The Dutch solution to flood control is not confined to its iconic 17th century crescent-shaped network of canals lined with skinny houses and flat houseboats that form an inner-city drainage and transportation system in Amsterdam’s historic core.

In the Netherlands, half the size of South Carolina with a third of it below sea level, the Dutch have devised modest, innovative ways to channel and capture water. Some of these basic ideas are being used today in Charleston’s flood-prone neighborhoods.

Dutch water-control experts came to Charleston in 2017 to consult with city officials. That led to a 252-page “Dutch Dialogues” report released in October 2019. Since then, it has guided Charleston’s planning as sea levels slowly rise.

For the past half century, Dutch engineers have created options beyond canals, dikes and other large infrastructure projects to store and divert stormwater, tame swollen rivers and hold back a rising North Sea.

Rain gardens, planted mostly in the newer Amsterdam neighborhoods along sidewalks, feature water-absorbing plants. Water that spills over riverbanks is impounded in low-lying areas that also double as parks and playgrounds. A new city ordinance requires developers to install rainwater storage on the roofs of new buildings to hold water that can be used to flush toilets or sprinkle plants.

“We try to capture rainwater where it falls,” said Daniel Goedbloed, program manager at Amsterdam Rainproof, a program run by Waternet, Amsterdam’s water management agency that advises households and businesses on how to handle extreme rainfall. “It’s a lot of small droplets in the city to keep the water level manageable,” Goedbloed said at the Waternet headquarters in a high-rise building overlooking the Amstel River in Amsterdam South.

The Dutch have a reason to watch water carefully: A 1953 storm killed 1,836 people. After that catastrophe, the Netherlands built a series of dikes, levees, dams and massive storm surge barriers that the American Society of Civil Engineers called one of the seven wonders of the modern world.

But Goedbloed provides a warning that a severe storm or the eventual sea level rise still could exceed Amsterdam’s ability to pump out the excess water.

“There will always be severe rainfall events that will exceed what we now are designed for,” he told the Charleston City Paper. “We are now thinking of which adaptive pathways are possible and how the Netherlands can adapt and protect itself.”

Impacts of Charleston’s Dutch Dialogues

In Charleston, Dale Morris, the city’s resilience officer, said forecasters predict the sea here will rise 14 inches by 2050. Adding 14 inches of sea level rise to major tidal flood levels in Charleston is similar to the storm surge levels from the Dec. 17 nor’easter, which could happen six to 12 times annually by 2050.

The nor’easter surge was about 4 feet above the city’s normal high tide, which coincided with 4.02 inches of rain. The combined tidal surge and drenching, he explained, worsened the flooding.

It was the city’s fourth highest storm surge. Hurricane Hugo was the highest in 1989. Morris emphasized that tropical force winds like a hurricane did not push the Dec. 17 nor’easter surge, which creates concern for future weather events.

When Dutch consultants, including Goedbloed, visited Charleston in 2017, they encouraged local planners to think differently about storm surges, rainfall and daily tides. They suggested they look to find solutions within the context of the Lowcountry’s landscape and integrate flood risk mitigation within the city’s planning, Morris said.

“The Dutch don’t have smarter engineers. The Dutch think more creatively about integrated benefits,” said Morris, who was co-director of the Dutch Dialogues workshops in Charleston. At that time, Morris, a Pittsburgh native, was an economist working with the Dutch Embassy in Washington, D.C.

Morris, Goedbloed and others were invited to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina to hold the first Dutch Dialogues in the Crescent City. Unlike New Orleans after it faced devastation, Charleston does not have to rebuild its flood-control infrastructure, Morris said.

Instead, Charleston is following the key suggestions in a Dutch Dialogues report and has incorporated portions of it into its 10-year comprehensive plan that will guide where the city should and should not build, Morris said. The report encourages the city to “eliminate, or substantially reduce, the placement of fill or other structures that decrease the infiltration and absorption performance” of flood-prone areas.

For the plan to have the force of law, however, the city is rewriting zoning ordinances for the first time since the 1960s, Morris said. The zoning update is expected in mid-2025, he added.
The Charleston Rainproof initiative, which began in 2019, was one of the first efforts from the Dutch Dialogues to introduce residents to rain gardens and other rainwater harvesting systems. The simple rain garden prevents stormwater from flowing into the city’s drainage system, which will require future infrastructure investments, Morris explained.

Ongoing projects

Charleston has flood-control projects across the city, Morris said. Some areas with initial flood control efforts include the Lockwood Corridor/Medical District downtown, Vardell’s and New Market creeks in Charleston’s Eastside, Johns Island’s Barberry Woods neighborhood, Church Creek Basin in West Ashley near the Shadowmoss subdivision, the peninsula and the coastal zones. The areas were part of the early Dutch Dialogues research where solutions created could be applied elsewhere, he said.

The city and the federal government bought homes in flood-prone sections of Church Creek in West Ashley’s Shadowmoss subdivision. The plan for the area calls for converting the low places where people once lived into a park that can also be used to store water, an approach borrowed from the Dutch. Construction is expected to start this year. On Johns Island, the city will use an unoccupied area near Barberry Woods to cut flood risk in areas with existing homes, he said.

On Charleston’s Eastside in Vardell’s Creek — in the footprint of the old Cooper River Bridge and at New Market Creek under the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge — the city will restore the marsh in those areas to improve the marsh’s ability to store more water, Morris said.

He said the city missed an opportunity to build a retention pond as recommended in the Dutch Dialogues by instead allowing development to occur in the footprint of the old Cooper River Bridge along Lee Street.

And in a controversial proposed project, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will pay 65% of the $1.3 billion cost to elevate the edges of the peninsular to support a wall that would begin near Magnolia Cemetery on the Cooper River and end at the north end of the Wagener Terrace neighborhood on the Ashley River.

The city will pay the remaining 35%, and Charleston will receive financial credit for the land it uses to build the structure, reducing its cost from $455 million to about $300 million, Morris said. The structure, if built, would block a storm surge and have pumps to remove rainwater trapped in the city, he said.

Congress has approved the wall project, but the city and the Army Corps of Engineers must “finalize a design agreement before any design and engineering can be done,” Morris explained. “Only after the design phase is completed could construction start. City Council has to approve funding for each phase.”

The storm surge structure could have multiple uses, such as a pedestrian walkway in places, a feature of the Dutch way of thinking.

“We should not have a single-purpose piece of infrastructure,” Morris warned. “Getting additional benefits from infrastructure is a more efficient use of tax dollars.”

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Next: A regional flood control plan

When Dale Morris became the city’s resilience officer in 2021, he called surrounding governments to talk about flooding. He was surprised there was no regional collaboration.
Since then, Charleston, Mount Pleasant and other local governments are supporting a $2 million grant application to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to develop a regional resilience plan. The Berkeley, Charleston and Dorchester Council of Governments applied for the money and would manage the grant. The NOAA application, he said, “is based on the plan the city is developing, and it will guide the regional resilience for the tri-county.”

Susan Lyons, chairman of Groundswell, a local grassroots advocacy group that educates the public on ways to stem flooding, welcomes a regional approach to combating flooding.

“Water knows no boundaries, and all of us are bound to have serious problems, if the predictions come true about sea level rise and continuing global warming,” said Lyons, who lives on Charleston’s west side. “We should all be talking to each other.”

Lyons said she’s encouraged that Charleston’s new mayor, Williams Cogswell, mentioned flood control in his recent inaugural address. She’s also happy that the S.C. Office of Resilience has written a statewide resilience and risk reduction plan. She said she is concerned, however, that Charleston County Council barely acknowledged flooding in a draft of its 2025-2027 Strategic Plan.

“The county does not seem to be as aggressive on the issue as compared to the city of Charleston,” she said. “That is a problem, and it is a problem in securing regional agreements.”
Lyons said she is also concerned about what effect sea level rise will have on homeowners and flood insurance for the cost of existing and new homes.

Since the Netherlands’ 1953 flood catastrophe, the Dutch government has been responsible for flood defenses and flood damage compensation. Flood insurance does not exist in the Netherlands.

“The Dutch government has chosen to self-insure against flood risk, hence the strong focus on flood prevention,” Morris said.

Charleston should not allow homes built “in areas that you know are going to flood more and more in the future,” he said. If that happens, the city would be “condemning people to lose equity in their homes,” he said. “We have to modernize our ordinances and approach development practices [differently] so we don’t have regretful situations in 20 to 30 years.”