurricane Hazel hit North Carolina in 1954. It hosted North Carolina a day after Hurricane Hugo swept through the Piedmont. It played Ohio and South Carolina during pretty much during Hurricane Bonnie and Tropical Storm Dennis, respectively.
Fran was a little different because it hit Raleigh so hard and devastated the entire eastern half of the state. It was blamed for a total of 37 deaths, including 24 in North Carolina. It caused $7.2 billion in damage just in North Carolina, the state’s biggest natural disaster until the flooding caused by Hurricane Floyd came along three years later.
The coast, particularly Topsail Island, bore the brunt of the damage, but homes and businesses were wiped out from sea to state line. Crops — tobacco, corn, cotton, even timber — washed away.
The game was definitely a harbinger for a dismal season for the Wolfpack, which began the year with high hopes but finished with a 3-8 record. The Wolfpack hosted No.3 Florida State 12 days later in a nationally televised Thursday night game and lost 51-17. The school gave 1,000 free tickets to the National Guard and the North Carolina State Department of Transportation to thank them for volunteering in the recovery efforts.
Three weeks later, for the first time ever, the Wolfpack hosted Alabama and nearly won, but the Crimson Tide held on for a 24-19 victory. State also lost non-conference games at Purdue and to East Carolina in Charlotte.
O’Cain switched quarterbacks midway through the season, replacing Laureano with redshirt freshman Jamie Barnette against Alabama. Barnette developed a great rapport with Holt, a redshirt sophomore who was clearly destined for stardom. The season, however, was adversely affected when star running back Tremayne Stephens was hampered midway through the schedule with an injured rotator cuff.
Still, there was one huge bright spot in 1996. Senior kicker Marc Primanti, the team’s leading scorer that year, nailed three field goals against the Yellow Jackets, including a career long 47-yarder. He went through the entire season without missing a field goal or extra point (20-for-20 and 24-for-24, respectively) and won the Lou Groza Award as the nation’s top kicker, in one of the most remarkable season-long performances in Wolfpack football history. He finished his career by making 27 consecutive field goals during his junior and senior seasons.
Fortunately for Primanti, Fran’s winds had subsided when he lined up for the first of those field goals that season.
Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.
