South Carolina, Oh Wandering Shore

Remember this: It is not as it once was.

I guess by now, the Great Flood of 2015, is slowly fading in South Carolina. Now there is news that water levels have not crested yet.

I have been reading reports the dams are failing. A lot of negative things are being said about the inconvenience of rain from the sky.

Are the dams really failing or is it that the capacity of the dam has been met? Excess is the problem overriding the volume. Not sure, I don’t work in dams.

It was odd to see. Flooding by the ocean and flooding in the upstate, but the area in between wasn’t that bad.

During those torrential rains, where I live the ground was mushy. In the low spots where the water would settle, or the low spot drainage ditches were overfilled, it was ankle deep. By the next day, when the rains final disappeared, the water was moved along. This might be because of all the holes dug for sand to be shipped out to other places.

I looked at Nature’s shenanigans in the Upstate. Not that we weren’t having a hard enough time with Church Shootings and non-state people calling us racists, baby stealers, and ignorant backwards people. Roads were cracked in half and bridges tested and failed. Caskets were coming out of the Earth, people were taking chances with their lives, evacuees were being robbed while away from home, and everyone wanted to point their anger at the Governor. The Governor couldn’t point her finger at the sky and say, “Now you stop that right now.” Give her a break, she has been busy trying to find us a job. Yet, this isn’t entirely new to us. Repeat after me, "Hurricane."

I just wrote about upland water being held back and it affecting the shoreline. I guess higher powers have decided water needs to be freed a little. I was wondering when we had a drought back in May and June, why some of that water wasn’t released onto the lower half of South Carolina. No one foresaw all this rain, and water was being held back, I assume. If the water was released that would have dropped the volume and garnered more room for rainfall. Everyone that lives here knows in August it starts to rain.

You can’t suck that excess water up and send it to other states because of the content containing invasive things, or carrying something you could pass off onto another state.

Of course, the powers that be could pull another town of Ferguson. There are places Upstate that are ghost towns flooded by water and turned into public scenic areas for locals and tourists.

I live in the Coastal Plains which extends from the Atlantic Ocean inland a distant from 120 to 150 miles to the Fall Line. It adjoins the Piedmont section of the state.  This area is 2/3 of the state. ± 30, 981 square miles and ±494 square miles of that is varying degrees of water. The Coastal Plains are drained by three rivers. The way in which water was to be drained was determined by pre-history but then man got involved and starting damming up the water, which had already plotted its natural course. This damming was to make land more available and control the water.

One must also consider the wandering seashore. The impermanent seashore is affected by the boundary between Coastal Plains and the Continental Shelf. Things that cause a seashore to wander are: Winds, tides, warping of the land, and fluctuations in the sea level.

When you think of land moving, we can skip back to August 31, 1886 when an earthquake happened in Charleston, South Carolina. The faultlines shifted, causing a lot of damage. There were 438 reports between 1754 and 1971; 402 were in the Charleston and Summerville areas; 36 formed a southeastern trend. Four shocks occurred in 1971 in the central part of Orangeburg County on three occasions. One report occurred in Seneca.

Where did my thinking of earthquakes come in on this?

I hiked on this one State Park near Orangeburg, South Carolina and you find volcanic pumice stone on top of the ground by the shoreline. I wish I could find the account I read about someone hypothesizing the presence of underground or submerged volcanic activity. Don’t quote me on that, but I read it somewhere. Not my monkey or my circus.

Here is where I take you by the hand and go back in time. Yes, back in time, once again. Crack, Crack, Pow! Black smoke pores from the time machine motor. I guess I have to get that updated with clean energy. Shame on me...

Enter the Sandhills and archaic oceans (20 million years ago).

There is a place called the Sandhills. The Sandhills State Park and Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge is ±35 miles away from the North and South Carolina Stateline.

The Sandhills was a portion of ancient beach dunes that divided the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain; a former coastline just thirty miles from the North and South Carolina state lines. The coastal plain is shaped by previous ocean levels rising and falling.

Is there any visual proof of a previous beach? There is plenty of geological research illustrating terracing on the Coastal Plains, digging up fossilized shells, etc.

One place I lived was fifty minutes from the beach. After my father would cut fire breaks in the woods behind the house to do equipment testing, you could walk along and find fossilized 12 inch whelk shells. I found a gigantic Knobbed Whelk shell just jutting out of the ground.

Ten minutes away from my present home, there is a coquina plant. Coquina is a sedimentary rock composed of shells of mollusks, trilobites, brachiopods, etc. Coquina is the Spanish word for “cockle” or “shellfish”. Coquina is dumped out and smoothed onto driveways because it has a cement quality. This place is ±50 miles away from dipping your foot in the ocean.

When you consider this coquina, it accumulates in high-energy marine and lacustrine environments where currents and waves do a good job of mixing the oceanic stew. These coquina beds could have been barrier bars, beaches, raised banks, and channels.

The question that is obvious is: how does coquina appear underground fifty miles from the shoreline? Why is there beach sand dunes ±139 miles away from the present shoreline?

When you live your life in a place without knowing prehistory, you forget to remember there is water under the ground, outside of the river, lakes, and creek systems. People are afraid of the water they can see with their eyes. Damming water up settles lots of water in one place, when that water is being filled by rainfall, even a glass will crest from the volume exceeding the amount it can hold.

There you have it. South Carolina, even looking at it from a residential aspect of land, is really just a gigantic shoreline well into the state’s interior waiting to happen...again. Most people do not know that. It is just the place they live, with its flooding, hurricanes, past earthquakes, and those terrible television southern drawls that even I have to change my voice to match.

There will be a lot of consideration to some engineering feats in South Carolina, or a better way of looking at the way we manage water in lieu of further potential rainfall in mass. 

If someone builds a house right on the shore, it should be expected that house could face some problem with flooding or being knocked down. If you live around a place where water is settled for a period of time with no consideration for breaching its carrying capacity, you should expect flooding. When you live in a place that use to be a gigantic beach, expect a lot of water at some time. 

It reminds me of Pompeii. People built a city by a volcano. The volcano eventually erupted. All was lost. 

Hopefully, all the South Carolinians suffering from this disaster will be surrounded by their state family. We have each other, Liberty or Death.

When you see a casket floating by you think to yourself, “You can’t keep a South Carolinian down.”

We Salute You.

Written by: Angelia Y Larrimore