By Steve Twomey and Stephen C. Fehr
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 23, 1989; Page A1

Schools closed, Metro ridership slipped, thousands of federal and District workers stayed home, downtown thinned out, malls grew quieter and two elderly women even trooped to a Prince George's County storm shelter to wait out the worst.

And then Hugo missed its appointed round by a mile.

Actually, by several hundred miles.

Widely predicted to pass this way yesterday with soaking rains and gusty winds, the disintegrating remains of Hurricane Hugo toured Appalachia instead, leaving Washington in occasional sunshine and leaving, too, a lot of people wondering just what went wrong. Or right.

"I don't know whether to be happy or sad about this," said Patrick J. Michaels, the Virginia state climatologist. "But I'm sorry. What can I say? You think forecasters feel good when this happens?"

By the end of the day, many were making light of the storm that never was, but it still managed to inconvenience thousands of parents who had to decide what to do about child care when many schools never opened or closed early.

"I was caught in a situation where I'd be terribly late, stay home or bring Joshua to work. So I brought him," said Charlene Wallace, a worker at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where several other children could be seen wearing visitor's passes and scampering alongside their mothers.

Prince George's County school officials complained that forecasters had worried parents needlessly about a storm that, while dangerous, never got close. Angry parents called Fairfax County Superintendent Robert R. Spillane's office, first to complain that officials did not cancel classes altogether because of the storm and then, later in the day, to grouse about their children coming home early while the sun was out.

Meteorologists replied they had done the best with what they had, and felt it was better to be prudent.

They had expected that Hugo, heading northwest as it crossed the Carolina coast overnight, would be shoved quickly by the westerly winds of a low pressure system into a northeasterly course that would bring it over the capital with winds up to 70 miles an hour and several inches of rain.

But the storm barreled far inland, dumping heavy rain in North Carolina, Southwest Virginia and West Virginia as it swept across the Appalachians.

Washington had some early morning showers – and then nothing. By noon, all flood, tropical storm and hurricane watches and warnings for the area had been canceled. At 7 p.m., total rainfall for the day at National Airport was a tenth of an inch, while the highest winds were 37 miles an hour. Occasionally heavy rain, unrelated to Hugo, is in the forecast for today.

"I've been calling my mother and saying, 'Don't go out, don't go out, don't go out,' and finally I called her and said, 'Go out,' " said Jackie Donnelly, an employee of the budget office of the Department of Agriculture.

Climatologist Michaels, who answered the telephone by saying, "The 'kick me' department right here," said Hugo had gathered more speed than expected as it approached the coast and that the increase contributed to its unexpected course.

Forecasters had thought that a low pressure system in the Midwest would redirect Hugo on a north-northeast path early yesterday, Michaels said. But Hugo came ashore so quickly that the system was too far away to change Hugo's direction.

Scott Prosise, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service, said not only was Hugo faster than expected as it reached land, it was stronger, with higher winds. That strength helped keep it on its original track, he said.

Ken Reeves of Accu-Weather Inc., a private forecasting service in State College, Pa., said yesterday that the path of a hurricane that goes inland is particularly difficult to predict because of the uncertainty about how the storm will be affected by the jet stream.

"A hurricane has a mind of its own," he said.

Once Hugo moved into central South Carolina, Reeves said, "It weakened, it lost control of where it was going and the jet stream took over."

Armed only with what they had heard and read, residents and officials took hundreds of actions large and small that turned out to be unnecessary.

The District's 88,000 public school students were given the day off after officials decided at 6:30 a.m. "to err on the side of safety, knowing you can't really predict where these storms are eventually going to fall," a spokeswoman said. Many other school systems closed early.

Both the federal and District governments gave their employes the option of using a vacation or personal day, and officials estimated that roughly 20 percent of the 364,217 federal workers were absent and the same percentage of the city's civilian work force. Counting police and firefighters, 44,647 people work for the District government.

In Loudoun County, officials set up a "war room" in the fire and rescue building. Spokesman J.B. Anderson said, "This is the best prepared we've ever been for any impending disaster I've been through." But by 12:15 p.m., all fire and rescue units were informed that the severe weather warnings had been canceled.

Panicked residents prepared too, rushing to food stores Thursday and yesterday, buying up stocks of bottled water, candles and canned goods. A spokesman for Giant Food said that business had returned to normal by last night.

"They blew the hurricane way out of proportion to me," said Craig Watson, a USDA mail clerk from Landover.

But not to Nancy Alexander, 39, and her mother, Catherine Connolly, 71.

They took a $20 cab ride from their home in Landover to wait out the storm at the Hyattsville school.

"I'm not taking any chances," Alexander said. "I almost lost my life in one storm and I am not about to die in this one."

Staff writers Michael J. Abramowitz, Peter Baker, Alice Digilio, Paul Duggan, Cornelius F. Foote Jr., Keith Harriston, Nell Henderson, Alison Howard, Robert F. Howe, Veronica T. Jennings, Lisa Leff, Michele L. Norris, Whitney Redding, Michael Rezendes and Howard Schneider contributed to this report.