Maybe more than 20 miles from the coast. I drove up I-95 one night about a week after Hugo. From maybe St. George to the N.C. state line, almost all the billboards and most of the road signs were blown down.
At many of the exits, the power was still out. Sometimes the power was on, and the spotlights that had illuminated the billboards shone up into the sky.
Trees had fallen over the interstate, especially above Santee, and the roadway was still pitted and pocked where they had fallen. The trunks had been cut at the edge of the emergency lane and dragged off the pavement, but you could still see all the fallen trees right at the edge of the emergency lane.
It was an eerie drive, and if I hadn't known my mile marker, I wouldn't have known where to get off that night.
I paid close attention to this storm, since the Fla West Coast is alot like the Texas gulf coast. I wanted to see what "the big one" would do to my area if the "big one hit". For a while it looked like the worst case sciearo. Big storm pushing lots of water ahead of it filling all the bays up with water and then a storm sugre comming in on top of already high water. But it doesn't look like that happened, Charlie was more like a big F2 tornado. I was worried about what an 18' storm surge would do to all the low lying areas. Happily that never happened.