Charleston completes $198M drainage project along Crosstown

MORNING HEADLINES | Charleston city leaders on Monday celebrated the completion of its U.S. 17 Highway drainage project along the Spring Street and Fishburne Street corridor, marking a milestone in efforts to reduce flooding along the Crosstown and surrounding neighborhoods.

The project includes the William Dudley Gregorie Pump Station, which can move 360,000 gallons of water per minute into the Ashley River. That’s the equivalent of draining an Olympic-sized swimming pool in under two minutes, one official said.

“The pump station is just the tip of the iceberg. The vast majority of the project is underground,” said Steve Kirk, a stormwater project management practice lead, told reporters. “We’ve got about a mile and a half of tunnel, 12 feet and 8 feet in diameter. We’ve got 18,000 linear feet of new pipes, new boxes that extends throughout the Spring and Fishburne Street drainage basins.”

The network serves more than 500 acres, covering about 20% of the peninsula, he said. It is designed to keep the U.S. Highway 17 corridor passable during most storms. And while it won’t eliminate flooding in Charleston, it should help water drain from streets faster, reducing the depth and duration of flooding, he added.

Charleston Mayor William Cogswell said the project is part of a broader effort to address flooding throughout Charleston.

“Water is not something that you can just deal with here because it’ll then go over here,” Cogswell said. “So you have to work on a system that addresses it holistically.”

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