Horry County officials want to limit rezoning development in these areas

A proposed Horry County Council resolution aims to slow development in areas more than five miles from a fire station or around fire stations manned by volunteers, but stops short of restricting rezoning.

Officials say increasing residential growth in unincorporated areas, especially in more rural western and northern parts of Horry County, endangers residents with limited access to emergency services.

“It’s a problem with the western part growing the way it’s growing and something that we are definitely going to have to address,” said Public Safety Committee Chairman Danny Hardee.

Committee members approved a “resolution to express county council’s desire to limit residential rezonings that increase density on parcels served by volunteer fire stations and ISO 10 areas” in a meeting Tuesday. Most of those areas are currently zoned as forest agriculture, which only allows low-density residential uses.

If passed in a full county council meeting, the resolution will officially acknowledge council’s desire to limit further residential rezoning in certain areas until career fire stations are built and funded, but it won’t take steps to actually slow growth.

“We did put together a resolution to kind of look at [residential rezoning], not to stop it, but maybe have second thoughts on it,” said Randall Webster, deputy county administrator of Public Safety.

Those ISO 10 areas are communities which the Insurance Services Office (ISO) has classified as unprepared for a fire. The ISO assigns scores ranging from one, meaning the community is well-protected from fire, to 10, meaning the community is not.

“An ISO 10 rating, it makes your insurance higher, but in some cases, the insurance companies won’t even insure, and if you got a bank loan on your home and your insurance cancels…you better be making some fast arrangements, or they’re going to cancel your loan,” Hardee said.

The ISO automatically categorizes several areas in unincorporated Horry County as 10 because they’re more than five miles from a fire station. But officials say more stations isn’t a simple solution.

“It’s not so much building the stations as it is the annual salary requirements for the career folks, which could be one-and-a-half-million [dollars] or more, depending on what needs to be in there, over the course of forever,” said Webster. “I know we’ve had some offers to build stations for us, but that’s, even though that’s hard, that’s the easiest part.”

Other communities have fire stations, but they’re staffed by volunteers. Nine of unincorporated Horry County’s 32 fire stations rely on volunteer firefighters for protection. The resolution argues increasing density in these areas will overtax those volunteers.

“We have a great group of volunteers that work very hard, but they have their limitations, as well…It’s not like it used to be, so we do supplement those calls with the closest career station that gets on the way, but it is a response time issue,” Webster said.

The resolution is set to go before Horry County Council for a vote on Tuesday, Oct. 21, according to a county spokesperson.

This story was originally published October 16, 2025 at 5:00 AM.