Finalist: Staff of The Post and Courier, Charleston, S.C.

Forget about climate change. The real story is climate speed.

By Tony Bartelme

1. Faster, sooner

A two-hour cloudburst drenched Charleston on Wednesday, turning downtown streets into swirling rivers. Nearly 5 inches fell over the city’s hospitals, turning the medical district into an island. Five inches fell on Johns Island, turning parking lots into lakes. It was a mess. And it’s not normal.

Set aside the notion of climate change. The climate has always changed. The real story is about speed. The pace of change. From rain bombs to higher sea levels, the impacts are coming faster. This is as real as Wednesday’s storm. And the one four weeks ago. And so many others in the past five years.

In the coming months, The Post and Courier will explore these accelerating forces and their many ripple effects. We’ll explore the underlying science and responses by our elected leaders. We’ll look at the winners and losers. We’ll examine potential course corrections.

And we’ll do this in real time, as the king tides rise, the hurricanes gain strength, amid the thunder and lightning. Why? Because a breaking news story only skims the surface of what’s really happening. Deeper currents can remain hidden amid the immediate need to stay dry or move your belongings to higher ground.

The most pressing steering current is climate speeding, the pace of change.

It’s an issue that carries particularly high stakes in places where land meets the sea.

Wednesday’s midday deluge showed why.

2. The storm hits

It seemed like a normal late spring thunderstorm. Forecasters warned about some rain, but nothing like this. It moved in just before noon with clouds the color of bruises, gray and laden with moisture. Suddenly, the skies erupted with lightning and thunder and wind.

The National Weather Service broadcast an alert about a possible tornado on Johns Island. High winds ripped down trees on Wadmalaw Island. Hail the size of half-dollars fell west of the Ashley. Lightning struck two homes on Johns Island.

And the rain kept coming.

Three inches in Mount Pleasant.

Four inches in James Island.

Five inches on Wadmalaw Island.

Charleston has always had heavy rain, but as the climate warms, these storms are stronger and more intense. Why?

The laws of thermodynamics: A growing human population has unleashed massive amounts of carbon dioxide and other gases, mostly by burning fossil fuels. These gases trap heat, and warmer air holds more moisture. When this moisture falls as rain, it releases energy in the form of heat. It’s like adding an accelerant to fire: more heat, more moisture, more heat — and you end up with more downpours such as Wednesday’s.

And the one just four weeks ago, which dumped 6 inches on James Island.

And the crazy one in October 2015.

That storm dumped 17 to 23 inches on peninsular Charleston, roughly equivalent to 3.2 billion gallons of water. It was akin to moving Niagara Falls over Charleston for an hour. Much of the peninsula south of Calhoun Street merged with the Atlantic. Public officials called it a 1,000-year event, including then-Gov. Nikki Haley.

But record-breaking downpours followed in 2016 and 2017. In 2018, Hurricane Florence dumped another 23 inches in parts of South Carolina. Rivers inland from Myrtle Beach rose as high as two-story homes.

All told, the Southeast has seen a 27 percent increase in the number of downpours since 1958.

All this water from above is meeting another accelerating force below, a sea level rising faster than many scientists originally predicted.

3. Rising

Wednesday’s storm hit at low tide, but within an hour, water covered downtown Charleston’s western edge. Susan Lyons lives on Gadsden Street and watched in awe. “It happened all of a sudden.” There’s a point where a storm goes from something normal to one where you feel as if you’ve lost control, she said. “It’s scary. I’m looking outside watching the water come up.” 

Residents scrambled to move their cars. Water coursed down a high spot on Calhoun Street, with one dark tributary moving toward the Medical University of South Carolina and another into a nearby neighborhood. Green garbage cans toppled and floated like rafts. Their contents moved down Halsey Street as fast as a resident walking in hip waders. The water flowed with such force it created a current with ripples.

City officials set up barricades on streets into the medical district, including primary routes to hospital emergency rooms. In all, more than 22 streets were closed throughout the city. Pablo Santos was on the way to Goose Creek but was caught in the chaos. His GPS told him to head down Gadsden Street because other roads were closed. But Gadsden has a long history of flooding, and his car submerged at the intersection.

“I just didn’t think it would get this bad,” he said.

Nearly 4.7 inches fell in this area, according to a local weather observer on Halsey Street. At least 4.6 inches fell in West Ashley, said Shade Nofziger, who lives near the Early Bird Diner. At one point, rain was falling at a rate of more than 4 inches an hour, he said.

When so much water arrives so quickly, the city’s gravity-fed storm drains get stopped up, no matter if it’s low or high tide. Low areas fill up like clogged toilets and overflow into yards, stores and crawl spaces.

Since so much land here is a few inches to a few feet above sea level, even small changes can make a big difference, as Lyons and Santos saw on Gadsden Street.

And given what scientists have learned in recent years, big changes are happening now: Seas are rising faster than they did a few decades ago.

And the pace is picking up.

4. Upward curve

Scientists have good data on this. They’ve been measuring the sea level in Charleston Harbor continuously since 1921. Since then, the sea level here rose about 1 foot.

Part of this has nothing to do with saltwater. When the last ice age ended 20,000 years ago, sheets of ice melted in what today is New England. Freed from the weight, land there moved upward while land to the south, including South Carolina, sank like the lower end of a seesaw. 

Known as subsidence, this sinking has happened at a relatively slow rate — about 5 inches during the past century. This gives marsh-building sea grasses time to trap sediment and rise with the water, as long as the pace isn’t so quick.
But in the mid-2000s, scientists began to rethink the pace of sea rise. It wasn’t rising in a linear way as many had thought. It was accelerating. An upward curve. Researchers at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science were among the first to pinpoint this accelerating trend in specific areas, including Charleston.

This was no easy task given the sloshing nature of the sea, said Molly Mitchell, one of the institute’s lead researchers. Natural tidal fluctuations and weather patterns can mask long-term changes. But over time, the patterns in Charleston and other coastal cities were unmistakable.

From 1990 to 2000, the sea level rose 1.4 inches.

From 2000 to 2010, it added an additional 2 inches.

From 2010 to now: 2.7 inches more.

Apply this curve to real life, and you had an explanation for the record-breaking number of sunny day and nuisance floods in Charleston — floods that occur at high tide. Those happened about four times a year 50 years ago. Now that average is closer to 40.

Follow this curve into the future, and you see a growing threat — a sea level that rises an additional 3.2 inches by 2030.

Then 4.1 inches between 2030 and 2040

And 5.3 inches between 2040 and 2050.

Another foot in 30 years.

5. Accelerating everything

Wednesday’s deluge was so intense that a foot of water soon covered parts of Market Street, a taste of the future. It overwhelmed the new tunnels designed to help drain this tourist mecca more quickly. Garbage cans bobbed into the calf-deep water as a small geyser spouted from an overburdened drain.

The storm moved in quickly, and then seemed to hover over the area.

“It was a lot of moisture, a lot of energy in the atmosphere, quite a bit of spin and the frontal system in the area trapping things in place,” said Peter Mohlin, a National Weather Service meteorologist.

About a mile north, water poured into the city’s East Side, a historic, predominantly black neighborhood. At Amherst and Drake streets, a whole row of cars sat stewing in a brown soup of debris. A sign outside a nearby church promised: “BETTER DAYS ARE COMING!”

A couple blocks away on America Street, Joe Watson stood outside Mary’s Sweet Shop, a longtime snack shop and community hub. Watson grew up here, and for 62 years he’s watched the waters rise and fall along with the neighborhood’s fortunes.

The area has seen increased diversity and investment in recent years. But all that is being threatened by climate-driven rains that flood the neighborhood many more times year. Watson pointed to a gnarled tree that was unofficial flood line when he was a kid.

Now, the waters crest a half a block farther or more up the road. And they’re deeper. A lot deeper. “Now, it just takes 45 minutes of heavy rain and the whole street gets flooded.”

The rain was particularly heavy west of the city, including the flood-prone South Windermere Center. At Haddrell’s Point Tackle and Supply, Joe Kowaleski, an employee, said it was fortunate that this storm came at low tide. The last bad storm in April dropped 5 inches in two hours and came near high tide. Water filled the store then. On shelves inside, employees have made marks showing how high up water went during past floods.

Elsewhere, cars stalled as they tried to drive through thigh-deep ponds at King and Huger streets. On Johns Island, customers at the Bi-Lo emerged from the store and stared at the parking lot, which looked like a pond, with shopping carts partially submerged. “It’s never been this bad on Johns Island,” said Amanda Yowell, adding that she was planning on moving.

In West Ashley’s Moreland neighborhood, Kathleen Sottile, a retired nurse, stood in her flooded front yard. Water reached the second step of her stoop. She’s lived there for 42 years but said the flooding has gotten really bad just in the past decade. After another storm, she shelled out $1,200 to raise her air-conditioning unit higher off the ground.

These floodwaters would recede, but a more permanent 1-foot rise in the sea level would regularly flood 64,000 acres in Charleston County, about a quarter of its land, a College of Charleston study found. Nearly 1,000 homes, offices and other buildings would be affected.

Already, more than half of South Carolina’s shoreline is eroding under an onslaught of rising seas, pounding storms and other scouring forces, according to a study in 2018 by [a] Georgia Southern University geologist.

And we’re seeing evidence of the climate’s acceleration beyond our marshes and flooding streets. We’re seeing twice as many extreme heat waves today than in the 1970s. We’re seeing “real feel” temperatures in Maryland above 122 degrees. The heat index in the Persian Gulf now sometimes exceeds 132 degrees.

The sea sucks up 90 percent of this heat, and we’re seeing the ocean temperature rise 40 percent faster than United Nations experts said 5 years ago. We’re seeing the ocean literally expand because of this heat, raising sea level even more. 

We’re seeing permafrost melt in Alaska and ice at the poles fall like cubes into a drink. Greenland has lost 1 trillion tons of ice in just 4 years. 

We’ve seen the human toll accelerate, as stronger hurricanes saw through the Caribbean and Southeastern United States. We’ve seen the toll grow because more frequent wildfires in California and Australia. More military deaths from heat stroke. Rising insurance rates to meet these new risks. Bleaching coral reefs. Earlier springs, earlier tropical storms, later autumns. We’ve put our foot on the accelerator, and the planet is struggling to keep up.

Wednesday afternoon was soggy, but the sun came out three hours later. A young man kayaked down Gadsen Street. Near President Street, two men drank beer and drifted on pool floats, as if on a very slow rafting trip. More rain was expected Thursday, but for the time being, the city was drying out.

Another fierce storm had blown through the Lowcountry.

But the deeper, more important forces are still with us, moving faster by the year.

Chloe Johnson, Thomas Novelly, Gregory Yee, Mikaela Porter, Fleming Smith, Sara Coello, David Slade, Thad Moore, Stephen Hobbs, Jerrel Floyd and Glenn Smith contributed to this report.

Secret records reveal crushing cycle of disaster and repair

By Stephen Hobbs and Chloe Johnson

Kristopher Fowler thought he found a place he could settle down when he purchased his first home in 2013. 

The inspection on the property, in an attractive James Island neighborhood about 5 miles from downtown Charleston, showed nothing abnormal.

But after heavy rain submerged his bedroom floor nearly two years later, he learned something startling: Fowler’s first flood was the home’s sixth.

The federal government offered him money to restore the house. So he rebuilt.

Then, Hurricane Matthew hit in 2016, flooding it again and leaving him with the prospect of rebuilding a second time. 

“It was pointless to keep doing this,” Fowler said. “It’s going to happen year after year.”

Flooding caused by rising tides, hurricane-force winds and rain deluges, has left a glut of damaged properties in South Carolina’s real estate market, specifically in cities along the coast.

Homeowners might get days of advanced warning that a storm is coming or walk outside to see the water rapidly rising as they did in the Charleston region on Wednesday. The end result is the same: houses get flooded and federal privacy laws hide the exact addresses of those properties from the public.

But data obtained by The Post and Courier allowed reporters for the first time to pinpoint about a third of South Carolina’s most vulnerable and water-damaged properties, a revealing disclosure for a state that is near the top in flood insurance payouts from the federal government.

Records obtained from the federal government through an open records request show the claims history of specific addresses, which are usually kept secret from all but the owners. They include a multi-million dollar home near Charleston’s Battery sea wall that has maxed out its $250,000 policy coverage and modest homes that received more money in insurance claim payments than their value in county property assessments.

That includes a home in Charleston’s West Ashley community that has flooded at least 10 times and has received $165,000 for building damage — $44,000 more than its appraised value. And another, in Charleston’s Shadowmoss neighborhood, that received $212,000 from the federal government before the city purchased it and tore it down.

This list led reporters to people like Fowler, stuck in a crushing cycle of disaster and repair. His former home was one of roughly 800 repetitively flooded properties in South Carolina that have received more than $100,000 in damage claims from the federal government.

Federal and state efforts to lift or move these repeatedly flooded houses have lagged behind the pace of damage that was exacerbated by a recent four-year stretch of destructive weather in the state.

That has left homeowners with few options other than to rebuild and wait for the next flood or put their at-risk properties on the market with no requirement, until recently, to let potential buyers know about past damage history. 

The existing flood insurance system leaves them with a lack of alternatives, and quickly provides payments to rebuild, even in the face of likely future disasters. In high-demand housing markets like the Charleston region, moving into a comparable home isn’t always financially possible.

Troubled safety net

From its inception in 1968, the National Flood Insurance Program was built on the premise that floods were not a chronic problem, but random and infrequent disasters that could be weathered with a little financial help.

That premise has been challenged as sea levels rise, storms get stronger, and development decisions put more properties in harm’s way.

Flooding has long been a mathematical nightmare for private insurers. Homeowner insurance policies don’t cover flooding as a matter of course, because the disaster is one that’s presumed to simultaneously affect many properties in a large area. That raises the chance that an insurer breaks the bank by paying out several claims at the same time.

“The (national) program was needed to make it affordable for people who couldn’t afford the full risk of living in risky places,” said A.R. Siders, a University of Delaware researcher who’s an expert on coastal management and retreat policy. 

In providing financial protection for people in flood-prone places, the program has ultimately created an incentive for them to stay and for new people to add more development, Siders said, “because they’re not bearing that full risk.”

While policy holders do pay premiums, the program is heavily subsidized: it’s more than $20 billion in debt, according to a recent report from the Congressional Research Service. The program has piled on loans without paying off past ones since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which the government estimates is the most expensive disaster in U.S. history.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced last year it was going to make the rates more reflective of risk, but past attempts to do so have been met with strong political opposition. 

Government data shows that, as of 2019, claims for property paid out in South Carolina totaled more than $920 million, the 10th-highest amount among the 50 states. The Charleston region accounted for a third of the state’s payouts.

And while the program is in continual need of financial support, it’s also unable to cull out properties that flood over and over again, as private insurance carriers can. 

The federal government paid $5.5 billion to repair and rebuild properties between 1978 and 2015 that had been damaged before, according to an analysis of flood insurance data by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Those properties had flooded five times each on average. 

Rob Moore, director of the water and climate team at the NRDC, said insurance claims are paid out quickly, while efforts to lessen future flood damage can take years. That encourages homeowners to restore their damaged properties without addressing their vulnerability.

“Rebuilding is the first and highest priority, even though we know that’s not what we should be doing in every instance,” Moore said.

In South Carolina alone, the federal government’s flood insurance program has paid out more than $185 million to repair homes in the state that have flooded multiple times. That includes more than $45 million paid for properties that the government flagged as frequently flooding, or receiving high claims amounts.

Breaking the cycle

After the first flood, Fowler didn’t know his options. 

He started with the state’s hazard mitigation officer and was referred from public employee to public employee. Ultimately, he reached a Charleston County building official, but the county wasn’t coordinating buyouts to demolish problem properties. 

In many cases, homeowners who need financial help to move on from flooded houses are at the mercy of their local governments. Cities and counties can apply for FEMA-funded voluntary buyouts, but the process is competitive. The city of Charleston has used federal money for buyouts, but Charleston County has no record of pursuing similar grants, county spokesman Shawn Smetana said.
Part of Fowler’s James Island former street was located in the city. But his home was in the county. 

Without a buyout option, Fowler took a big risk — buying a new house before selling his old property. Paying two mortgages was a strain, and he knew it might end up in foreclosure, but better than trying to rebuild, he thought. 

He decided to be frank about the problem on the property. He left a 2-foot gap where soggy drywall was ripped from the inside of the house.

In a stroke of luck, a buyer acquired the flood-damaged home. That person tore down the house and built a new, higher one.

Others, like Melissa Krupa, have been less fortunate. 

Krupa bought her home in Rosewood Estates, a middle-class neighborhood near Myrtle Beach, in 2013. The development, on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, had flooded before, but she didn’t initially buy insurance because she wasn’t in one of FEMA’s mapped flood-prone zones. 

After 2 major floods in 3 years, half of the residents of this SC town never came home

In 2015, flooding from a record-breaking deluge across the state brought water within 5 feet of her doorstep. A year later, Hurricane Matthew swelled rivers in a huge swath of the Carolinas’ border belt, and 3 feet of water rose inside her house.

One flood was enough to convince her to sell. In the interim, she bought flood insurance and started renovating the house, but she wasn’t finished when Florence arrived in 2018, submerging her home in 5 feet of water.

The second flood convinced her to seek a buyout. Rebuilding seemed unlikely: shortly after Florence, Krupa’s mother had a heart attack, and she moved up to Pennsylvania to care for her. Flood insurance money was used for rent in Krupa’s new home, not repairing her old one. 

“Even if I did fix it up, how do I sell it to innocent people knowing that it’s flooded a few times?” Krupa said. “I would not want anybody to go through what I (went) through.”

Others caught in a similarly desperate situation may not take the same direction: until recently, homeowners had the ability to patch up the house they’re selling and say little about its flood history. 

The federal Privacy Act stops potential buyers from looking up flood insurance claim histories of a house they might purchase. But late last year, South Carolina’s Real Estate Commission made homesellers start documenting the number of federal flood claims on their properties in a standard disclosure form. 

Sellers still don’t have to include the amount of those claims, a key indicator of a flood’s severity. S.C. Realtors Association Chief Executive Officer Nick Kremydas, who pushed for the change, said it’s a stopgap as the state waits on the federal government to take more decisive action. 

“We’re holding out hope for the next Congress,” he said. 

Meanwhile, Krupa has been seeking a home buyout, and the wait has been a long one. Like Charleston County, Horry County did not have a buyout program. Recently, the state said it would use $30 million in federal Housing and Urban Development money to buy out Horry County homes.

Krupa arranged for a real estate investor to view the stripped-to-the-studs home in Horry County. But the viewing was cut short in February when another, less severe round of flooding hit Rosewood, sending water feet from her property and scaring the investor away.

Robust programs lacking

The four-year spate of flooding along South Carolina’s coast has spurred discussions of how to avoid future damage caused by a rising sea, but there are few long-running efforts in place to remove homes from harm’s way. 

An exception is an initiative in Greenville County that began in 2007. There, heavy rains overloaded creeks and overflowed into nearby neighborhoods and homes. The solution was a continuous buyout program that is funded with about $2 million in annual stormwater fees, said Paula Gucker, an assistant administrator. The county sees it as a good investment: Fewer flooded homes mean fewer emergency rescues, and less infrastructure to maintain. 

It also can do what the federal government can’t: buy homes quickly. It takes the county about six months to a year to buy out a homeowner. The federal government can often take five years.

In one neighborhood, along Del Norte Road, the county has removed at least 68 houses, the majority through the local program. 

One single-family home in the neighborhood flooded 11 times with damage totaling just over $62,500, according to the records obtained by The Post and Courier. The county bought it for $140,000 in 2010.

County officials also stepped up their efforts, buying properties that were offered on the open market because the owner owed delinquent taxes. The goal was to buy flood-prone homes before people do.

“We’re trying to be proactive and buy everything out pre-disaster,” Gucker said. “When you’re reactive, the emotional costs from the poor citizens that are living there and the work we have to do is much harder.”

Greenville County isn’t the only place that’s built a robust buyout program after disaster. Some states have built their own programs. In North Carolina, the state’s Office of Recovery and Resilience has identified 22 zones affected by Matthew and Florence. Staff there are asking homeowners whether they’re prepared to sell and plan to buy homes with money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

“In a lot of instances, people are waiting on us to offer the buyout program,” said Laura Hogshead, the chief operating officer of the North Carolina office.

Like most buyout programs, the state offers the pre-flood value of the home to sellers. But it also asks the people relocating to identify the next home they want to buy, and offers up to $50,000 to cover the difference, if needed. There are further incentives if the sellers stay in the same county or the state.

Not all homeowners are eager to take one. Some may suspect it’s really an attempt to gentrify an area. To combat suspicions like this and ease the transition, Hogshead said North Carolina is working to build affordable housing near historic communities like Princeville, in the eastern part of the state. The town was incorporated by freed enslaved people in 1885. 

“We want you to stay in the same community, we just want you to be on higher ground,” Hogshead said.

Still, the ties to home remain strong for some, even if flood damage has been persistent.

Robert Mundy, a Charleston resident in West Ashley, has had minor flooding in his home at least eight times since he bought it in 1974. The soakings are not the most costly, totaling just over $40,700 in all, but they have been persistent: stranding him on his property at times and repeatedly ruining flooring.

After several entreaties to the city of Charleston, he’s not confident that the problem will be fixed any time soon. The city, for its part, is trying to complete a drainage project, but has been stymied by a telephone utility’s underground transmission lines, which are in the way of the work. The utility only recently told Charleston that it would move the line and is working on getting permits now.

Mundy doesn’t carry flood insurance anymore. Despite the continued flooding, Mundy doesn’t plan to sell. The Vietnam War veteran said he was determined to hold on to his home and pass the asset on to his children one day.

Flooding: A destructive teacher

There’s no replacement for living through a flood. 

Fowler said he found out about his former home’s flooding history only after he looked through the stack of closing documents he had skimmed through before purchasing the property. He didn’t make that mistake again before buying his current home, he said.
Charleston Realtor Leslie Turner said purchasing a home in the area is not just risky for first-time buyers. Everyone should find an agent who is knowledgeable about the specific neighborhood where they are looking, she said. Requesting an estimate on how much flood insurance will cost is also a good step to take before finalizing a deal.

“If that quote comes back really high, there’s a reason,” she said.

Not all homebuyers have the means or desire to look for a new home.

Timothy Brown was 58 when he purchased his first home in 2018 in North Charleston. He plans to stay there.

He wanted to escape the Charleston region’s notoriously high rents. Spur Street, where he landed, was modest but quiet, dotted with one-story homes just off of Dorchester Road. 

But his section of the street fills up like a basin when the rain comes, and the open-cut drainage ditches do little to move water out. The ditch behind Brown’s own backyard is uneven, and the opposite bank is 3 feet higher, effectively acting like a levee that pushes water onto his property. 

He did not know the extent of his home’s flooding before he purchased it, Brown said, and there was no indication of damage inside the house. Neighbors later said the previous owners had replaced the floor several times.

The property has flooded at least six times, the federal data shows, causing $83,635 in damage. The most recent was in September 2017. Brown has flood insurance but says he’s hesitant to file new claims, because he doesn’t want his premiums to rise. 

His home hasn’t flooded since he bought it, but rising waters have come close twice. When water starts to submerge his yard, “I leave, I come back, and I hope for the best,” he said.

In the meantime, he has plastic sheeting to wrap the bottom 3 feet of the house and sandbags at the ready.

That’s kept the water out so far.

Bryan Brussee contributed to this report.

By Tony Bartelme

1. Sun

Under a perfect blue sky, Charleston began to flood.

At noon Monday, the tide pushed toward the dunes. It filled the area’s rivers and marshlands. It rose higher along The Battery’s sea wall.

Then, like an overfilled cup, the Atlantic poured in.

By high tide, we’d set yet another 8-foot-plus tide, another high-water mark. It was among the 30 highest tides here since scientists have been keeping track. And that includes past hurricane surges.

Monday’s sunny day flood happened because of a combination of factors, and some of these are normal: The moon’s gravitational pull would have made tides higher than average no matter what. And the passing of Hurricane Sally also piled waves onto the coast.

Other factors aren’t normal at all.

A rapidly warming planet has accelerated rising sea levels in multiple ways. Sunny day floods like Monday’s once were rare, but seas are a foot higher now than a century ago. And in a place called the Lowcountry, every inch matters.

The Post and Courier’s “Rising Waters” project is documenting the immediate impacts of these accelerating climate change forces — such as a flood here on a day with no rain.

These accelerating forces are playing out here and against a larger backdrop: a summer of climate chaos across the world.

But first, our sunny flood.

2. Rare

A tidal flood is an incremental event, one that creeps up on you. By 11 a.m. Monday, we were at the brim.

Waves ate away at dunes on barrier islands. Seawater poured through Breach Inlet, the gap between the Isle of Palms and Sullivan’s Island. It filled the marshes behind those sandy barriers. It swamped the marsh grass fronds.

Charleston sits squarely in the Lowcountry and is no stranger to chaos from flooding rain storms.

But when tides pass the 7-foot mark like this, land trades places with the Atlantic whether there’s rain or not.

Through the 1980s, this typically happened just five times a year — usually when a hurricane pushed waves ashore, such as Hugo, the record-holder with a 12.5-foot crest.

But last year, Charleston had a record 89 tides that breached that 7-foot level. So far this year, we’ve had 42 flooding tides. The past week alone had 7-footers at least once every day. More brimming tides are expected this week.

And they’ll get worse in the future as global sea levels increase. Already, Charleston is on a list of the eight most vulnerable cities in the United States to these forces, according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment.

And a study published Friday by University of South Carolina researchers uncovered new evidence that the city’s vulnerability is accelerating.

In the past, scientists thought sea levels rose in a straight line, like a slightly upward-tilting seesaw.

But the new USC study and other research shows that seas are rising faster every decade, said James Morris, a biology professor and co-author of the analysis. Graph it and instead of a straight line you have an upward curve — an accelerating pace.

Because of this acceleration, our floods will last longer, from about six hours a day now during a tidal flood to 10 hours by 2050.

“As the number of hours go up, so does the disruption,” Morris said. “And we’ll see significant areas of the city flood that don’t flood today.”

As the water rose Monday, the effects soon rippled across the city. 

3. Sponge

In downtown Charleston, salt water poured into streets around White Point Garden. Officers put up barricades on Lockwood Boulevard as the Ashley River merged with the surrounding neighborhood. It coursed down Calhoun Street by the Medical University of South Carolina’s new Children’s Hospital. Water filled the City Marina parking lot. On Barre and Wentworth streets, it oozed from the soil.

About 30 minutes before high tide, contractor John Jamison ran out of the house he was working in on Line Street to move his white truck. He was surprised at how quickly the water was rising at Line and Hagood streets, just north of the city’s sprawling medical district. And while he knew flooding was a problem in the area, he hadn’t even thought to wear boots on Monday.

“Look at how fast it’s coming in,” he said. “I wonder who thought to build this here,” he said, gesturing to the Gadsden Green homes, a public housing complex behind him.

The housing complex has long been plagued by flooding that spills out of tidally influenced Gadsden Creek, across the street. Rain makes the situation far worse. But on a bright day with a blue sky rippling in reflections of the murky water, a high tide was about to create a mini lake that sprayed the undersides of motorists’ cars with salty water.

“When it rains, you should see how it pours in here. You might as well build a bridge over this thing,” Jamison said.

Charleston has lost ground for a century against the Atlantic. Sea levels here are rising, in part, because of subsidence, the natural sinking of the land. But climate change is a bigger factor, and one that’s driving changes in unexpected ways.

We’ve known for more than 150 years that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. And, because we’ve burned so much fossil fuel, our atmosphere now has 42 percent more CO2 — an increase unlike anything the Earth has seen in hundreds of thousands of years.

The atmosphere has warmed as a result, and the United States saw the effects this summer. Death Valley hit 130 degrees. Scorching heat melted one record after another across the region. At least 452 cities had among the warmest summers on record. At least 55 cities had their hottest one ever.

The heat waves set the stage for the cataclysmic wildfires across the West. A town in Siberia that has been dubbed the coldest places in the northern hemisphere hit 100 degrees, possibly the hottest temperature ever recorded above the Arctic Circle. Two glaciers in Antarctica are teetering on collapse, and, like giant ice cubes thrown into the cup, that could raise global sea levels in feet instead of inches.

So far the ocean has absorbed much of the heat human beings produce — heat injected equivalent to four atomic bombs going off every second.

But now ocean temperatures are rising. Water naturally expands when it gets hotter — and spills onto more land than it would otherwise.

Warmer oceans also fuel more intense and frequent storms. And 2020 has been one for the record books. We blew through an alphabet of 23 named storms and are now going through the Greek alphabet. On Friday, Tropical Storm Beta formed in the Gulf of Mexico.

Six weeks are left in the hurricane season.

Still, with none currently on Charleston’s horizon, the ocean moved inland Monday.

4. Gulf Stream

“It doesn’t really put out the welcome mat,” said Sarah Fitch, vice president of Mount Pleasant Seafood on Shem Creek, glancing through the glass door at the water creeping into the parking lot.

Outside, the sky was blue and clear, but high tide was approaching. Part of the parking lot that serves the seafood business and several restaurants already had turned into a lake. 

Mount Pleasant Seafood gives out free tide charts, but they aren’t just for fishing. Fitch uses hers to plan trips to the Charleston peninsula, where she attends church at St. Matthews.

“If somebody says they are from out of town, we’ll give them a tide chart,” she said. “The locals would probably know to schedule their time around it.”

Standing behind the seafood counter, with a face mask on to protect against coronavirus, Fitch said sunny-day flooding has been getting more frequent.

“I don’t know if it’s global warming, infrastructure or something else,” she said.

Global warming has had an unexpected effect on a powerful river in the ocean 60 miles offshore: the mighty Gulf Stream.

It flows with so much force that it pulls water away from the coast, lowering our sea level by as much as 3 feet.

But a growing body of evidence suggests that climate change has gummed up that current. A slower current means high sea levels along the East Coast.

Researchers at Old Dominion University recently published a new study that analyzed sea level trends since 1900. They found an unprecedented slowdown in the Gulf Stream since 1990 — one that couldn’t be explained by seasonal variations, said Tal Ezer, a professor of ocean sciences at Old Dominion University who led the study.

Ezer’s previous work had shown that hurricanes, including Hurricane Matthew in 2016, could temporarily put a kink in the Gulf Stream, a kink that led to higher tides from the Carolinas to Virginia. He had an inkling that Hurricane Dorian had done so in 2019; the storm followed a similar track as Matthew’s and was among the most powerful on record, clipping Charleston.

Ezar discovered that the Gulf Stream slowed for more than a month and a half after Hurricane Dorian had passed, raising sea levels along the East Coast.

“I was somewhat surprised how long this impact lasted.”

5. Ripple effects

By 12:15 p.m., high tide, traffic slowed to a crawl around the medical district. Half a mile inland, water pooled by Cannon Park as sunbathers stretched out on a blanket. The water crested at 8.03 feet, and when it gets this high, the story isn’t about drainage. It’s about inundation from the sea.

By the Low Battery wall, brown, murky water sloshed in waves against its ramparts, coming perilously close to the top as the sea spilled onto the roadway from drains around the corner. Tourists stood around snapping pictures of cars passing through, throwing up high sprays, as Charleston police officers waded in to set up barriers at the intersection of East and South Battery.

James Gathers cradled a fishing pole in his hands as he tried to explain this odd phenomenon to a pair of out-of-town visitors. He’d felt drawn there Monday morning to fish for trout, but had only caught a feeling of disappointment.

Gathers grew up in Awendaw and has spent his 62 years around the Charleston area. He contends city officials should have seen this moment coming years ago and done something to help fix it rather than shovel money into various other projects to appeal to tourists. He wonders where the city will be in 10 years if action isn’t taken soon.

“Greed has caused this city to lack. A lot of people have been rubbing money when they should have been spending it on things to make it better,” he said. “It’s a beautiful city, but we need to do something now to save this place we say we love.”

At the City Market, tourists maneuvered strollers and wheelchairs around the flooding. The guide of a horse carriage tour urged her guests to look at how the bottom few bricks of the market buildings are darker, a sign of how often the water rises around them.

Margaret Smith has worked in a T-shirt stand in the City Market for 24 years. She was one of the vendors separated from her customers by a moat that grew around some souvenir stalls. Business “was going great before this,” she said. “Now nobody can cross.”

She knows the routine by now: smile and be friendly, but encourage pedestrians to come back in an hour or so, when water welling up long after the high tide might have receded. A newly installed drain was evacuating some of the ponding, but in other places, puddles were still spreading and merging together.

“The city’s tried (to fix the problem),” Smith said. “I just wish it wouldn’t flood.”

Further up the peninsula, Shawn Parks shook his head as he watched the floodwaters pool beneath his Jeep and circle his home on North Hanover Street. He’d already lost a low-riding Honda to tidal floods that chewed up its chassis and rotted out the joints with their salty brine. And each year it seems to get worse.

Parks has lived in the spot for 20 years. It’s quiet and close to his job at the port. But the construction of a high-rise condo and office complex next door on Cool Blow Street paved over land that used to absord some of the rising tides and runoff from heavy downpours. Now, the waters regularly swamp the road outside his door and surround his home, turning his back yard into a small brackish lake replete with dead sea birds and other ocean treasures. So he diligently checks the tides and keeps pairs of heavy rubber boots in his home and vehicle to guarantee he’ll be able to get where he needs to go. 

“Because when I come home, I never know what I am going to find,” he said, chuckling grimly. “I always wanted a pool in the back yard, but I’m afraid of what I might be in there.” 

On Folly Beach, Jeanette Halberda took a break from her run to watch tidal water spew out from a grate.

“This is unusual,” Halberda said, who has lived in the beach community for the past eight years.

Halberda said she is optimistic about human ingenuity but is concerned about the future.

“I have hope in the human species,” she said. “I hope things will change so what’s occurring environmentally won’t be as damaging. But I think we’re late in the game.”

After a few more moments, Halberda turned and continued her run, clutching weights in either hand, the submerged road to her back.

6. Recede

Monday’s sunny day flood was abnormal when placed in a historical context, but it’s also a taste of the future.

In the USC study, Morris and his colleague Katherine Renken calculated that Charleston’s sea level will be a foot higher within about 30 years, the life of many a mortgage.

Girding the city against tide levels that approach something akin to a hurricane surge will be a monumental undertaking. In his paper, Morris stepped outside the scientific arena.

“There’s no way the population of Charleston can pay to protect the city on its own,” he said.

He urged city and state leaders to consider enacting an additional hospitality tax.

But call it a climate tax instead.

“Humans have taxed the Earth’s climate,” he wrote in his paper, “and the time has come for a climate tax in order to insure human welfare.”

Glenn Smith, David Slade, Chloe Johnson and Stephen Hobbs contributed to this report.

By Stephen Hobbs and Rickey Ciapha Dennis Jr.

When the flooding gets bad enough, Jessica Flowers is forced to walk. She trudges through water-filled streets in pants and shoes to catch a bus that will take her close to the grocery store where she works.

Sometimes her clothes get so soaked she has to buy new ones and throws the others away. 

Flowers lives on the western edge of the Charleston peninsula in a neighborhood dominated by the sprawling Gadsden Green public housing complex. President Street, where she normally waits for the bus, can look like a river during heavy rains. 

She told The Post and Courier in June that she can’t begin to calculate how much she’s spent on losses related to water damage. There was the money at the laundromat to try to salvage clothes she ended up throwing away. There was the time she had to stay in a hotel room because floodwaters prevented her from getting back to her home.

Then there was a storm earlier this year when flash flooding shut down bus routes and a ride-sharing service wouldn’t pick her up due to the risk of getting stuck. 

“I was stranded,” Flowers said. “I couldn’t get to work.”

As the pace of sea level rise accelerates, flooding is more than just a nuisance. It’s an intensifier of inequality. While it affects both rich and poor, those with less wealth are more vulnerable to its impacts.

Flooding can cause transportation hardships that lead to lost workdays and health risks for those who have to slog through water teeming with E. coli and toxic chemicals. That may mean less money in a paycheck and more going out for medical expenses, further deepening financial insecurity. 

Tuesday afternoon was another day of disruption. An unusually high tide just after 1 p.m. put parts of the peninsula under water: the streets around the medical district, The Battery — and especially Gadsden Green, where saltwater covered the aptly named intersection of Line and Flood streets.

In the Charleston region, one of the most flood-prone areas on the East Coast, Black people face great risks from climate change due to racial discrimination that limited generational wealth and displacement caused by gentrification.

The Gadsden Green apartments were built as segregated housing for Black residents on low-lying land previously occupied by African American homeowners. The nearly half-square-mile neighborhood it sits in now is just one pocket of poverty in Charleston primarily occupied by Black people. 

There is also the city’s East Side, where flooding and pooling water around public housing are common occurrences, even when it’s not raining.

Residents in Rosemont, a community in the industrialized upper peninsula, blame the building of a new highway interchange nearby for their recent issues with water. One, who has lived there for 20 years, said she now must bring sandbags to help fortify her elderly neighbor’s house ahead of approaching storms.  

“Those areas were put on the back burner years ago,” said Arthur Lawrence, a former president of the neighborhood association for the Westside, which covers much of the peninsula’s flood-prone western edge. “It’s a shame that every time you have a storm or have a hard rain, those people are bearing the brunt of it.”

All three communities are in areas with poverty rates double that of Charleston as a whole, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. At least one in three residents in those areas are below the federal poverty level, which is currently an income of $26,200 for a family of four.

Half of the 2,800 people in the area that includes the Gadsden Green homes live in poverty, the census estimates. Nearly all of the residents in the public housing complex are Black, according to the head of the city’s housing authority.

Flooding around the complex happens rain or shine. Contractor John Jamison found that out Monday as he ran from the home he was working on to rescue his truck before it was swamped by rising creek waters, driven by 8-foot-plus high tide on a sunny day. 

“Look at how fast it’s coming in,” he said, gesturing to the public housing apartments behind him. “I wonder who thought to build this here.”

To understand that story and the vulnerability these residents face today, one must revisit the past, beginning with the tornadoes that led to the creation of the Gadsden Green housing project 82 years ago.

Born out of destruction

On the morning of Sept. 29, 1938, whirling winds moved onto the peninsula, flattening homes on what is now the area around the Gadsden Green apartments. 

Another tornado damaged buildings downtown. In all, five tornadoes hit the region that day, killing 32 people.

After the storm, Black residents along the low-lying western edge of the peninsula picked through the ruins for whatever clothing and possessions they could salvage as workers in tractors and trucks broke up and hauled away pieces of the damaged and demolished houses.

“The homes of all these people proved to represent their life savings, and in many instances the home had been left them by relatives or parents,” a survey of more than 200 Black families after the tornadoes found. Across Charleston, Black residents historically lived in low-lying and flood-prone areas because those spots were considered less desirable and cheaper. 

The destruction only worsened a housing shortage for Black people in Charleston. To address it, Mayor Burnet Maybank sought federal money to build segregated public housing.

That meant clearing the homes of Black residents who still lived in the neighborhood to make way for the new apartments.  

In March 1940, John Harris wrote a letter to Maybank’s successor. Harris, and the 37 other residents who signed the document, asked the new mayor to reconsider the plan. 

The area had the largest group of Black property owners of any place in the city, Harris wrote, and included mechanics, artisans and schoolteachers. The majority of people either owned or were in the process of buying their homes, the letter said. 

“There is not another single area in Charleston available to Colored people where so large a group can purchase or build homes, and the few places that are available to our group, are prohibitive in the purchase price,” Harris wrote.

Mayor Henry Lockwood told Harris he would discuss the matter with the head of the city’s housing authority but he wasn’t optimistic. 

Construction on the first batch of public housing apartments there began the following year. 

The collection of brick homes was named Gadsden Green, likely after Thomas Norman Gadsden, a White developer from the 1800s who subdivided the land. Residents who lived around the apartments called the area Back-da-Green.

‘Waterfront property’

Barbara Gathers grew up with her grandparents in a two-story home across the street from the apartments. The neighborhood had a mix of homeowners, renters and businesses. A few White families lived there. 

Things took a turn for the worse in 1954 when the city opened a landfill nearby on marshland next to the Ashley River. Gathers, who was 10, watched trucks deposit old appliances and tires on the heap.

“They used the Black community as a city dump,” she said. 

Maurice Washington was around 7 when he and his family moved to a Gadsden Green apartment in the late 1960s. 

Washington compared the stench from the landfill to cologne. The people around it all day got used to it, but it could be overbearing for someone smelling it for the first time.

Washington said he’d go to the second level of the apartment he shared with his parents and nine other siblings to overlook the trash piles. There, he could see the sun set over the sparkling Ashley River. He learned to crab on the bank of the river and nearby Gadsden Creek, which flowed in front of their apartment. Residents used to drive boats in areas now covered in pavement. The creek was used for baptisms. 

“We had waterfront property,” Washington said.

The apartment was along what is now Hagood Avenue, a notorious flood spot in present day.  

This week, salty water has covered the road during high tides, splashing the undersides of trucks that sped through it and forcing walkers to change course.

Back when Washington was growing up, he remembered high tides bringing water through the shower drains into his, and other, apartments. He would see people sweeping water out of their front and back doors. 

Even so, he recalled, there were natural filtrations in place — wetlands, grass and other vegetation — that helped soak up water. 

“It wasn’t the kind of flooding that you see now,” Washington said.

Equal attention

Similar concerns echo up the peninsula in North Charleston’s Union Heights neighborhood, where a major storm can submerge streets such as Irving Avenue. The road — less than one-third-of-a-mile long — has a dead end. A former highway ramp, that cut through the community, runs next to it. 

Residents on Irving live in homes passed down through generations. One senior citizen who lives there has to use her back door to get inside her house when the rain hits. Her neighbor, another senior, doesn’t have that option. He has to walk through ankle-deep water, or sometimes higher, to reach his front door.

The Union Heights neighborhood sits on former plantation land that became the site of an African American community after the Civil War. The neighborhood later bustled with barbershops, a fish market, movie theater and other businesses as the area thrived from the 1930s to the 1960s. It has since declined, with its narrow streets now populated with abandoned homes.

Black people make up the vast majority of residents who live on a stretch of land sandwiched between the Ashley and Cooper rivers, where Union Heights is located. In some sections, one in three residents live in poverty, which is double the statewide rate, according to census estimates. 

Some residents see racial discrimination as the reason why their low-lying area has waited for flooding relief — something North Charleston officials deny. A city spokesman said earlier this year that 18 ongoing stormwater projects were aimed at upgrading pipes to address excess water in areas including Union Heights and Chicora-Cherokee, another predominately Black community.

To Omar Muhammad, it is class, not race, that is the issue. Muhammad is executive director of the Lowcountry Alliance for Model Communities. The group advocates for environmental justice and community development for Union Heights, Chicora-Cherokee and other neighborhoods in the area.

“Affluent people have a great influence on the political system,” he said. “When you can’t get the attention of your political system, your needs go unanswered and not addressed.” 

Down the peninsula, residents of Gadsden Green learned that lesson long ago. Many rejoiced after the city finally shut down the landfill near their homes due to federal concerns that it was harming the marshland and the Ashley River. But the city just built on top of the dump. In 1974, the Charleston Police Department opened their new headquarters there. More paving and building followed, giving water fewer places to go as flooding worsened. 

Washington, who is the chairman of the Charleston County Republican Party, said he’s watched the development around the Gadsden Green apartments and noticed how the land gradually elevates as you head away from it. That means when it rains the water runoff flows down toward the public housing complex. He questioned whether that would have been allowed in a wealthier neighborhood. 

Others have also pointed to flood mitigation projects in the city’s more affluent, and tourist-centered, areas and wondered if residents in Gadsden Green are being left behind. There’s the raising of the Low Battery seawall, drainage work on Market Street and the proposed 8-mile perimeter seawall around the city’s core peninsula. 

The ongoing drainage project along the Septima P. Clark Parkway is expected to reduce flooding for people living in and around the eastern half of the Gadsden Green homes. The job is adding tunnels below the parkway, also known as the Crosstown, and a new pump station on the Ashley River. It is set to be completed in three years. 

Matthew Fountain, Charleston’s director of stormwater management, agreed that there was not equal investment in drainage and flood-reduction projects across the city in the past. His department, which was created as a separate entity in 2018, is working to change that, he said.

“We want to make sure we’re not leaving behind vulnerable populations,” Fountain, who joined the city last year, said. 

His department is using a new ranking system for stormwater projects that will factor in social and equity impacts, he said, which will give City Council members more information before deciding what work gets funded and in what order.

‘Long time coming’

Teddy Foster hopes changes will happen soon.

For generations, his family has run Teddy Foster Grocery, which sits near Flood Street — a fitting name that likely comes from a misspelling of the Fludd family that was involved in laying out the neighborhood, not the area’s water problems.  

Foster’s father ran the store after taking it over from his father. 

Gathers said the grocery was a community staple, where people talked about what was happening in the world. It was only a few doors down from her home. She would stock up on Popsicles and candy there. Washington’s first job was at the store, which he started working at in sixth grade.

On a day in June, potatoes and onions filled crates near Teddy Foster’s cash register. Cans of sweet corn and peas were stacked on shelves.  

Foster said that flooding on Allway Street, which runs right by the store, has worsened in the past 10 years. 

During high tides and heavy rains, people have to walk through water to access his store and two others in the neighborhood that carry food and household items. That’s if the stores are able to stay open due to the high water. 

He also watches children and teenagers wade through dirty floodwater to get to nearby schools.

The Post and Courier in May sampled floodwater in the area and found levels of E. coli at least seven times what health officials consider safe.

“Has the city ever listened to the people over here?” Foster said.

Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg said he is listening, and that the new stormwater prioritization system and ongoing drainage projects will help with the flooding. 

“Some of this is a long time coming, but I feel like we’ve refocused our priorities and progress is on the way,” he said.  

The Gadsden Green apartments are especially vulnerable to water damage, as they were built before the federal government set height requirements for properties in flood prone areas. 

Stevenson Johnson said in June that he had lived in a Gadsden Green apartment for the past seven years.

During the historic 2015 flooding that damaged homes across the city and state, he said water got inside his apartment. 

Johnson, a landscape worker, said it cost him around $1,200 to have water vacuumed up in his home and for mold to be removed. 

The housing authority pays for maintenance work when water damages the inside of its homes, but it does not pay for harm to personal property. The authority encourages residents to get renters’ insurance, something few can afford. 

Johnson said he didn’t have insurance and paid for the work himself.   

It doesn’t take a monumental storm like 2015 to shut down life for residents in the neighborhood, he said. Sometimes a high tide can do the trick. 

“If we get flooded, we’re stuck,” Johnson said from his front porch. “We can’t go anywhere.”

A couple of used sandbags sat nearby. 

Wary from the past

The fate of another formerly segregated public housing project worries people connected to Gadsden Green. 

City officials closed the Ansonborough Homes, located on the peninsula’s eastern edge, after Hurricane Hugo in 1989 damaged many of its 162 units. They also pointed to testing that found a cancer-causing contaminant in the soil the homes sat on. Black residents who lived there protested the decision. 

The land was later sold and the complex demolished. 

But building occurred there again. Not in the form of more public housing, but as high-end condominiums and office buildings.

“The problem is when they built it back, they didn’t build it back for the people who lived there before,” Charleston City Councilman William Dudley Gregorie said. “That’s the big fear of many of the African Americans in the city of Charleston, ‘What’s going to happen in our existing public housing community?’ ”

The city eventually added more affordable housing for senior citizens in the area. 

Bernard Powers, a historian and the interim CEO of the International African American Museum in Charleston, said climate change and flooding could continue to exacerbate disparities caused by racial discrimination, leading more Black residents to be displaced from the peninsula. 

“The differential in income and savings based on race, makes Black residents less able to apply the fixes to their homes that might allow them to stay where they are,” he said. 

In Rosemont, the upper peninsula community, residents there are frightened about their future as many receive repeated phone calls and letters to buy their homes from people looking for affordable places to live.

That fear extends down to Gadsden Green. Gathers, the former neighborhood resident, said she is concerned the public housing complex will be cleared to make way for a “resort area for the rich and well-to-do.”  

A nonprofit formed by the city of Charleston and the Medical University of South Carolina’s foundation has already helped spur new high-end projects nearby, including a Publix grocery store, apartments and office space. 

A one-bedroom apartment was recently listed for $1,580 a month at Caroline, one of the new buildings, which is featured as a “private oasis with all-encompassing water views.” The maximum a Gadsden Green public housing resident pays to rent a one bedroom apartment is currently $765, Donald Cameron, the city’s housing authority director, said. Residents can also choose to pay a rental amount based on their income.

Tecklenburg said the city and housing authority have no intention of having the site of the Gadsden Green apartments be available for anything other than affordable housing.  

Michael Maher is the CEO of the WestEdge Foundation, the nonprofit behind the recent additions to the area. He said that the foundation’s proposal to build on Gadsden Creek, and the former landfill, will reduce flooding for the public housing residents who live across the street.

“We think this is a situation that has to be resolved, that’s why we’re taking on a very significant investment,” Maher said.

The state Department of Health and Environmental Control and the Army Corps of Engineers are reviewing the proposal. 

Gathers, for her part, doesn’t think the new buildings will last long. 

“I don’t wish harm on anybody,” she said. “I just feel Gadsden Creek, like its inhabitants, will rise again.”

Tony Bartelme and Chloe Johnson contributed to this report.

By Tony Bartelme and Glenn Smith

Charleston-area floodwaters are a festering soup of disease-carrying microbes, a new Post and Courier analysis shows.

Last week had Exhibits A and B: Under sunny skies, tidal floods sent salt water into low-lying areas of the city; then a few days later, the skies darkened, and a drenching storm suddenly converted streets into rivers.

During both events, a Post and Courier team of reporters collected water samples and delivered them to a state-certified lab.

Results showed sky-high levels of E. coli bacteria near schools, public housing complexes and hospitals — in some places more than 60 times higher than state limits. Water samples in West Ashley, North Charleston and Mount Pleasant also were tainted.

Levels were so high that if health officials found them in recreational lakes, they’d have to close them.

Taken together, last week’s tests and earlier sampling efforts for the newspaper’s Rising Waters project offer sobering and disgusting reminders: The region’s floods carry hidden health and safety risks; and because of a rapidly warming planet, these risks will increase.

“The message is clear: More intense rainstorms and more frequent floods aren’t just threatening our businesses, homes and commutes,” said Andrew Wunderley, head of Charleston Waterkeeper, a group that monitors area creeks and rivers. “They are threatening our health, too.”

Stomach turner

E. coli is short for Escherichia coli, a pathogen found in the feces of humans and animals. E. coli can make you sick to your stomach, cause diarrhea, generate rashes and infections and, in rare cases, harm your kidneys. Scientists also consider it an “indicator” that suggests even more harmful bacteria and viruses are present, including Hepatitis A.

Dr. Valerie Scott, a family care physician with Roper St. Francis Physician Partners, said floodwaters are nasty business for all, but these germ soups can present potentially life-threatening issues for young children and the elderly.

“When I see people walking through standing floodwater downtown, I just shut my eyes,” she said. “I can’t stand it. It’s horrible. There’s just too much going on in there. … If it’s not running water, just stay out of it.”

Scientists and public health officials measure bacteria levels by estimating the number of cell colonies in 100 milliliters of water, about half a cup. When it comes to drinking water, you’re not supposed to have any E. coli, because all it takes is one colony to make you ill. Standards for lakes and other bodies of water are higher.

If the state Department of Health and Environmental Control finds a swimming area with more than 349 colonies, the agency can close it.

During our tidal floods and rain bombs, low and poorly draining areas become temporary lakes and rivers. Some of this standing water can last for days, creating a petri dish of bacteria. Neither DHEC nor the city test these waters. Instead, officials merely caution people to stay out of waters as best they can.

That’s not possible for people who need to get to work or school — or find themselves trapped in their cars by rising waters, as happened in several places during last week’s storm.

To better understand what’s in our murky floods, Post and Courier reporters fanned out to frequently flooded areas last week and during two previous floods.

Donning hip waders and sterile gloves, they collected samples in small plastic bottles and packed them into ice chests. With water still in the streets, they drove samples to Trident Labs Services, a state-certified lab in Ladson that works with industrial clients. The nonprofit Pulitzer Center helped fund the analysis of 39 samples. The results were revealing.

A sunny flood

Just after noon on Sept. 21, an 8-foot tide poured into the Lowcountry.

The sea level is about a foot higher today than it was a century ago, in large part because of global warming. And nuisance tides such as this used to happen just a few times a year. But this tide would mark the 43rd time in 2020 that water levels exceeded 7 feet, the height when flooding begins.

As the tide rose, a reporter went to Lockwood Boulevard, where the Ashley River had merged with the western edge of peninsular Charleston. A sample there showed relatively clean water. That made sense because the sample location was so close to the river.

But just a few blocks away, at Barre and Wentworth streets, an officer manned a barricade as residents walked through floodwaters to their homes. A sample taken there showed they were trudging through water with E. coli levels 16 times what’s deemed safe. Farther inland, near Colonial Lake, another sample was six times the safe level. Even farther inland, by Cannon Park, a rapidly forming pool had E. coli levels four times the state limit. Cannon Park is a popular place to take your dog.

On North Hanover Street, the water by Shawn Parks’ home and his backyard was about eight times the state limit. He’s laid down rocks to elevate his driveway and keeps rubber boots in his car and home, but he can’t help but wonder what filth he’s tracking in. 

“What in the world am I suppose to do?” he said, upon learning of the test results. “I don’t want that stuff coming into my home.”

Skies were nearly cloudless as other low-lying areas filled with salt water. Samples in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods off Morrison Drive also contained high levels, as did sample sites near Gadsden Green, a public housing project north of the medical district. That area routinely floods — and even has a street named Flood Street.

It was surprising to find high levels in a tidal flood, but results literally were off the charts when the skies opened last Friday.

Dirty moats 

It began to drizzle just before noon Friday, and then, gaining momentum, rain fell harder and harder.

Within a few minutes, water coursed through streets by Burke High School. It created whirlpools over grates until the city’s aging stormwater system was overwhelmed.

Then moats formed around the city’s medical district and Gadsden Green. Trucks plowed down Rutledge Avenue, creating wakes that washed like ocean waves against a school fence. 

Colonies of bacteria grow quickly as floodwaters pick up waste from wildlife, pets and faulty sewer systems. Some of the worst readings were in the city’s densely populated neighborhoods.

This includes low-income areas such as Gadsden Green, where a sample at Line and Flood streets was seven times higher than the state limit. And a block from Burke High School, which was 50 times acceptable limits.

And, especially on Charleston’s East Side, which saw E. coli levels at least 69 times the limit at America and Amherst streets and America and Cooper streets. The actual readings may have been even higher: The number of cell colonies exceeded the testing limit of 24,200 colonies per sample.

“That is gross! Nasty!” a woman named Lexi said, wrinkling her nose when told about a sample taken at America and Harris streets, just yards from the stoop she sat on. A sample taken between Sanders-Clyde Elementary School and a densely packed housing project was 44 times the acceptable limit. 

Lexi, who wouldn’t give her last name, said the area routinely floods during high tides and heavy rains, toppling garbage cans and sending trash floating through the streets where children walk to and from school. The foul water laps into apartments as well, she said, breeding mold that sickens area children. “It’s soooo bad,” she said.

Just up the street, 61-year-old Henry Sumter said he’s long known to keep his body out of the murky water that swallows his streets. “It makes you all itchy,” he said this week. 

A few blocks over, an ice cream truck rolled through the intersection of America and Cooper streets, its speakers playing a circular children’s tune as its tires crunched over brown magnolia leaves, brittle twigs and other debris left behind from last week’s flooding.

This dry, sunny day seemed a world away from the previous Friday, when rising brown water swallowed a Nissan sedan and left the intersection all but impassible. College student Ethan Thorpe watched that water pour into his garage and fill up his neighbor’s yard. He figured he was safe with his waterproof shoes, but he wasn’t so sure after hearing how much E. coli was floating about. “That really makes me question it, and whatever else is in the water in general,” he said.

But high readings aren’t limited to downtown’s densely populated neighborhoods. They’re also found in suburban areas.

Off Pepperdam Lane, downstream of a rapidly developing area off Palmetto Commerce Parkway in North Charleston, a sample was nine times the state limit.

West of the Ashley, a reading on Wappoo Road not far from the West Ashley Greenway, was 28 times safe limits. Nearby, at Beverly Road and Chadwick Drive, a sample was 38 times the limit.

And, in Mount Pleasant, a sample in a parking lot at Shem Creek had E. coli levels four times the state maximum.

Yuck

“You have some really, really high results, yuck,” said Wunderley, the Charleston Waterkeeper. The group regularly tests the area’s waterways. 

Like Dr. Scott, he said he also cringes when he sees social media posts of people swimming or playing in floodwaters. “If you cannot avoid getting wet, you should clean up with soap and water as soon as possible and avoid getting any water in you ears, eyes, nose, or mouth.” Polluted floodwater can be a health risk for pets, too, so it’s good idea to keep them out of the water, he said.

Matthew Fountain, the city of Charleston’s director of stormwater management, said bacteria levels can vary widely, even in small areas of flooding, but its presence at all is of concern to officials. The city has embarked on a number of projects to reduce the severity, frequency and duration of flooding, from the construction of a massive drainage tunnel on Charleston west side to the preventive cleaning of pipes and the installation of check valves to impede tidal inundations, he said.

“There is no one clear solution,” he said. “It’s sort of a basket of solutions. And one thing is awareness, making sure people know the risk of floodwater and not to play in it, not treat it like a recreational possibility.”

Despite the city’s efforts, these floods are likely to be even more common. Sea rise is accelerating because of global warming. Until the past few decades, the sea level rose at a manageable 1.4 inches every 10 years. Now it’s rising at a rate of nearly 3 inches a decade. At this pace, seas will be another foot higher in Charleston in 30 years.

For now, it’s common after storms to see people floating and frolicking in the standing waters, most not realizing that dog poop, bird excrement and other filthy treats have likely washed into the mix. Just last week, a video making the rounds on Twitter showed a Jeep towing a young man on a surfboard down a flooded street — until he lost control and plunged beneath the germ-laden wake.
Joe Watson can recall neighborhood children playing for days in the waters left on America Street by Hurricane Gracie in September 1959. No one would think to do that now, with all the unknowns in the cloudy floodwaters that bubble up from the sewers and fill the street near his community store, Mary’s Sweet Shop. And it’s happening more and more each year, he said.

Watson thinks it’s high time the city, its residents and whatever experts they can muster get together and find a way to address this looming threat from sea rise and climate change. It’s just not safe to go on the way we have been, he said. 

“We all need to be talking to each other more,” he said. “We all need to be worrying about this, and what our children — our people — are going to be living with in the future.”

By Chloe Johnson and Mary Katherine Wildeman

The pool of water didn’t look too deep, so Steven and Christy Parker drove through, heading to a medical appointment they couldn’t miss. But then, water started to rush in.

Passing cars sent a wave into the Parkers’ vehicle as heavy rains raked downtown Charleston Friday. In the passenger seat, Christy Parker felt the grip of a panic attack. So, just steps away from the hospital, the couple called 911. They waded out into the knee-high water, which smelled of sewage. Then, they watched from a sidewalk near Storm Eye Institute as their silver Hyundai filled up.

This spot on the Medical University of South Carolina campus is known to flood, as it did Friday when a pounding afternoon rainstorm snarled traffic and drowned vehicles like the Parkers’.

As climate change brings ever-more frequent floods to the low-set Medical Mile, some wonder whether the region’s premier medical institutions should be there at all. The rainfalls and hurricane surges that swamp the district are, already, a drain: persistent flooding has sapped an estimated $45 million from the institutions in the past five years, they estimate.

Climate change’s urgency hadn’t made its way into board room conversations in Charleston by the time the Medical University of South Carolina committed to a 20-year expansion plan in the early 2000s. The hospital system banked on flooding issues being fixed over time by the city of Charleston. But since then, the flooding has continued. During a tropical storm in 2017, personnel criss-crossed the campus in boats. MUSC even bought a military surplus high-water vehicle to make sure staff can move between hospitals. 

Billions in investments made over more than 200 years have sealed the three hospitals’ futures between Rutledge Avenue and Lockwood Drive, a low-lying basin on the western edge of the Charleston Peninsula.

MUSC and Roper St. Francis have together funneled at least $870 million into major projects on the campus since 2000, according to newspaper archives.

Some of that spending has been financed with debt that will mature in a time when Charleston’s flooding problems will get more severe and frequent, scientists predict.

Flooding is already a slog for the hospital workers who walk, like Traci Davis, a technician at the Storm Eye Institute, which sits on one of the quickest-to-flood parts of MUSC’s campus. Davis is constantly attuned to the weather, and keeps a change of clothes at her office in case she has to wade through floodwaters in shorts and flip flops. 

Meanwhile, patients from all over the state continue to come to the medical campus for some of the most complex medical care available in South Carolina.

Centuries of building

Charleston’s Medical District was built on some of the most vulnerable land in the city. It’s a fact that becomes clear standing atop Roper Hospital’s helipad. In extreme cases, when waters rise high enough, helicopters may be the only way for new patients to come to the hospital.

From that vantage, the broad opening of the Charleston Harbor sprawls into the horizon; only a retaining lake and low boulevard stand between open water and the front steps of the medical district.

But the concentration of complex care in this location is the result of centuries worth of decision-making and inertia.

Medicine has had a home in downtown Charleston since 1736, when the then-province of South Carolina funded a “work house and hospital.” In 1824, the Medical College of South Carolina became the first medical school in the Deep South. 

Students have always needed a place to practice, and so the school has been tied to the nearby hospitals. Work on Roper Hospital completed in 1852, right next door to the medical college. 

The Ralph H. Johnson Veterans Affairs Medical Center opened in 1966, later named for a Charleston-born Marine who threw himself on a grenade to save his comrades in Vietnam. It became the last of the three institutions to join the 80-acre campus.

The decades that followed have been a story of one construction project after another. In the mid-2000s, development began at a record clip, and in recent years, hospitals have moved to build new facilities inland and away from rising waters. Still, investments into the peninsula continue.

Today, the medical district is the only place South Carolinians can receive a new heart or lung in-state. It is also home to one of the South’s top-rated hospitals for veterans, a brand-new children’s hospital, four emergency rooms and a heart and vascular center.

But the ground under these towering institutions is problematic. It’s one of many areas on the peninsula that was artificially filled as the city tried, over the centuries, to claim land that was once part of the Ashley River.

When MUSC built its Ashley River Tower on Courtenay Drive, workers had to sink pilings low enough that they would reach the Charleston marl. The stiff, watertight layer of clay is the closest thing the city has to bedrock. 

Engineers took core samples to estimate how deep the pilings would have to go. But, in a few cases, former MUSC Health president Dr. Ray Greenberg said, the estimations were off. Steel supports more than 100 feet long disappeared entirely underground.

Preparing for storms

One wrong turn, and Darci Kenagy’s minivan was floating.

Loaded with Kenagy, her husband and six children, the Toyota Sienna had made the two-hour trip from the family’s rural Midlands home to medical appointments in Charleston many times.

On one of those trips, the Kenagys tried to push their van through flooded Line Street after an SUV in front of them made a crossing through murky waters.

What happened next left them in a dangerous situation that’s unfolded time and time again for travelers to Charleston’s medical district. 

For the Kenagys, three of the six children they had by that 2012 trip to Charleston were born with cataracts. Eventually, all of their children were being seen by specialists at Storm Eye. No ophthalmologist in the Midlands had the same expertise in pediatric cataracts as the doctors here, Darci Kenagy said.

The family was well-versed in Charleston’s flood-prone streets, but they still ended up floating on Line Street. Water reached up to their headlights, air burbled out of the back exhaust pipe, and the Sienna started drifting toward a line of parallel-parked cars.

In a lucky turn, two passersby pushed the van to high ground. The Kenagys then spent hours waiting for a tow in a soul food restaurant; they were picked up by family, instead, and never made the appointment.

“It was a huge impression on my children,” Kenagy said. “They would draw pictures of the van in water for months afterward.”

Flash flooding like the Kenagys encountered strikes suddenly, and can put downtown Charleston at a standstill for hours. 

But the city’s hospitals also have to deal with the threat of hurricanes, which push a wall of ocean water onto land wherever they strike. 

Five tropical cyclones have affected Charleston in the past five years, an onslaught that has helped to reinforce the dangers posed by the rising seas and stronger rains driven by climate change. The city hasn’t had a true test of its defenses since the last major hurricane hit — Category 4 Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

After Hugo pushed water into Roper Hospital’s energy plant, the hospital spent millions to protect its infrastructure. In the basement facility, boilers thrum and chillers rattle. The hospital stores 45,000 gallons of fuel here. 

“This is the heartbeat of the building,” Mike Gunter, engineering coordinator at Roper St. Francis, said. “Everything comes from here.”

Gunter has been keeping watch over it for three decades. He started the job just two months before Hugo. Then, he said, engineers had to shut off the generator that fed the intensive care unit. All night long, Gunter sat in the stairwell and ran portable generators with extension cords to the ICU. 

When the floods receded, flounder, crabs and mud covered the concrete floor. The storm revealed how susceptible the hospital’s critical infrastructure is to rising water.

In 2001, the hospital started work to lift its generators to the third level.

The work has continued. One 15,000-gallon drum is now anchored to Roper’s concrete floor, so it won’t float away. Another is in a room entirely sealed, except a hatch at the top. 

Roper is also installing a new generator, a step that will help ensure air conditioning keeps running if the normal power supply cuts out. All-told, the health system has spent about $9 million on flood mitigation, with the aid of grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The VA Medical Center, on a relatively high piece of ground above Bee Street, has never taken water onto its first floor. Still, managers there have taken their own precautions. They’re moving generators up to the second floor, and plan to move all clinical services off the first floor.

Flash floods

Even when hospital leaders started discussing the future of the downtown Medical District years ago, flooding was a known problem. Medical University Hospital and MUSC’s College of Pharmacy were swamped in Hugo. Hollings Cancer Center flooded during Tropical Storm Irma in 2017. But, for the most part, flooding impacts mobility in and around the area, an issue for decades when a hard rain falls. On Friday afternoon, it took 20 minutes to drive two blocks down Bee Street, a drive that connects all three hospitals. A BMW stalled on Jonathan Lucas Street, within sight of Roper Hospital’s emergency entrance.

The problems are so persistent that two or three times a year, ambulances with Charleston County EMS can’t reach the downtown hospitals and are diverted elsewhere in the region, a county spokesman said. 

The area, Charleston’s stormwater chief Matt Fountain said, is “like a big bowl, and the water just doesn’t get out.”

The problem is compounded by climate change. A warmer atmosphere can produce more rain, and higher tides driven by sea level rise make it harder for that water to drain. The city logged a record-smashing 89 tidal events in 2019 alone, though not every one was enough to cause serious flooding.

Fran Clasby, who worked in physical therapy before retiring last November, was one of many workers who kept extra clothes on hand in case he had to cycle to work through standing water.

“It’s actually less scary than driving through it, because I know my bike’s not going to stall,” he said. 

But workers moving back and forth have to contend with drivers, whether or not they’re in a car. Kim VanHorn, a nurse at Roper Hospital, was walking to her house on Fishburne Street in May when a truck surging down the street to avoid deeper waters almost sideswiped her.

“When I’m in my scrubs and I almost get hit by a truck going through floodwater, during a time that the whole nation is going through a (pandemic) together, it feels pretty crummy,” she said.

Even Arlene Watrobski, a nurse and 20-year resident of Charleston experienced in driving around flooding, is challenged by the watery maze. 

During recent rains in late May, Watrobski found the normal route didn’t work on the way home from Roper Hospital — she had to call her son-in-law for help, and a trip that usually took 10 minutes expanded to 40. 

In the same late May event, Davis, the technician at Storm Eye, said she heard from patients for the first time that they couldn’t find a way onto the Charleston Peninsula. A family from Florence, two hours away, didn’t even bother to wait for the water to go down, she said; when police turned them away, they simply went back home.

VanHorn said Charleston needs to create a suggested driving route for medical workers and their patients. 

“We’ve got people coming into Charleston using apps like the Waze app to try and get there. The city fails to do what I deem kind of the easiest thing to do,” make a map of high ground, she said. 

Doing that is the goal of Charleston Police Department Capt. Dustin Thompson, who took over traffic control earlier this year. He hopes to have a map for the public by the end of 2020.

Police are already starting to leave barricades at intersections that go under quickly, and encouraging the people who live nearby to deploy them when flooding starts. 

Thompson has asked for detour signs that could be placed around the city to send unfamiliar drivers to high ground. 

Long-term investment

In recent years, Charleston’s hospitals have poured money into higher ground in the tri-county area. MUSC re-purposed a J.C. Penney at the Citadel Mall to give patients an accessible way to see their doctors. Roper St. Francis opened its fourth hospital in fast-growing Berkeley County. The VA broke ground on an outpatient center in North Charleston, citing flooding issues as a top motivation.

No institution has invested more into its downtown roots than MUSC. The state-backed health system estimates its economic impact on the Charleston area at $3.8 billion.

Thousands of people each day driving across the Ashley River see the sunlight glinting off the rounded glass faces of MUSC’s two newest buildings, a modern facade set against a backdrop of steeples.

Together, the two buildings are a $664 million investment, one MUSC committed to years ago.

Greenberg, president of MUSC Health from 2000 to 2013, said leaders started considering the hospital’s future on the peninsula in the early 2000s. The health system needed a plan to replace its main hospital, which was so old that it was becoming hard to fit modern equipment inside, Greenberg said. They also wanted to expand specialties like cardiac and children’s care.
Leaders debated moving away from flooding and traffic, potentially to North Charleston.

Ultimately, moving and splitting the campus apart was considered “too divisive” for faculty leaders, he said. And back then, while flooding was common, leaders didn’t account for climate change making the problems more severe.

There was a hope that projects planned by the City of Charleston would help alleviate the longtime problem. Then-Mayor Joe Riley, a friend of Greenberg’s, was also key in swaying the hospital to stay, Greenberg said. 

Riley was a tireless advocate for Charleston’s peninsula, championing projects there like the S.C. Aquarium and reinvesting tax revenues in the historic core of the city throughout his decades-long tenure.

But just before MUSC was considering its own commitment to the area, a different school had recently decided to abandon its downtown campus: Johnson & Wales University, which trained hospitality workers, announced in 2002 it would leave the Charleston peninsula for Charlotte.

For MUSC, Riley said in a June interview with The Post and Courier, “the dispersal of parts of those institutions takes something away, tangible and intangible, from a great university.” 

Looking back, the former mayor said he believed hospitals made the right choice by staying. 

MUSC’s leaders committed to a 20-year roadmap that sealed the health system’s future on the peninsula. Ashley River Tower opened in 2008; the Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital opened earlier this year.

MUSC's $389 million children's hospital is almost open. During Dorian, it started leaking.

The health system built both above the floodplain. It installed flood doors and pumps.

In May, MUSC reported it owes $530.6 million for the two projects, which it doesn’t expect to pay off for decades.

By 2045, the Charleston peninsula is expected to experience tidal flooding as frequently as every other day, according to a national assessment of climate change impacts conducted in 2018.

In the coming years, a third hospital will be joining the view as MUSC acts on the final phase of its plan to replace Medical University Hospital somewhere west of Courtenay Drive.

“To leave the peninsula now would take a level of investment that would require increases in state and federal funding that are not realistic or likely to fully address the need to move an entire campus,” MUSC said in a statement. 

The campus of about 100 buildings, including its hospitals and six colleges, would cost “well over $3.5 billion” to replace, according to the health system. Roughly 17,000 people work for the hospital system, and about 3,700 students pursue a degree there each year. 

MUSC’s decisions also affect the VA Medical Center, because the two institutions are closely intertwined. Some specialists and researchers work for both health care providers, said Rick Mahon, the local VA’s chief of strategic planning and analysis, said. Students rotate across campuses.

Attracting the best talent will decide a hospital’s success. But by law, the VA can’t be a pay leader. So, with high salaries off the table, the proximity to an academic medical center is a key selling point.

The VA needs to move in tandem with MUSC, Mahon said.

“Both of us are committed to being on the peninsula,” he said.

Flooding fixes

Resolved not to move, Charleston’s hospitals are asking for money to help them stay, and stay dry. 

Several projects are on the table, and they go beyond lifting generators or moving patients to higher floors.

At the top of the list is a shaft in the heart of the MUSC campus that would connect to massive drainage tunnels the city of Charleston has already carved to the north. 

City officials and hospital officials were hoping, earlier this year, that the state might help cover the $10 million cost of the linkage in this year’s budget by directing the amount to MUSC.

Time is of the essence, they argued. They want to dig the connection before the main tunnels under the Septima P. Clark Parkway, a key thoroughfare known as the Crosstown, open in 2022. 

“If construction can start in the fall, it will be just in time to link up with the main project,” Frazier said. 

The item was nowhere to be found in the state spending plan that passed the House in mid-March, just before the pandemic halted the session and made that budget proposal moot. When legislators returned to pass a new budget in September, it wasn’t included either. So the city is now pursuing federal funds.

Now, Frazier said, the city may add a watertight door to its tunnels, so a new connection can be hooked up after they’re full of stormwater. But that would add a new cost to the original tunnel project, already tens of millions over budget. 

There are other projects that could also help: pumps in various locations could speed drainage to the Ashley River, and a greenway that could one day include underground cisterns to hold rainwater. 

In the future, multiple buildings across the district could also be connected by skybridges. 

MUSC is on the hunt for the cash needed to start work on those improvements. The coronavirus pandemic could open up new opportunities to apply for special funding, said Lisa Montgomery, executive vice president for finance and operations at MUSC. 

But, of the five projects the Charleston Medical District association wanted to pursue in 2020, construction hasn’t begun on one.