Posted on February 9, 2026
Local officials plan to seek help from the state’s two senators to get approval for a project that will dredge silt from over 16 miles of creeks and channels in Murrells Inlet.
Georgetown County applied to the Army Corps of Engineers in 2023 for a permit to dredge over 750,000 cubic yards of material and pump it to a nearshore disposal site off Huntington Beach State Park. The county started planning the project in 2019.
The county councils in Georgetown and Horry counties are working on a letter to Sen. Lindsay Graham and Sen. Tim Scott to “move the needle on the federal side,” said Clint Elliott, who chairs the Georgetown County Council. “The permit should have been issued a year ago.”
At issue is the nearshore disposal site. The Corps has pumped sand from dredging projects in the federal channel onto the beach at Garden City and the state park. Silt from a county-funded project in 2016 was pumped into geotextile tubes, dried and hauled away. That’s too expensive for the project the county is now planning.
Since the permit was filed, the Corps has sought additional information about the disposal site. The county said in the permit application that the site would be designed to make sure silt and clay don’t wash up on adjacent beaches.
“They keep coming back and asking for different stuff. They’re basically stalling,” Elliott said.
State Rep. Lee Hewitt said he has been in touch with Graham’s office and U.S. 7th District Rep. Russell Fry.
“The people in Murrells Inlet, they’re almost getting angry,” Hewitt said of the delay.
In 2024, they completed a maintenance dredging of the federal channel, pumping sand onto the beach. Members of a committee created by County Council as part of its update of the county’s beachfront management plan hope that sand from the county dredging project can also be placed on the beach. They also want the Corps to evaluate the effectiveness of the north jetty, which was designed to keep sand carried in the current along the beachfront from migrating into the inlet.
“Those weirs are too low. They’re not doing what they were designed to do,” said Elliott, who sits on the committee. “We need to get the Corps back out there and have a look at them.”
The jetty that stabilizes the north side of the entrance to Murrells Inlet has a low weir in the middle and a deposition basin above it that is supposed to trap the migrating sand.
“It’s not working,” Elliott said. “Maybe it was doing it for awhile.”
Property owners in the Inlet Harbour community at the south end of Garden City proposed a beach renourishment project in 2020 that would have removed some sand from the deposition basin, but it was dropped. Georgetown County included $2 million from its capital project sales tax to install two groins near Inlet Harbour to help trap sand on the beach.
That is a contingency project and not guaranteed to get funding.
“It’s so far down the list, I don’t know if it will ever get there,” said Schiff Johnston, who represents Garden City on the beach committee.
A little over a mile of Garden City in Georgetown County is part of a federal beach renourishment project now underway that starts in North Myrtle Beach. That leaves out almost two miles of beach.
“Some of the most dire portions of Georgetown County area they’re going to avoid,” Johnston said.
That’s why it’s important to get any sand dredged from the inlet onto the beach, he said.
But Elliott said the county doesn’t want to alter the permit for the dredging project at this stage of the process.
“Pumping sand to the beach would be great,” he said. “We’ve been fighting for this permit for so long we don’t want to monkey with this permit.”
