S.C. universities collaborating with Sea Grant Consortium to study stormwater ponds

More than 14,000 stormwater ponds are estimated to have been dug for development on the coast, and more are coming. Staff Photo

Across a Lowcountry landscape where few natural inland ponds are found, more than 21,000 acres of man-made ponds now collect rainfall that otherwise would filter into the ground or run off.

More are dug every day.

Nobody fully understands yet how development stormwater ponds hurt or help the overall coastal environment, much less how to manage them. But an effort is underway to find out.

Seven research schools and agencies have agreed to work with the S.C. Sea Grant Consortium, which is seeking funds to bring a "more bang for the buck" approach to various stormwater projects underway. The idea is to collaborate on the efforts, to find answers for community concerns about the ponds.

The initiative is being launched with $200,000 in combined state and federal grants.

It's long been needed. The ponds have been installed with new buildings for a quarter century. They sequester pollution, such as gasoline, oil, pet waste, fertilizer nutrients, garbage and varnish from lawns and streets, that otherwise would run into the waterways.

But as The Post and Courier reported in July, the build-up of toxic sediment makes the ponds tougher to handle and a high-dollar hazardous substance removal job waiting to happen.

Meanwhile, marine life-killing "algal blooms," a chronic problem in the ponds, have begun to occur in the ocean along the developed Grand Strand beach.

"We don't have a good handle on the characteristics of the ponds and the elements they're bringing in. There's concern out there that people don't know what they have (with the ponds), what the responsibility is and what it means over time," said Rick DeVoe, consortium Grant director

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S.C. universities collaborating with Sea Grant Consortium to study stormwater ponds