The challenge of living with water on the Charleston peninsula began in the 1680s when European settlers moved Charles Towne from West Ashley to high ground between the Ashley and Cooper rivers that wasn’t “washed by the tides.”
Between the late-1750s and early 20th century, Charleston completed two adjoining sea walls and Murray Boulevard to deal with the water at the peninsula’s sandy tip to create today’s White Point Gardens with its iconic cannons at the Battery.
In 1909 as Charleston emerged from the post-Civil War doldrums, Mayor Robert Goodwyn Rhett envisioned a multi-year plan to extend the boulevard and the concrete sea wall three miles up the Ashley to Hampton Park.
That wall was not built, but the flood risk didn’t subside. Since 2019, Charleston has devised at least two plans to reduce flooding in various locations around the city. But now Charleston has its first city-wide flood risk management plan that looks at what should be done to control the flow of water for the next 25 years.
When freshman Charleston Mayor William Cogswell and other officials recently unveiled the city’s new water plan at City Hall, he said, “The concepts … are aspirational, and they are informative. I am confident they will help us as a community better understand what it means to live with water and more importantly it will help us in the future as we make policy and infrastructure decisions that will impact our city for generations to come.”
The plan is the latest action “toward controlling and mitigating the threats caused not only by climate change and rising sea level, but by our predecessors’ desires to grow the city’s buildable land,” Charleston preservationist Christina Rae Butler, told the Charleston City Paper.
The city’s current leadership has inherited a “complex and multi-faceted landscape that took more than 300 years of human intervention to create,” said Butler, author of Lowcountry at High Tide. “Looking to the past is key in understanding what worked, what didn’t, what lies below our city streets, and how to respond to the engineering challenges created by earlier generations.”
What’s in the plan
The water plan builds on a 2019 Dutch Dialogues Charleston report, the 2021 Charleston City Plan and the proposed peninsula protection system and others, said Andy Sternad, an architect and planner at Waggonner & Ball, the New Orleans-based firm that led the city’s water-control plans.
This foundational strategy seeks to manage long-term flood risks from storms and severe rainfall, sea level and groundwater rise, tidal flooding and predict where the city is most at risk. It anticipates sea levels that rise 14 inches by 2050 and 2 feet to 4 feet by 2070, based on the city’s sea level rise strategy.
Sternad said the plan does more than recommend ways to keep the city dry in the future. It is also an “opportunity plan” to look at steps that can be taken to improve the quality of today in the city, he said.
At least two more steps are necessary, however, to put the plan into action, Sternad said.
More still to do
The new plan delves into how vulnerable the city is to flooding, but it does not estimate the cost of the more than 100 small and large planned water control projects, he said. To calculate that cost, the city must first develop a comprehensive stormwater model to help determine whether the cost of a project justifies the investment to mitigate possible flood damage.
“To calculate the cost of a project versus the value in savings a model is needed to quantify the benefits and impact in greater detail,” he explained. The plan recommends that the city develop the model, he said. “Fragments of the model exist, but there is no comprehensive model city wide,” he added.
Also recommended:
New zoning rules. These would prioritize the best use of the high ground. It also encourages using low-lying areas for future marsh migration, storing sea water when levels rise and repairing the ecology.
Adaptive. It says city leaders should remain flexible to update and adapt strategies over time to protect ecologically sensitive areas and accentuate Charleston’s sense of place around water.
Risk. The plan could also benefit inland communities, which risk being flooded if there is no place for water to go down stream. Sternad said.
Regional. City leaders recognized a need to take a regional approach to flood mitigation. City Councilman Keith Waring noted that whenever there was a “billion dollar need” for roads, bridges and green space local governments have pulled together to get them done.
“We have not broached drainage on a regional basis,” Waring said during the City Hall meeting. “There needs to be a stream of revenue dedicated to drainage on a regional basis,” he stressed.
Cogswell responded: “We need money to flow like water.”
Removing neighborhood boundaries
The plan divides Charleston into at least 18 drainage basins where water flows into major rivers and creeks. The basins alongside its potential plans and on-going projects will serve as planning areas, which have its own unique water risks and characteristics.
The mayor said Charlestonians should not consider themselves as residents of any particular neighborhood. “People do need to start thinking about these (water basins) as part of their community,” he said. “You live in Avondale, but you’re also part of this drainage basin. That is an important aspect of living with water.”
The approach to divide the city by geographic areas simplifies the plan, said Charleston anti-flooding activist Susan Lyons, chairman of Groundwell.
“People can go to where they live and work in those basins and speak to that,” she said. “[The mayor] is asking for public engagement, and I endorse that. I am hearing a lot of concern about flooding, more than what I heard seven years ago when (Groundswell) started after Hurricane Irma.” That storm washed the Lowcountry with a 9.92-foot surge, the highest since 1940.
The current challenge, she said, is to take some of the current water control projects that are underway or proposed and keep them connected to the new plan. “In an ideal world,” she said, “if we can get the work done, and get it all paid for after the 25-year point, we’d be safe, if we did it according to this plan.”
One of the proposed projects picks up where Rhett left off more than 100 years ago. The city is studying along with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers the idea of a barrier on the peninsula’s western edge that would extend from the Coast Guard station to the Ashley River bridges. When asked if she thinks it will take another 100 years to build the barrier, Lyons laughed and said “by then we’ll be under water, and it will be moot.”
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
