After years of work, Charleston’s new water plan is complete | Rising Waters
After years of work, Charleston’s water plan is complete – designed to get the city through decades of rising sea levels and climate change. Now it’s up to city leaders to implement the recommendations.
The project is available as an interactive online story map at https://bit.ly/3XmaCNx.
The Water Plan is a roadmap for dozens of different actual and potential infrastructure projects across the city over the coming decades to address flooding from storm surges, rising sea levels, groundwater and rainfall.
A lone lawn chair floats at the intersection of Aiken Street and North Hampstead Square as rain from Tropical Storm Debby continues to fall in Charleston, Tuesday, August 6, 2024.
“There will always be flooding in Charleston, but we can make sure the flooding remains manageable, and that is exactly the goal of the water plan,” says Andy Sternad, who leads resilience programs at Waggoner & Ball, a firm that helped develop the plan.
The plan takes a new look at the Holy City by breaking it down not by neighborhoods or boroughs, but by the 18 different water basins formed by Charleston’s major rivers and streams.
Charleston’s new water plan divides the city into 18 different drainage districts centered around the city’s major streams and rivers. (This is a portion of the water plan, not the full document.)
“People need to start thinking of these (water basins) as part of their community,” Mayor William Cogswell said Aug. 27 at a City Council workshop on the plan. “You live in Avondale, but you’re also part of this drainage basin. That’s an important aspect of living with water.”
Sea levels in the Charleston area have risen more than a foot in the last century, and according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sea levels in the city are expected to rise another foot by 2050. Water levels have risen while the city has filled and destroyed its tidal wetlands and streams, making flooding worse.
“Charleston was founded on water,” said David Waggoner, one of the founders of Waggoner & Ball. “(Water) also has its own memory and tends to return to where it was.”
Since records began in October 1921, Charleston has experienced 49 “severe” floods, including 35 since January 2015, according to the National Weather Service’s Coastal Flood Event Database.
