Junk Removal in Folly Beach, SC

FOLLY BEACH, S.C. (WCIV) — Lowcountry beach communities are preparing for the worst and hoping for the best as Hurricane Ian makes its way to the Florida coast.

On Tuesday afternoon on Folly Beach, however, beachgoers flocked to the shore, aware of the threat expected to be knocking on the Lowcountry’s doorstep in a matter of days.

“I actually have two sisters that live down in Tallahassee; one is actually in St. Marks,” said Patrick Sullivan, who spent the day looking for shark teeth with his sisters who traveled north to escape the storm. “So, they’re concerned.”

“We’re watching it because that’s about the time we drive back, and we want to be aware of traffic and flooding and things like that,” said Nicki Neumann, who is visiting from North Carolina.

“Literally until Jim Cantore shows up, I’m not worried about it,” said Marc Ross, on vacation from Virginia. “I work on an ambulance for two different services, so I work like hundreds of hours in a week. No, a storm is not going to ruin my vacation.”

While the level of concern from vacationers may vary, it doesn’t take an expert to suspect what potentially high winds can do to the Folly Beach Pier, that is still under construction. The pier’s substructure is about 70% completed, according to the latest update posted by Charleston County Parks.

In a statement sent to ABC News 4 on Tuesday, Cape Romain, the pier’s contractor, stated: ‘Any loose material or debris will be secured. The crane will boom down and will remain on the temporary work trestle. We do not expect any erosion.’

Folly Beach Mayor Tim Goodwin said conversations with crews from various construction sites across the city are ongoing.

“They have to get the dumpsters empty or get it all tied down where it won’t be blowing; won’t be an object blowing around in even just high winds,” Goodwin said.

Goodwin said the city has been proactive in keeping everyone informed about Ian by sharing updates on the city’s website and Facebook page.

“If you think you need to leave, leave two days early,” Goodwin said. “Because if you don’t, you’re going to be stuck in traffic, and that’s just the way it is in the Charleston area these days.”

Goodwin is hoping that warning will not be taken lightly if the time comes, as the nation waits to see the path Ian takes.

“Poor Tampa,” Sullivan said. “They’re really going to get it, and with the rain and the storm surge, it will be tough for those people. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody, anywhere.”

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.

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.”

©2022 The State. Visit thestate.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

JAMES ISLAND, S.C. (WCSC) - A new development will bring homes and an inn into Beefield community, where a homeowner says they were not fully communicated with about the project.

Deborah Green has lived with her family off of Battery Island Drive and Old Folly Beach Road for 50 years. When news of the new development came to the community, many of the elderly residents were confused.

“Communication between the developers have not been really well,” Green said. “The community is not getting a lot of the information and they’re not building a relationship with the community.”

Plans for the project include building about 15 single-family homes as well as an inn with 20 rooms. The neighborhood is currently very small and has one restaurant and bar.

Robert Summerfield, Charleston’s director of planning, preservation and sustainability, said communicating with the public is the developer’s job.

“A planning ethos is always, ‘Communicate with the community, communicate with the community, communicate with the community,’” Summerfield said. “So, when a project first comes to us, you’re going to tell the development team, go talk to the community, depending on the nature of what’s being proposed.”

Green’s family claims the original plans shared with the community included building affordable housing, but now the plans include three to four homes at 4,000 square feet.

Although the neighborhood includes residents who have lived in the area for decades, Green said she is not fighting development, they just want to be told what is going on.

“I think that they need to come and attend one of our association meetings so that they can sit down with the community and let us know what their plans are as a group. Not just saying one person all the time, but investors sit down and talk and tell us about your claim,” Green said. “Then, we will let them know how it affects because after all, once they developed it and leave, we’re still here.”

The developer of the project, Robinson Design Engineers, did not respond to a request for comment.

The next planning meeting for members of the Beefield community to attend will be Oct. 24.

Copyright 2022 WCSC. All rights reserved.

Like most people, when I go on vacation with my family, I like to take a break from work. Hence, why there aren’t in-depth posts here on the blog about most of our travels. When we’re away, I don’t want the pressure of recording all the details or feeling like I need to check out certain things to report back; on vacation, I generally like to go with the flow and relax. I’ve written about some of our shorter closer-to-home trips, but the bigger ones I usually just share through Instagram posts (if interested, check out Idaho, Asheville, Mexico, Croatia, Barcelona, Maine, Vermont, California, Nicaragua).

This is my rambling way of explaining why this post about our Spring Break trip to South Carolina — specifically Folly Beach and Charleston — is mostly scenes and quick tips, less of a thorough guide. But sometimes, that’s all you need — inspo for a destination, a starting point for planning, and a few ideas for activities.

So, the quick gist of our trip: We spent three nights in Folly Beach, three nights in Charleston (and one in NC on the way down to break up the eight-hour drive). At the last minute, my friend Margaret and her family decided to meet us there, so we spent a lot of time with them (though stayed in separate places since we’d already booked when they decided to join). Our crews always have a great time together and similar traveling sensibilities (very important when traveling with others). She also posted about the trip in her Designer’s Guide to Charleston SC (she’s an architect and interior design extraordinaire), which includes details that this post doesn’t, so be sure to check it out for even more travel inspiration!

FOLLY BEACH

This actually wasn’t our first Spring Break getaway to the area, though last time we stayed in Charleston and Isle of Palms. During that trip, we took a drive south to Folly and decided that next time we would stay there. Both are great in their own ways, but Folly has a more laid-back surf vibe and more of a town, plus there is excellent fossil hunting! We found a rental through Airbnb that was perfect — just the right size for our family, an easy walk to the beach, and surrounded by leafy trees.

Part of the reason we went to SC for Spring Break was better chances for warmer temps than more northern beaches, and that was a good call, because the weather was fantastic. Sunny and high 70s made for very pleasant days on the beach, and the water wasn’t too cold for swimming.

We ate most of our meals out, but had breakfast and snacks at the house. There are a bunch of good restaurants and places to get a bite in town, most of them casual and fun. Our favorite easily Chico Feo, with delicious tacos, sandwiches, bowls, and drinks. For snacks and stuff at the house, Bert’s Market had everything we needed and then some. It’s not a huge grocery store, but they also have take out sandwiches and other freshly made fare, plus it’s open 24 hours. And non-food related, but I must mention the great massage I had at Folly Beach Medispa.

Before we headed to Charleston after we left our digs in Folly, we went to see Morris Island Lighthouse. You can’t actually go in or even get up close to it, but we walked to a small beach to get a view. However, the path leading to the beach may have been the highlight, the stretch of asphalt covered with colorful graffiti. The walk should have been quick, but we kept stopping to check out the art beneath our feet.

CHARLESTON

Okay, I’ll be straight up: This part of our trip was really a lot of eating and drinking and walking around. We’d been to the city before and had done a lot of touristy stuff — Fort Sumter and tours of historic places, etc. — and we didn’t feel the need to repeat them. So, besides the guys taking a water taxi to the Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum (while Margaret, Sasha, and I shopped on King Street), we really mostly ate, drank, strolled, and just enjoyed hanging out with everyone. Here’s a recap of that in pictures.

Have you been to Folly Beach or Charleston? What are some of your favorite things to do and places to go there?