Charleston Water Specialist

The Santee Cooper Project gets remembered as one of the great infrastructure achievements of the 20th century. Two lakes. Sixteen thousand workers. Power for a region that had none. What does not get talked about is what happened after they opened the floodgates.

Redirecting the Santee River through the Cooper River system increased the Cooper’s flow by more than 200 times. That silt-loaded freshwater hit Charleston Harbor and started stratifying with the saltwater. Sediment stopped flushing. It settled. Annual dredging in the harbor went from 180,000 cubic yards to 10 million cubic yards per year. The Port of Charleston, one of the most important on the East Coast, was slowly filling in with mud.

It took until 1985 for the Army Corps of Engineers to finish the Cooper River Rediversion Project near St. Stephen. The fix sent 80 percent of that Santee water back to the Santee River and brought dredging back down to 2 million cubic yards a year.

One decision in 1942. A 40-year consequence. Another major federal project to correct it. That is the water history nobody is telling you.