Excavation and land clearing across Georgetown County, SC.

Five rivers drain into Winyah Bay at Georgetown — the Sampit, the Pee Dee, the Black, the Waccamaw, and the Santee feed in via various branches. That confluence makes Georgetown County one of the most hydrologically complex pieces of geography on the Carolina coast. Most of the county sits at low elevation and has water table considerations that vary block by block depending on which river system’s floodplain a given parcel falls inside. The northern part of the county, around Pawleys Island and Murrells Inlet, is coastal beach and barrier island country. The middle, around Andrews, is inland swamp and pine forest. The south, around the city of Georgetown itself, is the working port and the brackish edge of the bay.

Georgetown the city was founded as a colonial port and has been moving cargo through the bay for more than 250 years. The International Paper mill (one of the largest in the southeast) sits on the bay just outside the city, and the working waterfront remains a meaningful part of the county economy alongside the more visible tourism and golf development on the Pawleys Island corridor. The county’s population is small (around 60,000) and most of it is concentrated in two clusters: the coastal Pawleys/Murrells area in the north and the city of Georgetown in the south, with rural land in between.

The five-river hydrology and the coastal location combine to make Georgetown County one of the more permit-heavy places to do site work on the Carolina coast. Properties close to any of the river floodplains have flood zone considerations. Properties on or near the bay or the Atlantic are subject to South Carolina coastal management oversight (the SC equivalent of NC’s CAMA, administered through the SC Department of Health and Environmental Control). And a meaningful share of the historic Georgetown port and rice plantation country has wetland delineations that have to be respected before any earth gets moved. We are not the contractor to call for the regulatory work itself — that goes through environmental consultants and surveyors — but we know to flag the likely regulatory environment during a site visit.

The practical reality of working in Georgetown County is that almost no two adjacent properties have the same hydrological situation. A lot on the north side of US-17 in Pawleys can be on stable upland with normal drainage, and the lot directly across the road can sit in the floodplain of a creek that drains into the Waccamaw and back into the bay. We have learned to walk Georgetown sites carefully and to ask questions about historical water levels before writing the quote. The crew that shows up does the same kind of work we do everywhere else, but the site assessment in this county takes longer than in any other county we cover.