Charleston's new water plan likely coming soon (2024)

After years of work, Charleston’s new Comprehensive, Integrated Water Plan is nearing completion. The document will help guide Charleston’s planning and development over the next 25 years — which could shape up to be some of the most tumultuous in the city’s history.

Sea levels in the area are set to rise about a foot by 2050, according to federal climate predictions. Rising waters are also warming waters, and those warming waters could fuel stronger hurricanes.

These aren’t distant threats. Charleston Harbor hit a “moderate” flood stage 27 times in 2023, more than any year in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 102-year record. For comparison, from 1922 (the earliest year NOAA has public data) to 1972, Charleston Harbor hit a moderate flood stage eight times.

Charleston’s new water plan aims to help the city “embrace its relationship with water,” according to the project’s webpage. Functionally, that means adopting new flood-mitigation infrastructure and strategies for stormwater, tidal and storm surge flooding — with an eye toward how global warming could exacerbate those problems by 2050.

“We think this will be ready sometime this summer, maybe a little bit sooner,” Charleston’s Chief Resilience Officer Dale Morris said at a May 16 meeting of the city’s Resiliency and Sustainability Advisory Committee. The project was originally slated to wrap up in March of this year, and the city has officially been working on the plan since September 2022, according to the project webpage. But it has its roots as far back as January 2019, when Charleston began its Dutch Dialogues process.

At the May 16 committee meeting, Morris offered some glimpses of some of the Water Plan’s project proposals. Among those: potentially raising the West Ashley Greenway over time to protect surrounding neighborhoods from tidal flooding. The pedestrian trail runs from Main Road to Albemarle Road.

“If you do some marsh restoration out here, now you’re getting a multiple line-of-defense structure,” Morris said. The greenway cuts through salt marshes and tidal creeks, such as Long Branch Creek, across its roughly 8-mile run. “That is a way we can keep people safe ... in a way that is productive and useful.”

Morris also highlighted a proposal to restore and repair New Market Creek, a tidal creek and salt marsh just off the exit from the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge onto Morrison Drive on the peninsula.

“This is an old creek, but it is now in sort of a neglected condition,” Morris said. “Can we do something different with that and do something in a way that reduces flood risk and makes the area more valuable?”

As part of the water plan, Morris said the city’s Resilience Office also is monitoring Charleston’s groundwater levels to better understand how sea-level rise impacts subsurface water. When groundwater levels drop too far, the ground itself can also drop, which is a problem for a city at sea level.

Too much groundwater can cause the ground to lift, potentially damaging pipes, buildings and other infrastructure. An overabundance of groundwater can also waterlog soil, limiting its ability to absorb rainfall and runoff, and potentially causing more flooding woes. Morris said the Office of Resilience and Sustainability hopes to expand testing capacity in the future, allowing it to create a citywide groundwater model.