Charleston Takes a New Approach to Living With Water

The City of Charleston is taking a broader approach to one of its biggest challenges: flooding.

The recently developed Charleston Water Plan, along with the city’s Basin Flood Action Program, looks beyond individual drainage projects to address flooding across the entire city. The plan considers the combination of heavy rainfall, high tides, storm surge, rising sea levels and groundwater—all of which can contribute to Charleston’s flooding problems.

Rather than relying on one solution, the city is combining traditional infrastructure such as drainage improvements, pumps, barriers and flood protection with natural approaches including wetlands, restored ecosystems, water storage areas and other green infrastructure.

The Water Plan organizes its long-term strategy around four basic ideas: Reserve, Adapt, Defend and Grow. That means protecting natural areas that can hold water, adapting vulnerable neighborhoods and infrastructure, defending critical areas where necessary, and directing future growth toward higher and less flood-prone ground.

Charleston has also divided the city into 18 drainage basins through the Basin Flood Action Program. Instead of treating flooding as one citywide problem, the city can identify trouble spots neighborhood by neighborhood, prioritize projects and increase drainage maintenance where it can make an immediate difference.

The approach grew in part from Charleston’s Dutch Dialogues, which encouraged the city to move away from the idea that flooding can simply be engineered away and toward a philosophy of “living with water.”

With Charleston experiencing more frequent flooding and approximately 13 inches of sea-level rise over the past century, the city is planning not just for today’s flooding problems but for conditions decades into the future.

The goal is fairly straightforward: give water somewhere to go, protect the places that need protecting, work with natural systems where possible, and make smarter decisions about where and how Charleston grows.

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