By Molly Parker

The extra 10 million gallons of water needed daily to support two booming North Carolina bedroom communities outside Charlotte, N.C., isn’t likely to leave South Carolina high and dry, at least not anytime soon, even though the two states share access to the Catawba River basin.

But you might call South Carolina’s lawsuit against North Carolina a “matter of principle,” said Jeff Allen, director of the South Carolina Water Resources Center at the Strom Thurmond Institute of Government and Public Affairs at Clemson University. “It’s kind of the slippery slope argument of, ‘If we allow them to do this now, they’re going to want to keep going.’”

The water war between the two states escalated in June, when S.C. Attorney General Henry McMaster petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to interfere in the dispute.

Officials representing both states attempted to reach an agreement outside the court over use of the shared river, but those efforts apparently stalled when North Carolina’s Environmental Management Commission approved the request for the municipalities of Concord and Kannapolis to siphon the extra water they needed to support their population growth.

The Catawba River flowing through the heart of this debate originates in the mountains of North Carolina and snakes for nearly 200 miles before heading toward the Charlotte area, and then across the state line near Rock Hill.

The riparian water laws that dominate the eastern region of the country require governments to share access to the supply, as opposed to the “first-come, first-serve” laws more typical of the west, Allen said.

In its lawsuit, South Carolina is arguing that North Carolina is usurping its supply, which could harm “the generation of hydroelectric power, economic development and commerce, and recreation,” the attorney general’s office wrote in its plea to the court.

But the real rub seems to lie in the fact that North Carolina did not ask.

Bud Badr, chief hydrologist with the S.C. Department of Natural Resources, said the state would like to be involved in decisions North Carolina makes pertaining to the river to ensure that the people living downstream get their fair share of the flow.  

“In a nutshell, we want to establish some sort of commission with some teeth, not just a nice picture-and-shaking-hands sort of thing, but a commission (with) equal representation between North Carolina and South Carolina.”
Badr said the transfer may not have an impact during normal and above-normal flow conditions, but noted that water levels did slip dangerously low several years ago.