Dam bursts in Aiken County after heavy rainfall; officials watching second dam
A privately owned dam broke in Aiken County on Monday afternoon after hours of steady rainfall, damaging one home and leaving residents and authorities on alert as they monitor the next dam downstream.
The Aiken County Sheriff’s Department responded to a report of the dam breach along Richardson’s Lake Road just after 2 p.m., according to sheriff’s spokesman Capt. Eric Abdullah.
Water covered the road at one point, and the pond has completely drained, Abdullah said.
One nearby home was damaged by water from the breached pond, and those residents also lost a couple of cars, Abdullah said.
No injuries have been reported, and there have been no mandatory home evacuations at this point, Abdullah said.
However, authorities are closely monitoring a nearby pond where the water has drained with concerns that its dam could break, too.
“The ground is so saturated, we’re not sure if it’s going to give way or if it’s going to hold. But there’s a lot of water that’s been dumped into this adjoining pond,” Abdullah said.
As of around 4:30 p.m., that pond’s banks were intact but overflowing, Abdullah said.
Richardson’s Lake Road, which had been washed over by water from the breached pond, has since reopened. But transportation officials are monitoring the condition of the road to ensure it remains safe, Abdullah said. He encouraged anyone who does not need to drive on that road to avoid the area.
Nearly 3 inches of rain have fallen in the Aiken area since Sunday morning, according to Chris Rohrbach, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Columbia. More than an inch and a half fell since midnight Monday.
Such heavy rainfall is “pretty uncommon this time of year,” Rorhbach said.
Rain in the Aiken area was tapering off by late afternoon. The heaviest rainfall was moving east toward the Midlands and the Pee Dee regions heading into the evening and Monday night.
The rainfall hasn’t been as heavy as early October 2015, when more than a foot of rain fell in a short amount of time in the Columbia area and other areas of South Carolina, causing severe flooding.
Those floods caused about three dozen state-regulated dams to break across South Carolina. Dozens of dams not regulated by DHEC also breached in the storm. Most of the dams broke in the Columbia area.
