In Island Green, residents worried about over-development. Now a bridge has collapsed.
Once a small neighborhood and popular golf course bordering one of Horry County’s largest nature preserves, the Island Green neighborhood in the Burgess community is now dotted with hundreds of homes, apartment buildings and patches of woods, streams and swamps a variety of wildlife call home.
Creatures from otters, to great blue herons to snapping turtles, red-shouldered hawks and tufted titmouse all live in the area.
And for years, residents have raised concerns that building too many homes in the area could prove disastrous for the wildlife there, or even their own safety. After all, some residents argue, the community of more than 1,200 homes has only one entrance and exit, Sunnehanna Drive. County regulations say that neighborhoods with more than 100 homes should have at least two entrances and exits, in case of an emergency.
Now, rain over the weekend has caused part of a bridge in the neighborhood to collapse, according to video of the damage posted online and shared with The Sun News.
The bridge is off of Bellmonte Drive, one of the still-developing roads through the community, and leads across a small stream into an area where developers are building new homes. According to the video, rain appears to have washed away dirt that was supporting the concrete and asphalt above, causing the road to collapse. Island Green resident Dawne Dunton recorded the video and said she was outraged.
“This is the shoddy work that they’ve done. This is what they’ve done to our community. This is what they’ve done to our pond,” Dunton said in the video. “Two, almost three inches of rain yesterday and this is what happens, the road happens. This has got to stop.”
“They don’t care about our safety,” Dunton added.
Dunton told The Sun News she and her neighbors worked together over the weekend to block off the road so that drivers or cyclists wouldn’t accidentally travel onto the damaged bridge.
But more than concerns about the quality of construction work, the bridge collapse could mean improvements to other parts of the neighborhood are delayed.
Under a 2019 agreement with Horry County, the developers of Island Green won approval to build more homes in the area without building another entrance into the neighborhood. In exchange, county leaders asked the developers to fix and improve Sunnehanna Drive once the new homes were built. At the time, the developers argued that they would need the revenue from selling the new homes to afford the road upgrades.
“If you’re concerned about safety in Island Green, letting this project isn’t just the best option, it’s the only option unless Horry County wants to come in and do it itself,” developer Steve Powell, with Venture Engineering, said at the time.
The bridge that collapsed over the weekend leads to some of that new construction, meaning that developers will have to fix that before continuing on with the home construction.
Road maintenance is a pervasive issue in the neighborhood as all of the streets are privately owned by a developer. That means Horry County crews are not able to pave or widen the roads, and it’s up to the developer. The neighborhood is also home to 25 homeowner associations that, in the past, have not been able to come up with an agreement on how road improvements should be paid for.
“You have 20-some HOAs within there, nobody correctly identified who was responsible for maintaining the road,” David Schwerd, Horry County’s former Planning Director, explained earlier this year in an interview with The Sun News. “The HOAs said another one was, some said the developer and property owner were, nobody could come to a conclusion.”
Island Green as it exists today is largely owned by Robert Williamsen of Cornelius, N.C., who bought the former 123-acre golf course for approximately $1.6 million in 2017. The golf course closed in 2016.
For a period of time earlier this year, Dunton and other Island Green residents were pushing to have the undeveloped areas of Island Green to be placed in a land trust, which would have prevented future homes from being built there. They staged a protest in April against the developer.
Part of the reason development is so controversial in Island Green is because the building hasn’t had to go through the traditional approval processes. Rather, Island Green was originally conceived as a master plan community, meaning that once Horry County approved those plans, additions or changes must only be approved by the Planning Commission, rather than County Council. That means the 2019 addition that exchanged 134 new homes for future upgrades to Sunnehanna Drive only had to pass a vote of planning commissioners, whose votes are typically only recommendations on how elected council members ought to vote.
On Monday, crews with D&L Sitework could be seen working near the bridge at Bellmonte Drive where the damage occurred.
D&L Sitework is owned by Charles Brown, who sits on the Horry County Planning Commission. On Monday, Brown said the damage to the bridge was caused by rain washing away backfill that was holding up part of the curb along the edges of the bridge. He said the structural integrity of the bridge was not affected.
The damage happened, Brown said, because his crews weren’t able to properly reinforce the part that was damaged by the end of the day Friday, and the weekend rain washed away the fill dirt before they could do so on Monday.
“Anything would wash out with that amount of rain,” he said. “There was no bridge collapse, this was something Mother Nature did.”
To fix the damage, Brown said it would take his crews several days and cost at least $1,000. Once construction of the homes on the other side of the bridge are complete, work crews will repave and improve Sunnehanna Drive, he said.
Brown, who was on Planning Commission when the design modification was approved, said he didn’t vote on the project. Video of the meeting shows Brown recusing himself from the decision.
Brown also pointed blame at residents like Dunton, saying that they’ve damaged equipment his company has left at worksites. He said he was looking to press charges. Dunton, though, said she hadn’t heard from police, and that she was “not that low to vandalize.”
“I’m looking out for the safety of my community. If he thinks that’s gonna help him in any way ... bring it I guess,” she said.
For Dunton, though, the easily-damaged bridge was evidence that developers are performing hasty construction in an area where they could harm the natural environment and wildlife. Dunton also said she and her neighbors worry about flooding, and that new homes, boosted by fill dirt, will change the topography of the neighborhood and cause some properties to flood that don’t today. Part of the neighborhood is already in a flood zone, according to county maps.
“What’s happening here, it’s wrong, we’re overdeveloped and no one cares,” she said. “This isn’t safe, we’ve never flooded in areas before because they’re clear cutting.”
