COASTAL OBSERVER

A month and a half after the town of Pawleys Island agreed to settle a lawsuit over erosion on a neighboring beach, the details remain unclear.

But Mayor Brian Henry told property owners the deal will allow the town to remove up to 100,000 cubic yards of sand from Pawleys Inlet annually for beach renourishment.

“We can go down to that spit, to that inlet management zone, and grab 100,000 cubic yards of sand anytime we want to,” he told the Pawleys Island Civic Association at its annual meeting.

Town Council voted in July to settle a suit brought by property owners in the Prince George community south of the island after Pawleys Inlet began to migrate south after the town completed a beach renourishment project in 2020. The suit against the town, two state agencies and two contractors claims that they should have foreseen that the 1.1 million cubic yards of offshore sand placed on the beach would cause the inlet to shift. 

The town will pay $150,000 to the plaintiffs in addition to what the town’s insurance pays. “That’s a drop in the bucket,” Henry said.

The money will be used to relocate the inlet to within 700 feet of the public parking lot on the island’s south end. Sand dredged to form the new inlet will be used to renourish the beach at Prince George, which the erosion from Pawleys Creek led beachfront property owners to seek state permits to install sandbags to protect the dunes.

The Prince George Community Association, which is among the plaintiffs, submitted plans to federal and state agencies in December 2023 to relocate the inlet. A permit application has not been put out for public comment. A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said the agency is waiting for the community association to submit revised plans.

“The goal was to keep that spit within that 700 foot band,” Henry said.

The location of the inlet was part of the negotiations between the parties, he added.

“We feel like the town has negotiated a fair agreement,” Henry said.

But what that agreement contains has not been made public because not all of the parties have signed it, he said.

Although all five defendants will contribute to the cost of the project, it won’t fully fund the work, Henry said.

“I can’t say too much,” he told the civic association.

Had the case gone to trial, Henry said the potential liability would have been $10 million to $20 million.

The $150,000 that the town will pay out of pocket will be paid back over time by the ability to use sand from the inlet for renourishment, he said.

“It allows us to do periodic renourishment up and down the beach,” Henry said. “We’ll just be paying to move the sand.”

And unlike the offshore sand that was used for the 2020 renourishment, the inlet sand will be more compatible with what’s already on the beach, he said.

As part of the agreement, Prince George won’t raise objections to future renourishment on Pawleys Island, Henry added.

The town is still working to acquire three easements from property owners on the south end to allow the Corps to pump up to 200,000 cubic yards of offshore sand onto the island’s south end to replace sand lost to Hurricane Ian in 2022.

“We’re doing everything we can to get those easements,” Henry said.

The town needs appraisals of the easements in order to condemn them. Two appraisal firms hired by the town later backed out, Henry said.

Once the easements are in place, it will take six to nine months for the Corps to complete the project design and award a contract for the work, a spokesman said.

It will take two to four months to complete the project.

“We are standing by,” he said.