It’s hard not to notice the bittersweet wistfulness in a name like Huckleberry Creek; how much it sounds like the echo of a time and place that probably never actually existed, but feels like it should. Or could.
This is where Edward and Tracey Phillips bought their retirement home in 2018, not far from where the Pee Dee River courses through this verdant corner of Cheraw.
The Phillipses had escaped the working life, but they’d also escaped the endless storms that plagued them in Florida – and the gigantic flood insurance premiums that came with living where the runoff of soaking storms posed persistent threats to homeowners.
When the couple found the home in Cheraw, Edward says, it was exactly what he and Tracey had wanted – a grand country home with a porch, ringed in stately trees, with deer and opossums and songbirds and tranquility to spare.
Phillips did his homework. He studied the area; studied the house. It wasn’t in a flood zone. The previous owners had done a lot of work on the house.
All was great, until Hurricane Florence – a 2018 storm that lingered over South Carolina for so long and dumped so much rain on the state that dams broke and communities far inland washed out. The storm sent its wrath over the rim of the Pee Dee River and rushing down Huckleberry Creek.
The water came up to the floor in the Phillips' new home, washed out the shed out back (and several expensive tools), and saturated the ground enough to cause trouble in the foundation.
What, at least, the stormwaters didn’t bring was polychlorinated biphenyl – PCB, the toxic byproduct of industrial waste wrought by a long-gone materials manufacturer upstream.
This is what has turned the charmingly named Huckleberry Creek into an EPA Superfund site – which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was in the process of remediating when Florence hit.
There have been numerous lawsuits and legal actions filed in connection with the contamination, but Phillips at least was not affected by it. He had a soil sample specialist from Clemson University come out to test the ground and was told his property had not been contaminated.
But the potential for toxic chemicals to be washed into Phillips’ living room was enough to make him and Tracey want to find an answer.
The couple – along with eight other households near Huckleberry Creek – found it through the South Carolina Office of Resilience’s Mitigation Buyout Program. This is a voluntary program by which owners of especially flood-prone property in six communities around the state can take a buyout and use the money to find literal higher ground. The program aims to remove at-risk or flood-beleaguered homeowners from harm’s way and from crippling flood insurance premiums and repairs.
Nancy Miramonte, SCOR’s Buyout Program manager, says that as storm frequency – and the amounts of rain they drop – increases, and as new residents unfamiliar with the realities of living in certain flood-prone regions look for an escape from the stress of seeing rainclouds form near their homes, more homeowners in South Carolina are contacting the agency.
“More people want to come in and be part of the buyout,” Miramonte says. “They see what's happening in their community and they don't want to boat up to their cars that they had to park half a mile up the street.”
The only thing keeping more homeowners from taking advantage of the Buyout Program, she says, is history.
“There are a lot of homeowners who have ties to their community,” she says. “Maybe that was their grandmother's place [where] they were born. The house may not be livable because it has been damaged in past floods … but a lot of people don't want to lose the rights to their land. And we understand that.”
At the same time, Miramonte says SCOR is seeing a lot of people coming in “because they are so eager to get out of the flooding.”
Once the state buys the property, Miramonte says, the structures are usually demolished and the land is put under state protection that forbids new construction. No houses near Huckleberry Creek have yet been demolished, but razing is expected to begin over the coming weeks.
Of the six communities in the state eligible for SCOR buyouts – Cheraw, Horry County, Bennettsville, Darlington County, Nichols (in Marion County), and Dillon County – Cheraw is the smallest in terms of the number of eligible properties. Horry County is the largest, and this is where Miramonte says demolitions of flood-beleaguered houses and the subsequent re-flooding of the places where those houses used to be are becoming their own type of advertisement for the SCOR Buyout Program.
“New people moved into their homes and they weren't aware of the flooding,” she says. “Maybe they're from out of state and as soon as they start talking to their neighbors [or] see pictures of past damage, they'll go straight to their community leaders [and ask], ‘How can I get in this buyout?’”
As for Cheraw, Town Manager Rob Wolfe says the city has set limits on building in floodplains as a way to keep development out of the path of river water, contaminated or not. This kind of planning is vital, says Jenny Brennan, a climate analyst working on climate change policy and resilience and adaptation at the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charleston.
“We've got a lot of people moving to the area, and, obviously, housing affordability is a big problem,” Brennan says. “But at the same time, we've got to be able to figure out ways to build new housing without putting more people at risk and in these really vulnerable areas. That's only going to put a burden, of course, on the people who are moving in those households as well as the local government.”
The rub here is that people like to live near the water.
“The places that are the most dangerous to live in terms of natural disaster are the highest demand for where people want to be,” says Wolfe, who studied disaster mitigation as part of his master’s in public administration from Clemson. “That's pretty powerful to overcome. There’s no easy solution.”
Especially not with the kind of money at stake with premium real estate, which is exactly what much of South Carolina is becoming.
Brennan says that municipal and county leaders need to make sure they stay ahead of pressures from developers who want to give new residents what they might be asking for, without knowing what they’re getting into.
“The developer tends to get out before any problems arise, so they're not incentivized to be really be proactive in most circumstances,” Brennan says. “It'd be great if [that push] could come from within the development community, recognizing the risk, but also, governments [must] to be able to take a firmer stance that we're not going to continue to put people in these areas.”
Back on Huckleberry Creek, Edward Phillips says he’s finally able to relax, having managed to put the stress of flood damage and flood premiums behind him. This is no small statement coming from a man who had a heart attack from the stresses of his life in Florida.
Today, Phillips and his wife live on top of a bluff overlooking Huckleberry Creek. If he opens his back door, the house he and Tracey once bought as a dream is at the bottom of the hill, barely 150 feet away.
For Phillips, now officially retired, having the new home, far above the floodplain, but still in this same corner of Chesterfield County, is what he’s been looking for.
“I needed to find a happy spot,” he says.
But he's still wistful about what might have been on Huckleberry Creek.
