Environment
Living shoreline comes to life on Winyah Bay
Three years after the planning for a living shoreline at the head of Winyah Bay started, installation has begun.
“It’s a great area and it is massively eroding,” said Liz Fly, director of resilience and ocean conservation for The Nature Conservancy, and the project’s manager. “We have seen this shoreline continue to get eaten away.”
The shoreline is at Morgan Park, which is next to East Bay Park and just outside the entrance to the Georgetown harbor. It’s a sandy spit that has eroded from the current flowing into the bay from the Pee Dee and Black rivers.
Living shorelines use plants or other natural elements — sometimes in combination with harder shoreline structures — to stabilize estuarine coasts, bays and tributaries.
The Morgan Park project consists of a wooden breakwater that will reduce wave energy and erosion, wooden wattle fence sills that will trap sediment, and manufactured wire reefs for baby oysters to settle in.
The project was slowed by the global pandemic and the permitting process since some of the material has never been used in South Carolina before.
“It is exciting because it’s different materials than we have used in the past,” Fly said. “It’s been used elsewhere, but here in South Carolina the breakwater concept and the wattle fencing concept is new for us for a living shoreline.”
Fly is hopeful that the permitting process will be more streamlined in the future.
Work on installation of the wire reefs started last week.
“Even if we don’t get a lot of oysters it’s going to provide a habitat for a bunch of critters,” Fly said.
Joshua Robinson of Robinson Design Engineers picked the materials for the project with the confluence of the area’s four rivers in mind.
“It’s definitely a lot fresher of a system than we’ve typically worked with,” Fly said. “They did an amazing amount of research with us. They looked at examples from other states and even the Netherlands.”
The Darnall W. and Susan F. Boyd Foundation donated $997,000 toward the $1.4 million project. It’s the first time the foundation, which is based in Columbia, has funded a project along the coast.
The Nature Conservancy has been studying living shorelines for about 30 years, and has completed 14 projects in South Carolina since 2010. Some of the projects were for people who have been turned down for retaining walls and other stabilization projects.
