Concerns rise with the seas: protecting coast, while facing realities

December 7 , 2006, The State
by Sammy Fretwell

CHARLESTON — In the summer of 2004, a married couple became ill from eating a toxin-polluted barracuda that had been caught off the South Carolina coast.

Never before had anyone caught a fish in South Carolina waters and gotten sick from ciguatera poisoning, a malady normally associated with species in Caribbean waters, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But rising ocean temperatures are sending tropical fish, and potentially new hazards, into the South Atlantic’s temperate waters, experts said Wednesday.

The episode provides a chilling example of why South Carolina — a coastal state with a booming tourism industry — needs to address global warming, rising sea levels and their associated impacts, scientists and public policy analysts said at a conference.

“There is going to be suffering,” said Strachan Donnelley, president of the Center for Humans and Nature. “This is a time of real crisis ... that is going to call upon the best in us.”

The conference, which attracted nearly 200 people, was co-sponsored by the Center for Humans and Nature and the Heinz Center. The Heinz Center, a Washington, D.C. organization, is developing a strategy to help communities across the country address sea-level rise, which is associated with global warming.

By some estimates, sea level is expected to rise anywhere from one to three feet on South Carolina’s 180-mile-long coast in the next century. The phenomenon is believed to be caused by higher global temperatures, which are melting sea ice and heating the ocean.

In addition to previously unreported diseases in recreational fish, South Carolinians can expect global warming and sea-level rise to cause:

• Higher insurance rates on coastal property
• The ocean to extend 100 feet or more inland.
• Eroding and dying salt marshes, the nursery grounds for seafood
• An increase in blooms of harmful algae

Bluffton Mayor Hank Johnston said state policymakers and many local officials aren’t focused enough on the issue and need more information. One way to combat rising sea levels is controlling greenhouse gases that heat the earth’s atmosphere, experts said.

Braxton Davis, a scientist with the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control’s coastal office, said the state faces major challenges in how to manage beaches and wetlands. The state’ s beach management law calls for a gradual “retreat” of new development from the seashore, but building pressures continue from Cherry Grove to Hilton Head Island.

Jim Morris, director of USC’s Baruch Institute, said some salt marshes could erode noticeably or disappear in the next century, as they have done in coastal Louisiana.

“We’ve seen evidence that our marshes have not kept up with recent rates of sea-level rise,” Morris said.