Can Horry County raise its roads to prevent flooding from cutting off transportation?

Historic flooding caused by Hurricane Florence nearly turned the Myrtle Beach area into an island, causing local officials to call for infrastructure improvements.

U.S. Rep. Tom Rice has been steadfast during his three terms in his support of building Interstate 73 to help connect the Grand Strand to the outside world, and he’s ramped up his efforts in the wake of Florence.

“The Grand Strand wasn’t damaged that badly, but people couldn’t get here,” he said, pointing out the economic losses from a month of minimal tourism could be severe locally and statewide due to decreased tax revenue.

The state Department of Transportation’s sandbag barrier on U.S. Highway 501 allowed one lane of traffic in and out of Conway during the flooding. That’s not a sufficient long-term solution, according to Rice.

Rice sent a letter to Gov. Henry McMaster urging him to amend his request for federal recovery aid to include money for I-73.

But while I-73 would have been helpful as an evacuation route prior to the storm, it wouldn’t have allowed for easier travel in and out of the Grand Strand once the section of S.C. Highway 22, which potentially will connect to I-73, flooded and shut down for several days.

Horry County councilman Harold Worley said that whoever designed Highway 22, which was opened in 2001, should be fired.

County council voted in July to devote $23 million annually beginning in 2020 to help pay for I-73, a project estimated to cost between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion. The estimated total cost for the Horry County portion is between $375 million and $500 million.

Rice’s solution? Raise the roadway on the section of Highway 22 that flooded.

“We need a reliable road to get in and out on,” Rice said. “It’s absolutely feasible (to raise the road on Highway 22).”

But engineers don’t necessarily agree with Rice’s proposal.

Mike Wooten, president of DDC Engineers in Myrtle Beach and former chairman of the SCDOT commission, said raising the road isn’t justifiable from a cost-benefit perspective.

“Raising the road sounds so simple, but the cost is so extreme, it’s really not worth it to plan for an event that may or may not occur in anyone’s lifetime again,” Wooten said, referring to the excessive amount of rain that Florence produced.

The national standard for building highways is to make them able to withstand a 100-year flood, Wooten explained.

“Whatever man builds, the good Lord can tear it down,” he said.

Andy Leaphart, SCDOT’s chief engineer for operations, agreed that raising roads is costly, but he said every option is on the table following Florence’s impact.

Factors that need to be taken into consideration when raising a road include environmental impacts and the elevation of surrounding communities, he said.

“Bigger is not always better,” Leaphart said.

Infrastructure improvements aren’t likely to come anytime soon, Leaphart said, because SCDOT is currently in recovery phase, so any funding they receive to recover from Florence is only allowed to be used to repair roads back to where they were prior to the storm.

One improvement SCDOT is strongly considering is looking for ways to improve its modeling, which would allow it to more accurately predict where and when streams will overtop roads and bridges, he said.

David Weissman: @WeissmanMBO; 843-626-0305

This story was originally published October 5, 2018 at 12:49 PM.