After years of work, Charleston's new Water Plan is out (2024)

After years of work, Charleston’s Water Plan— which aims to steer the city through decades of sea-level rise and a changing climate— is complete. Now it’s up to city leaders to implement its recommendations.

The project is available as an interactive, online story map at https://bit.ly/3XmaCNx.

The Water Plan is a road map for dozens of infrastructure projects, real and potential, across the city over the coming decades to address flooding from storm surge, rising seas, groundwater and rainfall.

“It will always flood in Charleston, but we can make it manageable, and that's what the Water Plan aims to do,” said Andy Sternad, who leads resilience programs for Waggonner & Ball, a firm that helped craft the plan.

The plan takes a novel look at the Holy City,breaking it down not by neighborhood or City Council district, but instead by the 18 water basins carved out by Charleston’s major rivers and creeks.

“People do need to start thinking about these (water basins) as part of their community,” Mayor William Cogswell said at an Aug. 27 City Council workshop on the plan. “You live in Avondale, but you're also part of this drainage basin. That is an important aspect of living with water.”

Sea levels in the Charleston area have risen by more than a foot in the past century, and the city is expected to see another foot-plus of sea-level rise by 2050, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Water has risen while the city has filled and destroyed its tidal wetlands and creeks, worsening tidal flooding.

“Charleston was founded on the water,” said David Waggonner, a founding principal of Waggonner & Ball. “(Water) also has its own memory, and it tends to creep back where it's been.”

Since tracking began in October 1921, Charleston has experienced 49 “major” tidal floods, 35 of which have occurred since January 2015, according to the National Weather Service’s Coastal Flood Event Database.

These are the events that submerge vast swaths of the peninsula and make parts of downtown inaccessible.

Last year, two of the top 10 highest tide events on record inundated the city: August’s Tropical Storm Idalia, which coincided with a blue moon and brought the sixth-highest tide on record, and the Dec. 17 nor'easter, which caused the fourth-highest tide on record.

As Charleston's threshold for flooding shrinks, the Lowcountry is being threatened by a new generation of supercharged tropical cyclones. Rising waters also are warming waters, which NOAA reports can fuel stronger, wetter tropical systems. At the same time, land is sinking, making already low-lying communities more vulnerable to flooding.

“This is a multigenerational problem," Waggoner said. "It requires an intergenerational approach. We bear responsibility for our ancestors as well as our children.”

While the Water Plan was designed with the next few decades in mind, the goal of the project is to create a foundation of infrastructure and natural systems that can evolve over the next century, said Jared Bramblett, a senior water resources engineer with Moffatt & Nichol, an engineering firm that helped craft the plan.

What’s in the plan?

Here are some of the projects that were highlighted in the Aug. 27 workshop:

• In West Ashley, the flagship projects are the West Ashley Greenway Fortification and the Long Branch Creek Commons. The Fortification aims to elevate and bolster the Greenway to create a new protective wall against storm surge flooding. The Commons would rehabilitate Long Branch Creek, creating more space for marsh migration and transforming it into a public park and flood storage system.

• On James Island, the flagship project is the Willow Walk Stormwater Park. Similar to Long Branch Creek Commons, this project would rehabilitate a creek system that drains into the Stono River, creating a joint public space and “green” flood-control system. The project could include a voluntary buyout program for often-flooded homes. Charleston undertook a similar project years ago in West Ashley’s Shadowmoss neighborhood.
• On Johns Island, the flagship projects are the River Road Resilience initiative and Bohicket Road Raising Integration and Burden Creek West Drainage Improvements. The River Road project calls for raising the heavily trafficked road and expanding the marsh system along Murraywood Road. The Bohicket Road project, similarly, would raise that road and restore Burden Creek.
• On Daniel Island and Cainhoy, the flagship projects are the St. Thomas Island Resiliency initiative and Martin Creek Restoration. The St. Thomas Island initiative would elevate St. Thomas Island Drive and Clements Ferry Road, simultaneously creating space for salt marsh migration. The Martin Creek Restoration would preserve and restore the areas around Martin Creek, which helps drain the high ground of Cainhoy.
• On the peninsula, the flagship projects are the Newmarket Creek Headwaters, Lockwood Lakes and the consequential Union Pier Terminal redevelopment. The Newmarket creek project would rehabilitate and restore the tidal creek, which runs along the Ravenel Bridge, and create a new public green space that doubles as flood control and connects to the future Lowcountry Lowline. Lockwood Lakes would connect and integrate Colonial and Long lakes, streamlining water transfer between the two in an effort to address flooding on the Lockwood Drive corridor. The Union Pier Terminal overhaul would integrate new flood-control measures into the redevelopment of the 65-acre property on the peninsula’s east side.

Those are just some of the projects outlined in the Water Plan. It’s an ambitious road map, and some community members at the Aug. 27 workshop wanted to know more about the city’s timeline and plan for accountability as the projects move forward.

“I think everyone's biggest fear is another plan that just sits on the shelf,” said Riley Egger, Coastal Conservation League program director.

The city’s immediate next step is to implement a Basin Flooding Action Program based on the plan’s basin map, Cogswell said.

“The idea is to take that, map it all out, which is largely done, and then start figuring out where the low-hanging fruit is, where we can find funding and attacking it one by one,” he said.

Not all of the Water Plan’s projects will be implemented as they’re presented in the plan, Cogswell said.

“I want to be clear that what's been proposed is not exactly going to happen that way,” Cogswell said. “This is just an exercise to go through for educational purposes and for aspirational purposes and for informational purposes to help us as we move forward with policies and infrastructure plans.”

Charleston isn’t the only city preparing for an altered climate. New Orleans, Norfolk, Miami, New York City and other coastal American communities are adopting new strategies to cope with rising seas.