Recently I was fortunate enough, or unfortunate enough, depending on how you look at it, to sit in on discussions concerning withdrawals and allocating surface waters of the state of South Carolina. The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (SCDHEC) and other government agencies, municipalities, hydrogeologists, the energy and paper industries, agriculture, non-governmental organizations like the Nature Conservancy, Edisto Riverkeeper and Friends of the Edisto, and American Rivers, held several workshops in the year 2020. We heard comments and discussions on the current withdrawal and safe yield standards and captured views from these different disciplines. In layman’s terms, SCDHEC is seriously looking at the state’s surface water policies, regulations, and permitting standards regarding the health of the environment and the over-allocating or over-permitting of South Carolina’s surface water. The idea is that overdrawing surface water will negatively affect the health of South Carolina’s water bodies.
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