Homeowners worry erosion of ‘Cayce Canyon’ threatens to swallow their backyards
Karen Dawkins has lived in her small house at the end of Cayce’s M Avenue for 30 years. She remembers when a small stream ran behind the house that her children would hop over to play in the woods that stretched toward the Congaree River.
Now when she looks out at her backyard, it slopes down toward a leaning wire fence on the edge of a precipice. Below, what was once a small stream emanating from a drainage pipe running under nearby Axtell Drive has become a 20-foot deep ravine that has eroded away her property little by little, year by year.
It’s such a noticeable part of the landscape, she and her neighbors have given it a less-than-loving nickname.
“We call it Cayce Canyon,” Dawkins said.
Once a small stream, the “canyon” now forms such a sheer drop behind her house that Dawkins suggests she could hide an 18-wheeler in it.
The stream, running under a city baseball field and American Legion post across Axtell from the short dead-end of M Avenue, exits a pipe and continues through decaying woods and another pipe under an entrance to the Three Rivers Greenway.
Tommy Spires, who lives next door to Dawkins where the pipe enters the canyon, said he’s seen a foot and a half of land drop off the back of his property in the six years his family has lived there. Utility workers recently moved a pole five feet further into his yard to keep it away from the side of the ditch.
Spires believes the angle of the pipe, pointing toward his back fence, has made the erosion worse.
“It’s shooting water toward my property,” he said. “When there’s a heavy rain the water shoots up the side like a spout aimed at my house.”
Behind a pontoon boat parked in the yard, a vine-covered chain-link fence hangs precariously over the water, only a thin stream on a recent sunny day. At one point in the fence line, the ground had given way under a metal fence pole, leaving only a concrete stub at the base dangling in mid-air.
Spires says he can’t let his children, ages 4 and 2, play in the backyard, for fear they might fall into the ditch.
At the other end of the street, Wayne Mathias’s backyard includes a shed and an out-building that houses his son’s tool-repair business. Both sit along a fence line that borders on the ditch he fears threatens to swallow them. He doesn’t have insurance on the property, and like the other residents worries he wouldn’t be able to sell his house.
“If it washes away, who’s going to buy it?” Mathias asked. “You’ve got to tell (a buyer) what the situation is, or you could go to jail.”
The city has studied what to do about the issue. A preliminary review last year by American Engineering Consultants determined the existing channel dates back to the 1950s, but that development over the years in the Avenues neighborhood has “resulted in increased stormwater flow.”
“The changes that have occurred in the amount of stormwater runoff have been incremental over many years, but have resulted in natural drainage channels that are over capacity,” the engineering firm wrote in its evaluation. “Because the subject drainage ditch is significantly over capacity, widespread damage can be observed.”
The study did not suggest what could be done about the issue or how much money would be needed to fix the problem, and suggested a more detailed engineering evaluation would be needed.
Dawkins said she’s reached out to every local, state and federal agency she could think of that might be able to address the situation. She even found an assessment from the S.C. Department of Natural Resources from 1995 that flagged the potential for “substantial erosion problems.”
But without mentioning a dollar amount, DNR also warned that potential fixes — installing a bulkhead or converting the ditch to an underground culvert — could prove “extremely costly.”
The city is looking for funding for a comprehensive approach to all of its stormwater issues, which officials estimate will cost $23 million in total. The first phase is already under construction at Guignard Park along Knox Abbott Drive. Once completed, the city hopes that culvert will collect more water from the Avenues.
Mayor Elise Partin said Cayce seeks funding from many different sources to pay for stormwater improvements, but funding will have to come from state and federal sources or from grants when they become available.
The city has the least ability to generate tax revenue of any entity involved, Partin said, “So there need to be other sources.”
Dawkins said she argued down the 2020 tax assessment on her house, pointing out the continuing erosion that she says has cost her about 10 feet of her property.
“It’s unusuable,” she says of her backyard now. “You couldn’t build an out-building or a pool or anything back there.”
Dawkins is retired now with her kids sent off to college, but whatever plans she had after 30 years on M Avenue are hampered by the difficulty of trying to sell a home that’s wearing away year after year.
“I couldn’t buy another house,” she said. “I’m stuck.”
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