Tackling rules allowing complete draining of South Carolina’s rivers 

Right now, South Carolina is facing dangerous and excessive heat, and more than two-thirds of its counties are under drought status.  

With climate change making summers hotter, it’s more important than ever that the state’s water resources are protected so people can cool off in our state’s waters, communities have clean water to drink, and river ecology and wildlife can thrive. 

South Carolinians’ access to clean water is being threatened by a loophole in the state environmental agency’s regulations that allows major agricultural corporations to take more water than our rivers can afford. 

Take away the water, and you no longer have a river.

Peter Raabe, American Rivers

“Take away the water, and you no longer have a river,” says Peter Raabe, Southeast Regional Director at American Rivers. “We need rivers for clean drinking water and abundant fish and wildlife. Healthy, flowing rivers benefit communities, businesses, and all of us.”

SELC is taking action to ensure that South Carolina’s streams and rivers can continue to flow. We just filed a lawsuit against the Department of Environmental Services (DES) to change its “safe yield” rules that allow major agricultural corporations to remove all the water from rivers and streams.  

“There is nothing ‘safe’ about the existing ‘safe yield’ rules. Just the opposite: they are a blank check for withdrawers to completely de-water rivers,” said Hugo Krispyn, Edisto Riverkeeper with Friends of the Edisto. 

The harms will only get worse as population growth and drier, hotter summers further strain our water resources in the coming years.

Sara Green, South Carolina Wildlife Federation

In the complaint filed on behalf of Friends of the Edisto, American Rivers, and the South Carolina Wildlife Federation, SELC asked the court to strike down the “safe yield” rules because they violate the 2010 Surface Water Withdrawal, Permitting, Use, and Reporting Act. This statute requires DES to protect river flows and restrict big water users to leave “minimum instream flows” for the people, recreation, business, small farms, and endangered wildlife that rely on abundant clean water.  

Yet the DES rules carve out a loophole for major agricultural corporations, allowing them to deplete and completely de-water South Carolina’s rivers and streams. Other state and federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, have criticized this loophole.  

“DES’s lax water protections draw interstate agriculture operations to South Carolina, where they can drain our rivers for free to the detriment of people, wildlife, and the shape and functioning of our rivers” said Sara Green, Executive Director of the South Carolina Wildlife Federation. “The harms will only get worse as population growth and drier, hotter summers further strain our water resources in the coming years.” 

The lawsuit follows a petition filed by SELC in December challenging the rules – in response, DES refused to change them.  

“We asked DES to change its illegal rules and follow the law passed by our elected representatives to protect families, businesses, and wildlife that rely on this water downstream,” says Frank Holleman, Senior Attorney at SELC. “Instead of obeying the law, DES has stuck with illegal rules that allow the complete siphoning off of our rivers and streams.”