Flood spawns lawsuits against dam owners, insurance companies, SCE&G and Lexington County

Four civil lawsuits were filed Thursday morning in Richland County’s state court alleging that negligence by organizations that controlled dams and drainage during the great rains of October greatly damaged the plaintiffs’ homes and, in one case, a business.

Three of the lawsuits are the first to allege negligence-caused damage in Richland County’s Gills Creek watershed and to allege that a domino effect produced by failing dams upstream caused devastating consequences downstream.

The fourth lawsuit, also filed in Richland, concerns property below the Lake Murray dam. It names two defendants: SCE&G power company and Lexington County. Although several other homeowners in the Coldstream subdivision area have sued the power company, this lawsuit is the first to name Lexington County as a defendant.

In Richland County, thousands of homes are built in the low-lying Gills Creek watershed, which has numerous interconnected lakes and streams. In the Oct. 4 rains and resultant flooding, hundreds of homes were damaged and even destroyed by the rising waters in part caused by dam failures.

Two of the three Gills Creek lawsuits also allege that the U.S. Army on nearby Fort Jackson “for years ... had been filling nearby ponds, creeks, and drainage ditches with silt and other sediment that runs off the base,” and “that negligence contributed greatly” to the flooding situation. However, the U.S. Army was not named as a defendant.

The three Gills Creek lawsuits also allege that insurance companies that separately insure each of those plaintiffs’ structures are refusing to make payments.

“The people who had no fault in bringing on the devastation are being made to bear the entire brunt of what happened,” said Columbia attorney Cam Lewis, who with attorney Pete Strom brought the four suits.

In the Coldstream suit, homeowners Lucas and Lesley Snyder are alleging that, on Oct. 4, negligence by both SCE&G and Lexington County led to two feet “of muddy water flowing throughout their home.

“The water continued to rise to the point of causing severe damage to their home, cars and property,” the lawsuit said. The couple bought their house in July 2014, the lawsuit said.

The Snyders live on Berks Court in the Irmo area, just below the power company’s Lake Murray dam and along a creek called Rawls Creek.

On Oct. 4, the sudden release of large amounts of water from Lake Murray by the power company caused Rawls Creek to back up, pushing some of its rising waters through an SCE&G pipe and drain system and onto the Snyders’ property, the lawsuit said.

The power company had advance warning of the Oct. 4 deluge and should have been releasing water from Lake Murray well in advance of that date so there would have been no massive build up of Rawls Creek, the lawsuit charges.

Lexington County is also at fault because it failed in its legal duty to maintain SCE&G’s pipe and drain system, the lawsuit alleges.

In the Gills Creek watershed lawsuits, the defendants include Cary’s Lake Homeowners Association, which allegedly owns and operates Cary Lake Dam; the North Lake Company, which allegedly owns and operates the Upper Rocky Creek, North Lake and Lower Rocky Ford dams; and Lake Elizabeth Estates, which owns and operates Lake Elizabeth dam.

The plaintiffs are James Mitchell, who lives on Rickenbaker Road; Lisa Davis, who lives on Forest Lake Place; and Greenberg Investments, a company that owns Coplon’s, a women’s clothing store on Forest Drive. All properties are downstream from Cary Lake and in the Gills Creek watershed.

According to those suits, heavy rains caused an upstream dam in northeastern Richland County, not identified by name in the suits, to break, allowing large amounts of muddy water to flow into Jackson Creek.

“This release ... was not due to a breach of the dam ...but rather due to the failed and eroded construction of the body of the dam itself, as well as a lack of maintenance to protect its integrity,” the lawsuits said.

The rising waters traveled through the Gills Creek watershed, overflowing onto Decker Boulevard and into the 56-acre Cary Lake, causing its dam to fail, the lawsuits alleged.

After the Cary Lake dam broke, “the ever increasing body of water and its ripple-effect” ran into Lake Katherine several miles south and, along the way, the dams controlled by the defendants broke, the lawsuits said.

All of the dams controlled by the Richland County defendants are classified as “highly hazardous” by the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control, meaning it they failed, there was a high risk of loss of life or property damage, the lawsuits said.

Steve Brown, president of the Cary’s Lake Homeowners Association, said Thursday he had not seen the lawsuit and, therefore, could not comment.

A spokesman for SCE&G said Thursday the power company could not comment on pending litigation.

But SCE&G did all it could within its federal operating license “to minimize the impact of the lake and river levels on area residents,” said spokesman Eric Boomhower.

Efforts to reach Lexington County council chair Johnny Jeffcoat as well as other representatives of groups that control the Richland County dams named in the lawsuits were unsuccessful Thursday. A Fort Jackson spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Lewis said he and Strom expect to bring more flood-related lawsuits in the coming weeks and months.

“These are just the first group,” Lewis said.

This story was originally published November 12, 2015 at 2:55 PM with the headline "Flood spawns lawsuits against dam owners, insurance companies, SCE&G and Lexington County."