Charleston City Council set to discuss contract on downtown’s historic brick arches

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCBD) – Charleston City Council is set to discuss several stormwater drainage projects Tuesday evening.

One of those projects awaits a new contract after the previous one expired after five years. These are more well known as the historic brick arches that date back to the mid 1800s. The city uses these for drainage that goes back out into the harbor, but before they were for sewage management.

“There’s about ten miles of them underground. We’ve worked through the first couple miles of them, it’s a pretty expensive process as you’d imagine, very complicated,” Matthew Fountain, director of stormwater management, said. “It’s something you see a huge benefit per dollar, it is slow going because you’re working in major downtown streets underground. Trying to close streets and reroute traffic, but we’re trying to get to the point to where we keep making steady progress.”

This contract would be a “reestablishment” of the old contract that capped this project under a stormwater management budget.

“So, each of them is $750,000. Two of them are for cleaning and investigating them. Two of them are basically for repairing and lining the system. So once you clean you have to basically repair this old brick work which is from the 1870s so it doesn’t collapse or have other issues,” said Fountain.

However, officials said this is a preventative measure that will pay itself off in the future and they have already seen success with the work previously done.

“We’re basically taking cost savings over the next 25 to 50 years from all those emergency repairs and using it to do preventative work,” Fountain said. “We’re going to see a benefit in drainage, but it’ll basically be cost neutral over a 50-year period if we had to do all these temporary repairs, none of which would have provided stormwater drainage improvements. So it’s trying to be smart with our money.”