Pinckney Point satellite photo
DHEC officials in Columbia out of touch
In 1995, the Beaufort County Clean Water Task Force identified two major saltwater estuaries as being significant for both the amount of public use and the threat of development: Broad Creek and the Okatie River.
Broad Creek on Hilton Head Island was chosen because it ran through the heart of an almost fully developed community, and a baseline was needed to know whether its waters were getting better or worse. The Okatie River was chosen because it represented a more pristine waterway with development looming.
In 1999, the state Department of Health and Environmental Control, the Town of Hilton Head Island and Beaufort County funded a study of both estuaries with some interesting results. Broad Creek, although degraded, was not as bad as originally thought and was repairable.
Hilton Head embraced its challenge by creating a Broad Creek management plan. The town doubled the cost and scope of its stormwater management plan to include an environmental component. The town aggressively pursued sewer access for everyone, and it targeted land around the headwaters for purchase. They did not wait for DHEC to come up with a plan.
The Okatie was showing signs of degradation, but there was no one to look out for it.
Now, despite a $1.2 million Special Area Management Plan study in 2002, a land development study in 2004, designation as an outstanding resource water in 2004, and DHEC's downgrading of its oyster beds to "restricted" in 2006, the only responses have been to schedule another study for 2008 on total maximum density loading of pollutants and approve what is perhaps the largest, most irresponsible and poorly planned dock permit this county has seen in years.
In DHEC's brochures you can read about the dangers of cumulative environmental impacts, yet they will permit the 500th dock on a river as if it were the first.
Although we believe that local DHEC officials, who are our neighbors, know the right thing to do, the closer to Columbia that DHEC decisions are made the more out of touch they are with the special demands of the unique Port Royal Sound ecosystem and its unparalleled tidal amplitude and fertile, fragile marine nursery.
Why else would an agency approve a fixed dock system that would rise ominously up to 12 feet out of the water at low tide and require boaters to ride their boats up and down like an elevator? If they didn't or couldn't move their boat to the landing they would have to climb a 12-foot barnacle, oyster and algae encrusted ladder to get back to the dock. I doubt that DHEC even asked the developer if they knew how much time it was going to take to get all the boats off the lifts and on to dry land in case of a hurricane and who was going to do it.
It's time to take our ecosystem back from an agency that has already allowed Charleston, Myrtle Beach and Georgetown waters to be trashed even when they had more money and staff to protect them then than they do now. We cannot afford to let them do five more years of studies to conclude that we should have done something 10 years ago. We should not put up with any more of this convoluted permitting process that allows major access and impacts on our natural resources when we haven't even granted permission to build there.
When we formed the Clean Water Task Force 13 years ago after oyster beds continued to be closed, we asked the Columbia DHEC chiefs "whose job was it to get the oyster beds back open?" They said they didn't know, but it was their job to tell us we couldn't eat the oysters. Things haven't changed much.
We must save the last decent populated coastal ecosystem that South Carolina has left.
David Harter of Hilton Head Island is chairman of Friends of the Rivers.