Published in Post and Courier 01/18/2024
Coalition wants to rewrite rules to allow farms to ‘drain rivers’
BY JONAH CHESTER jchester@postandcourier.com
A woman sits on a bridge over the North Fork of the Edisto River in Edisto Gardens park in downtown Orangeburg. Jessica Holdman/Staff
The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control has rejected a petition to change its surface water withdrawal policies.
A coalition of environmental groups contends that policy permits large agricultural operations to siphon dangerously high amounts of water out of the state’s rivers, and that DHEC’s guidelines violate a 2010 law regulating water levels on the state’s rivers and streams.
The Southern Environmental Law Center, representing Friends of the Edisto, American Rivers and the South Carolina Wildlife Federation, filed the petition in December 2023.
The groups contend that DHEC’s “Safe Yield” policy permits large farms to withdraw up to 80 percent of a river’s average annual daily flow.
That’s an amount which they say isn’t actually present in most of the state’s rivers for most of the year, functionally permitting those large agricultural operators to siphon off entire rivers.
In a Jan. 12 response to the groups’ petition, DHEC argued that the petitioners misinterpreted how the department applies its Safe Yield policy and its relationship to safe minimum river flows.
“Because it must be determined before a permit is issued or a registration is acknowledged, the Department consistently and conservatively calculates safe yield based on average annual daily flow that takes into account water availability over time,” department officials wrote in their response.
They contend their rules fall squarely within the guidance established by the Surface Water Withdrawal, Permitting Use, and Reporting Act, the law the environmental groups accused DHEC of breaking.
In its petition response, the department didn’t completely close the door to overhauling its rules.
But it contended the process should be handled through legislative action in the South Carolina General Assembly.
“In response to our petition, DHEC stuck its head in the sand and simply ignored the undisputed fact that its rules illegally allow agricultural corporations to drain our rivers completely dry,” SELC senior associate attorney Carl Brzorad wrote in an emailed statement.
“We are evaluating next steps and are determined to hold DHEC to the law passed by our elected representatives, which guarantees water in rivers for families, businesses, and wildlife downstream.”
In its initial petition, the Law Center cited comments from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which contended that DHEC’s Safe Yield Policy “could allow removal of all the water more than half the number of days in the year,” and that it lacked “any discernible sound scientific rationale.”
Similarly, the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources is quoted as saying that “there are glaring inconsistencies between the (Withdrawal) Act and Regulations,” on the exact definition of safe yield, and that “safe yield as used in the Regulations has been divorced from the concept of drought and a constraint on streamflow.”
The department said stakeholder meetings have been held to try to find an alternative method for calculating safe yield, but those meetings failed to find another method that would be a significant improvement over the current one.
Published in Post and Courier 01/18/2024