‘It’s time to start doing something’: How Horry County is moving on new flood regulations

Ever since Hurricane Florence devastated Horry County in 2018, leaving whole neighborhoods flooded for days, county officials have been debating: How can local government prevent, or at least mitigate, flooding like this in the future?

On Friday, a committee of County Council focused on flooding directed county planning staff to begin drafting regulations and ordinances to prevent flooding, ranging from a public education map to better inform people looking to move to Horry County, to requiring new development to be built above Hurricane Florence flood levels.

Drafting and implementing the new regulations is likely to be a months-long process and one that will require public input and the approval of County Council. Still, the decision Friday to begin working on new regulations marks one of the most significant efforts the county has undertaken to prevent future flooding since the Florence flood water receded. The new regulations have the potential to both better educate the public and the people who move here, and change how the county approaches the crush of development its experienced in recent years.

“The time has come. We’ve talked about it, it’s time to start doing something ,” County Council Chairman Johnny Gardner said. “We’re really making some progress.”

The flooding commission on Friday also noted that a buyout program for homeowners afflicted by past floods is now open, and homeowners can apply for the county to purchase their home. The Socastee community is the first that will receive buyout offers, and the county is seeking additional funding for buyouts elsewhere.

The measures the county could consider range from public education, to new internal planning policies, to new regulations for development. The public education piece will come in the form of an online, interactive map called Map My Move, which will allow users to look up specific areas of the county and if they flooded during Florence. The map will include information on how high flood waters reached during Florence so that new residents can know if they’re moving into a home or neighborhood that’s flood-prone.

The internal planning policies could include direction to County Council members to not approve rezoning requests that encroach into areas badly flooded during Florence, or increase density in an area flooded during Florence. For example, if an area was flooded during Florence, and is currently zoned for single family homes, but a developer wants to rezone the property to allow for apartment buildings, the policy would ask council members to reject that request.

And new regulations could range from limiting the amount of wetlands a developer could fill in, to requiring developers to build new homes and buildings above the Florence flood levels. Among the regulations county planning staff proposed are:

• A regulation that would establish a zoning overlay where developers wouldn’t be allowed to fill in wetlands, fill in other parts of the site, would be required to preserve more trees on the site or take other actions to preserve the environment in Florence-impacted areas. A zoning overlay would act as additional zoning rules on top of the existing zoning in a given area. Such an overlay would likely vary across the county, based on the Florence flood levels in a given area.
• A regulation that would establish a zoning overlay along the boundaries of the worst Florence flooding that would require homes within that area to meet a base flood elevation level. That would mean if a new home is being built, or an existing home is being repaired, it would have to be raised above a certain height to ensure it won’t flood in the future.
• A regulation that would require all new development to be built above the Florence flood levels.

One reason why new regulations could be useful, county officials said Friday, is because federal flood maps had predicted that flood levels in Horry County would be much lower during significant storms than they were during Hurricane Florence. The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) regularly publishes flood maps that predict how serious flooding could be given a bad storm. But during Florence, flood levels exceeded the predictions by feet, meaning that many areas thought to be out of harms way were badly damaged.

Members of the council flood commission — which includes County Council members, county staff, other elected officials and advocates for flood victims — expressed support for new building height requirements and limiting the amount of fill used in new developments, particularly in areas that have flooded in the past. Fill is simply dirt that builders dig up and truck in from elsewhere to elevate a home or building. Since Horry County is so flat, though, many new developments require fill, meaning large dirt mining operations are common here. Some advocates worry that using too much fill can make flooding worse in the parts of the county its removed from as its used to lessen flooding in other areas.

“I think it’s time for us to really take a hard look at these areas and do away with slab construction and the fill inside of those areas and to come up with some sort of zoning regulation that shall require these new homes to be built by some other raised (material) or stilts,” said County Council member Al Allen. “Because sooner or later, we’re going to face the very same things again in the future and I think it’s time for County Council to adopt this and to step up.”

April O’Leary, the head of Horry County Rising, a group that advocates for victims of flooding and stronger county regulations, said she’d like to see the county move forward on both a public-facing flood map and a zoning overlay that would mandate building above Florence flood levels.

“I would like us to enact a new (base flood elevation map) and have it be reflective of what happened in Florence,” she said.

O’Leary, who’s emerged in recent years as one of the most prominent advocates for stronger anti-flooding measures, also agreed that the county should limit fill and slab housing in flood-prone areas.

“We have a lot of concerns about using fill and doing slab homes so we would be interested in seeing an overlay map to provide some more regulations in those areas to either prohibit or reduce the practice of using fill,” she added.

As an example of how new regulations could be useful, county officials used the Aberdeen community, which experienced significant flooding during Florence, as an example. Using the current flood maps, homes in Aberdeen were predicted to be safe from flooding during a serious flood event. But during Florence, many homes in the area flooded, demonstrating the limitations of relying on FEMA maps alone.

Since Florence, the county partnered with Western Carolina University to create updated flood maps for Horry County based on the flooding levels during that major storm. Based on those maps, its likely that any regulations the county adopts would mostly affect communities near the Pee Dee and Waccamaw Rivers, as well as some near the Intracoastal Waterway.

As Horry County has grown over recent decades, creating booming real estate and construction industries, balancing the growth with flooding concerns is a frequent topic at public meetings. Allen on Friday acknowledged that new regulations could increase costs for developers, but said the county had a responsibility to act before the next major flood, whether it happens later this year or several years from now. In coming weeks and months, county staff will draft regulations and then the flood commission and County Council will debate and amend the new rules.

“Some will say it will cost more, or you’re adding an extra burden there, but it really has to be planning for the future here,” Allen said. “If we don’t do it we’re going to continue to go through this cycle again and again.”