So if you’ve been doing real estate in Myrtle Beach for like 10 seconds, you’re gonna get hit with one of these questions. “What parts of the beach flood?” Either that or “So where is it safe to buy?” I’ll answer both of those questions on the other side of the break.
Hi, my name is Lance MacMillan with Mango Homes, powered by Keller Williams Myrtle Beach. And today I’m gonna be answering the questions…you know, what areas of Myrtle Beach flood, where, where is it safe to move to? While I can’t legally answer those questions because it depends on whether the home you’re in is actually in a flood zone or not. What I can do for you is pull up my map on the computer and just give you a general overview of the area and where the waterways are. And then that’ll give you an idea. So with that said off to my computer and welcome again to my desktop. So again, this is just gonna be a real quick overview to give you an idea of the waterways around South Carolina and Myrtle Beach, and why flooding may or may not happen. So I’m gonna start at the satellite eye view right here. You’ll find Myrtle Beach here. So the reason I’m showing you this, and I wanna back out, so you can get a good view of the Caribbean here.
Everybody has seen the hurricane maps where, uh, you see the storm and you see the little arrows and it starts over here and it kind of north, sometimes it stops and gives The Bahamas hell, right? And then by the time it gets up here, it skirts along the Carolinas, or it hits the Carolinas. So let me zoom in. I wanna show you something when you zoom in, you’ll notice that if the storm track is headed north like this, or if it’s headed kind of north by Northeast, which, uh, sometimes it does, when it comes off of Miami and Daytona, Myrtle Beach kind of sits back. It’s almost like it’s dodging the blow. Uh, we do get hit by hurricanes, but, and I did the research for this. It’s actually really surprising how few direct hits we have in comparison to Charleston and Wilmington. Uh, it’s way less than you think it is. We do get indirect hits and we do get flooding, and I’m gonna show you why that matters. So let me jump to the next map because these hurricanes, if they hit, it’s either gonna auger into Charleston or it’s gonna side swipe us, and then it’s gonna hit Wilmington. We get direct hits again, but it’s not that often.
Why does that matter? Because water runs downhill. These are all of the rivers in South Carolina. And as you can tell, depending on where the storm hits, because this right up here, this is the mountains. This is the start of the Blue Ridge mountains up here. All these rivers run right downhill. They all run straight to the Atlantic ocean. And here we are right here. So you have the Waccamaw River running out of North Carolina, the Pee Dees, uh, the Lynches River, the Black River, all of these rivers run downhill and culminate here in Winyah Bay in Georgetown. And you can’t see it here, but the Intercoastal Waterway is also here. So in Myrtle Beach, let me go to the next one. You have basically two large strips of water and inland you’ll have a bunch of swamp. Okay, here we go.
So this is Horry County. I’m gonna pull up the actual flood map here in a minute, but this strip of water right here, this is the intercoastal waterway. Uh, this runs all the way from Miami up to Maine. And here is the Waccamaw River winding its way through. So as it runs downhill, you’ll notice the intercoastal goes right through downtown. The Waccamaw River runs through Conway and then cuts down past Socastee to meet up with the intercoastal waterway, both of those river start to accumulate. We’re running down past Pawleys Island and they dump into Winyah Bay.
So I hope that helps you get an overview of what goes on in Myrtle beach. Whenever the storms hit again, if you’re wondering whether a given place is in a flood zone or not, you have to actually plug the address in the flood map because you could be near the water and not necessarily be in a flood zone, or you could be what you would judge as further away from the water. And you might actually be in a flood zone. You don’t know. So always be safe and check. But again, this is just an overview. Hope this helps you guys. If you’re buying or selling, just remember Go Mango!