Horry County officials: ‘System worked’ sparing homes from Hurricane Sally flooding
When the flash flood rains from Hurricane Sally’s remnants struck Horry County last week, roads and some front yards flooded, some with as much as seven inches of water.
In Conway, along Cates Bay Highway, the flood waters caught a car, causing it to overturn. Horry County Fire Rescue pulled out a parent and their three children, and rescued a bystander too.
Everyone, thankfully, was unscathed. And that appears to be the worst of Hurricane Sally’s damage to the county, according to an assessment of the damage by county officials.
In all, county officials received word of only a few flooded garages, but no homes. Of the 142 service calls to the county’s stormwater department, most were residents worried about flooding, Stormwater Manager Thom Roth said, not residents whose homes had actually flooded.
The lack of damage, though, doesn’t mean that the flash flood wasn’t serious, Roth said. It means the county’s floodwater systems worked.
“The good news is we survived,” Roth told Horry County Council’s Infrastructure and Regulation Committee Tuesday morning. “The system worked the way it was supposed to.”
Calling the flash flood “unprecedented” in an “unprecedented year,” Roth said that Horry County received a heavy volume of rain in a matter of hours — rather than days — and said that while the county’s floodwater systems were able to handle the water, there are opportunities for improvement.
“In the county or any other municipality, we don’t design for a flash flood,” Roth said. “We design for a 24-hour rain event, we do not design for a two-hour rain event.”
Among the places that received the most serious flooding were the Bradford Meadows development. Over seven inches of rain in two hours soaked the area — nearly double the amount of water housing developments in Carolina Forest and Myrtle Beach received. Bear Bluff, along Old Reaves Ferry Road and Longs — near the intersection of highways 57 and 111 — each received more than 5.5 inches of rain in two hours.
Roth said the county should improve outfalls in several areas and drainage in others to help stormwater drainage. An outfall should be installed on Old Reaves Ferry Road to prevent flooding on Mule Trace Road, he said. An outfall near Brookgate should be updated while one near Bear Bluff Road needs to be reconstructed, Roth said. Those projects are pending the county’s approval of easements for the work.
Aside from a properly working drainage system, Roth said Horry County was spared the worst of Hurricane Sally in part because the Pee Dee River Basin in both North Carolina and northern South Carolina weren’t hit as hard as they have been in the past. During the flooding that occurred in late May and early June, Roth said, the upper parts of the Pee Dee River Basin received heavy rainfall, causing Horry County to flood in the days and weeks that followed the storm. Hurricane Sally stuck closer to the coastline, meaning Horry County received flash flooding but no residual flooding caused by water flowing from the north.
In recent meetings, County Council members have begun kicking around the idea of better notifying property owners of the flooding potential of their land, a notion Council member Bill Howard brought up after Roth’s presentation. Referencing Council member Harold Worley’s penchant to ask county officials if a property has flooded when re-zoning ordinances come before council, Howard — who represents part of Myrtle Beach — said he raises an important issue, and that residents should be privy to the information Roth presented to the committee. Committee members asked Roth to present about the affects of Hurricane Sally at the next council meeting, scheduled for Oct. 6.
“Has it ever flooded and will it ever flood? And that’s an important question, we all agree with [Council member Harold Worley] that we need to know that,” Howard said. “It’s really critical all the way around.”