‘We don’t need any more rain’: Horry County rivers in minor flood stages
It’s been a wet year for Horry County, and the rain keeps on coming through the start of the holiday season.
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, some Horry residents awoke to inches of standing water following a weekend of rain and king tides.
As of 11 a.m. Monday, the Waccamaw River was in minor flood stages, according to the Natural Weather Service’s online river data. The river crested at 11.34 feet deep in Conway.
The Waccamaw is expected to drop back to action status — the first of the four flood stages, signaling that the river is beginning to rise or is getting close to returning to its normal depth — by Tuesday morning and out of flood status altogether Wednesday. By the end of the week, the river should be close to its normal depth.
The Little Pee Dee River is also in minor flood stages but is expected to remain stagnant for the remainder of the week. The National Weather Service said the river was at 9.7 feet deep as of 11 a.m. on Monday.
By Saturday, the Little Pee Dee is predicted to be back down 7 feet deep, which is very close to the action flood-stage line. The NWS’s website does not list when the river should be below flood levels.
While rain is expected for the coming weekend, these predictions account for rain only in the immediate future. Steve Pfaff, the warning coordinator for the National Weather Service in Wilmington, North Carolina, said the rain predictions for this weekend should not greatly affect these predictions, barring any unexpected rainstorm.
Pfaff said that residents living near the rivers may experience flooded yards or streets as the water flows out toward Winyah Bay.
This round of minor flooding was unwelcome news to an area tired of floods. Pfaff said that 2018 will be a record year for rainfall in the Grand Strand.
For example, North Myrtle Beach typically gets 48 inches of rain between Jan. 1 and Nov. 25, but this year it got 61 inches in the same time frame.
Pfaff said that Florence was the main contributor to the increased rain totals, but there were also above-average rain totals during the summer.
“We don’t need any more rain,” he said. “It’s just been a really wet year.”
This story was originally published November 26, 2018 at 11:58 AM.