kitchen countertopsIn Folly Beach, SC

FOLLY BEACH, S.C. (WCIV) — Tuesday night, Folly Beach City Council passed an ordinance amending the Folly Beach Short Term Rentals policies with a vote of 6-1.

Eddie Ellis was the only city council member to vote no.

The ordinance means the city will continue to require renters to get a business license and a rental registration permit. Because the ordinance passed, there will now be a fee for rental registration.

The amount would vary. A fee per $1,000 of income was presented last night.

The city estimates short term rentals end up costing the city about $1 million in public services and infrastructure, so they are trying to recover some of that cost with the new fee. Money is slated to also go towards hiring staff whose only job is managing short term rental licenses and violations.

As for revoking a license, the proposed ordinance suggested changing the current four strikes over a six-month period to three strikes over the course of a year.

“The strikes are only issued after conviction, so not on ticket or warning. But only if a ticket is written and the person is actually found guilty, then we'll issue a strike. So it's fewer strikes over a longer period, but a higher bar for the strike to be issued," City of Folly Beach Administrator Aaron Pope said.

The city will now require more information about the property, like parking plans. Events at rental properties will now have a limit of 25 people instead of the previous number of 49 people.

Paid parking- another problem that’s plagued Lowcountry beaches all summer- was also discussed during the meeting.

The city of Folly Beach submitted revisions to their parking plan to SCDOT in August 2020. That plan was just returned to the city last month.

At the City Council meeting Tuesday, Director of Public Works Eric Lutz presented the revised pay parking expansion plan. The new plan makes those changes laid out by SCDOT.

Pope said Folly Beach is proud that most of their parking is free, but they are asking to increase the amount of paid parking they have to roughly 33 percent of the front beach parking only.

"That's what paid parking is about. It's not about restricting access or discouraging people from coming. It's about finding ways to balance the costs of providing services," Pope said.

City council will share the plan with the public next. Once the city has received public comment, they will submit the proposed plan and public comments to SCDOT for their final approval.

Only after they approve it, can the city implement it.

CHARLESTON COUNTY, S.C. (WCIV) — The Army Corps of Engineers is working to replenish Folly Beach by using what is called a "nearshore placement" project.

"You would literally walk off the steps and the water would be underneath the steps. There's no beach at high tide at all, like down by the washout," says Folly Beach visitor Amy Heaton.

Beach replenishment projects are crucial in protecting beaches and buildings on Folly.

"This will help protect the infrastructure of the homes, the businesses behind the beach, as a protective structural measure," says Wes Wilson, project manager with the Army Corps of Engineers in Charleston.

One of the ways to replenish beaches is through a project that has worked before.

"The nearshore placement project is a really innovative approach that the Army Corps is taking to utilize sediment that is being dredged for navigation purposes and to keep the boating channels clear, and then take that sand and help to feed the beaches in a different way than traditional beach nourishment," says Nicole Elko, president of Elko Coastal Consulting.

The last nearshore placement project took place in 2021. The Army Corps of Engineers and City of Folly Beach dredged up 50,000 cubic yards of sand from the Folly River, took it to the northeast end of the beach and dumped it about 200 to 300 yards offshore.

It proved to be successful thanks to the tracer monitoring contract and some colorful markers.

"The contractor used orange and pink dye in some of their sand loads and disposed of it. They sampled it and determined where on the beach those particular deposits landed," says Wilson.

These placement projects come with a lot of benefits.

"It is known to be a lot more environmentally friendly, too. That's one of the things we look for. The three "E's" is engineering, economics and environmental. The economics- that's cheaper; environmentally more friendly; and the engineering is constructible," says Wilson.

Another project is already being designed due to the success of the first. It is projected to wrap up by late spring of 2023.

These projects are federally funded.

FOLLY BEACH, S.C. (WCBD) – Officials say around 8:35 a.m. Wednesday morning, the oil spill was reported near the Folly Beach Pier. News 2 spoke with a beachgoer who says she, along with many others, were covered in oil.

Cat Sidwell was on her surfboard when suddenly something fell from above.

“Started to smell like oil and it was like real slick all over our skin and board and stuff,” Sidwell said. “And it kind of hit me first. I was like the closer one to the pier.”

Soon, other surfers in the area felt the oil rain from above as well.

“Everybody was kind of yelling like, ‘Oh my god, we’re all covered in oil,’” Sidwell said. “It smelled, it was super strong.”

Sidwell says they confronted the construction company on the pier about the spill, but says they were dismissive.

“We kind of yelled up to the guys that were working on the pier like, ‘Hey, you’re spilling oil,’” she said. “And they just yelled back something silly, like laughing that it was biodegradable.”

U.S. Coast Guard officials say the spill was from a faulty hydraulic hammer used on site.

“They had spilled three to four gallons of organic hydraulic oil,” U.S. Coast Guard public affairs representative Vincent Moreno said.

Charleston Waterkeeper executive director Andrew Wunderley says the fact that it’s organice is besides the point.

“Biodegradable or not,” Wunderley said, “it’s still hydraulic fluid and it has no place in the ocean. It doesn’t belong in our waterways, it doesn’t belong on the beach and it certainly doesn’t belong on people.”

Wunderley believes the company should have done more to notify beachgoers of the spill.

“We’d like to see, in this case, the responsible party take it a lot more seriously. It sounds like from what we’ve heard that they did a good job of getting it stopped, but they needed to go the next step and warn the public and say, ‘Hey, this just happened you need to stay out of the water. You need to use caution.”

And thinks they should be held accountable.

“The enforcement agencies in this case are the U.S. Coast Guard and DHEC,” Wunderley said, “and what we are calling on them to do is to investigate, and if there is anything out of the ordinary, they need to fine at a significant level in order to prevent this from happening again.”

The U.S. Coast Guard says the spill is contained and the incident is still under investigation.

In 2018, Folly Beach along with a 26-mile stretch underwent emergency beach renourishment to restore sand lost from Hurricanes. The damage was so bad that the Army Core of Engineers paid for the entire cost of renourishment.

(TNS) - The last time a hurricane reached the Grand Strand, it obliterated North Myrtle Beach’s sand dunes and ripped the Cherry Grove Pier in half.

That was just two years ago.

Repairs after Hurricane Isaias, which was “only” a Category 1 storm, cost millions of dollars. It wasn’t a hurricane that required major evacuations, but it was a sign of how a single storm, even one that isn’t a Hugo or a Katrina, can do massive damage to one of South Carolina’s most precious resources — the beach.

Protecting beaches is a crucial task for federal, state and local officials. Without the sand that defines the Grand Strand, Charleston’s barrier islands or Hilton Head, the state could lose billions of dollars in tourism. Anyone who grew up in South Carolina during the 1970s and 1980s can share how the near-total erosion of Folly Beach devastated that town’s economy and made it a place to avoid.

“The beaches are a very, very valuable resource for the state of South Carolina, for the country, but they’re under very significant and increasing pressures,” said Paul Gayes, executive director of Coastal Carolina University’s Center for Marine & Wetland Studies. “That’s a significant management challenge, and now the question is how long can we can we manage it as we have?”

In 2018, Folly Beach along with a 26-mile stretch of the Grand Strand underwent emergency beach renourishment to restore sand lost from Hurricanes Matthew, Irma and Florence. The damage was so bad that the Army Core of Engineers paid for the entire cost of renourishment. Normally, the federal entity would pay for just 65% of renourishment in the Grand Strand and 85% in Folly Beach. The remaining cost would be passed off to state and local governments.

Sand dunes themselves are important ecological habitats for grasses and other forms of coastal wildlife, but humans have a more selfish reason for maintaining them.

Dunes protect the buildings and infrastructure that sit behind them, particularly by breaking up storm surges, Army Core of Engineers project manager Wes Wilson said.

As storms come in, they bring in particularly strong waves that sometimes have enough force to topple building, wash away cars and toss boats from marinas onto highways.

Sand dunes, for their part, take the first brunt of that force, Gayes said. The strength of the impact of the storm surge depends largely on how fast the waves are moving. If a dune can slow down a powerful wave by even a couple seconds, that can exponentially decrease the water’s force when it makes impact on whatever lies beyond.

“It takes a long time for a dune to recover,” he said. “It may take weeks and months, even years to build a strong, healthy dune system, but a storm can come in and remove that dune in six hours.”

The dunes are strong, but brittle. They sometimes can’t survive more than one major hit.

“If another storm comes in before it’s recovered, it’s not there to do the protective services that was there before,” Gayes said.

Protecting sand dunes and the beaches in front of them is a circular endeavor. Tropical weather and general erosion over time wash away the sand, and governments have to spend millions of dollars to put the sand back, repeatedly. The task sounds futile, but Wilson says it’s worth it.

“After a hurricane has hit, the beaches that have been renourished and have sufficient protection measures such as dunes in place, fare far better than those that have not,” Wilson said.

The process to actually put sand back can be an irritating one for homeowners and visitors unlucky enough to be at the beach when renourishment is happening.

“We always say it’s a short-term inconvenience for a long-term benefit,” Wilson said. “As the contractor’s working in front of your house for a day or two, they can be kind of loud and kind of noisy. But as soon as they move on, within a day or two, you’ve got a brand new beach in front of your home and reduce the risk of damages not only your home, but the structures behind your home.”

There are a lot of reasons beaches erode. The most constant one is a sort of “river of sand” that is perpetually moving from north to south along the East Coast.

This movement causes some beaches to erode and others to grow, though as the sea level rises, the sand frequently disappears into the depths of the ocean, rather than flowing south to, say, Pawleys Island, Hilton Head or Florida.

“Over the long term, we are always losing sediment,” Gayes said. “That’s why we do renourishment, which is putting sand ‘back in the budget’ by artificial means.”

The more noticeable reason for beach erosion tends to be storms, experts say.

Isaias, for example, was particularly notable because of the damage its storm surges did to the low-lying sand dunes of North Myrtle Beach.

The storm surge’s strength came from both the power of the Category 1 hurricane itself but also the fact that it made landfall during the so-called “King Tides.” These appear several times a year and are known as the highest tides seen in the Grand Strand. When the King Tides reach North Myrtle Beach, particularly the Cherry Grove neighborhood, many roads flood, even without any rainfall or tropical weather.

The wind and storm surges that come with tropical storms and hurricanes break up the sand on the beaches and drag it back into the ocean, Gayes said.

Frequently, the sand will return on its own, but hurricanes can interrupt that process.

“It can move off shore enough that it won’t come back,” Gayes said.

This happened notably from 2016 to 2018, when a series of hurricanes — Matthew, Irma and Florence — tore up South Carolina’s beaches.

Their devastation was amplified by the fact that the hurricanes, particularly Matthew and Florence, were preceded by other tropical weather in the weeks leading up to them. That one-two punch left the beaches with no time to recover between storms.

“It’s not always a given storm that comes in that is the particular problem. It’s what’s happened a week or two weeks or 10 days before some of the big flooding events,” Gayes said. “If you’ve had a storm come in and kind of made the beach go away by moving material out of the upper beach and then the next storm comes in — it’s disproportionately more impactful.”

As a result, the Army Core of Engineers spent $60 million on an emergency beach renourishment spanning 26 miles of the Grand Strand and all of Folly Beach . Other parts of the state also had to do emergency renourishments, but the funding came from other sources, such as local accommodations taxes.

That renourishment required 3 million cubic yards of sand — the equivalent of 300,000 dump trucks — to be pumped from deep in the ocean onto the Grand Strand’s beaches alone.

Even a few years later, without any major storms, there is already some visible sand loss, Gayes noted. Garden City in particular, being on the edge of the renourishment project, has several blocks with at-risk structures as the ocean creeps in.

Not all storms do as much damage as Isaias, Florence, Irma and Matthew. A host of factors, from the speed at which a storm makes landfall, whether it’s a direct hit, the strength of the storm and even the direction it makes contact can all influence how badly the beaches are affected, said Victoria Oliva, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service’s Wilmington office.

“The storm surge is tied to the strength of the storm. The stronger the storm, the stronger the winds and the greater the surge,” Oliva said. “The greatest threat as far as surf goes is the stronger storms that are coming head on and pretty much coming head on for quite a while.”

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Volunteers will span out across the South Carolina coast in boats and on foot Sept. 17 to clean up litter left by beachgoers, items dumped in marshes and all sorts of toss-away or floating trash that becomes waterway eyesores.

The Beach Sweep/River Sweep has been an annual effort for the past three decades, and organizers have noticed improvement among certain types of rubbish thanks to crackdowns on specific items, including cigarette butts.

Last year, 2,255 volunteers cleared over 20,000 pounds of debris statewide.

Data from 2018 and 2019 showed about a 50 percent decrease in plastic restaurant takeout containers and plastic grocery bags left on the beach, said Susan Ferris Hill, coastal coordinator for the upcoming beach and river sweep.

Plastic straws decreased by about two-thirds, she said.

“I think there is this increased awareness that people know the right thing to do is to just recycle that stuff,” Hill said.

That could be because some area beaches in recent years have prohibited single-use plastics like straws, grocery bags and foam plastic.

Some municipalities in Charleston County have also banned businesses from distributing single-use plastic bags and certain food containers.

Folly Beach passed a smoking ban last year to help eliminate cigarette butt litter. The rule prohibits smoking, holding and carrying a lighted or activated smoking product on the sand and at beach-access points only.

But litter is still a problem across the coast. Volunteers who clean the beach and river areas have noticed a slight increase in litter from restaurant takeout containers, especially in green spaces near highways.

Hill said some of these items may fly out of vehicles without the owners realizing it.

“When (tropical storms) happen, and especially if we get a lot of flooding inland, I think a lot of that stuff (trash) travels through the waterways from some inland areas and makes it down the coast,” Hill said.

That is one reason why the beach and river sweep is a statewide effort.

The S.C. Sea Grant Consortium is organizing cleanup events on the coast, and the state Department of Natural Resources is leading the inland sweeps. The event is held in conjunction with the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup.

Volunteers will clean about 20 sites in the greater Charleston area, including downtown and on all of the barrier islands.

Edward Evans is leading the cleanup at the marsh in front of downtown Charleston’s Waterfront Park. He’s volunteered for the last 22 years and said people would be amazed at the amount of trashed pulled out annually.

“It’s a really good feeling to come there in the morning, (with) a bunch of people out there picking up trash ... and at the end of the term to have this substantial pile of trash,” Evans said.

But it is not an easy feat. Volunteers have to push through marsh grass, sometimes while sinking in pluff mud. Evans often tells his crew to wear clothes and shoes they don’t mind getting dirty because “nobody’s clean after this thing.”

He often gets the same group of people year after year.

“There’s something about it,” Evans said. “And I think for them (the volunteers), it’s the same things as it is for me, that it’s just a rewarding thing to do.”

People who clean the area near Waterfront Park collect a lot of fishing-related items and plastics.

On Shem Creek in Mount Pleasant, crews have tended to collect more bottles, cans, and even COVID-related safety masks in recent years.

Elizabeth Anderegg is the site captain there. Youth scouts and local schools have signed up to clean that area this year.

The children will take kayaks and paddle into the marsh area near Shem Creek, out toward Bayview Creek and along the marsh headed toward Crab Bank.

People who sign up will be provided with the needed supplies to make the collections. Hill recommends people reach out to the individual site captains to participate Sept. 17. That information can be found on the S.C. Sea Grant Consortium or DNR websites.

The effort runs from 9 a.m. to noon.