On This Date: An Epic South Carolina Flood Not (Directly) From Hurricane Joaquin Jonathan ErdmanOctober 3, 2025 at 5:00 AM 0 It doesn't always take a hurricane, or even a tropical storm, to produce a historic flood. From Oct.
- - On This Date: An Epic South Carolina Flood Not (Directly) From Hurricane Joaquin
Jonathan ErdmanOctober 3, 2025 at 5:00 AM
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It doesn't always take a hurricane, or even a tropical storm, to produce a historic flood.
From Oct. 1-5, 2015, 10 years ago this week, one of the most prolific rainfall events in modern U.S. history caused catastrophic flooding that claimed 19 lives in South Carolina.
Ten to 20 inches of rainfall was common across South Carolina. Nine of the state's 46 counties picked up over 20 inches of rain in that five-day period, including Mount Pleasant (27.15 inches) and Charleston's Clark Sound (23.76 inches).
Countless water rescues were conducted, and almost 50 dams were breached. The capital city of Columbia was left without water for days after the Columbia Canal breached due to the swollen Congaree River.
River flooding followed for weeks. The Santee River in Jamestown, South Carolina, was still above flood stage in mid-December.
NOAA estimated total damage from this flood of $2.7 billion. Up to 160,000 homes were estimated to have sustained at least some damage from the floods.
The record rainfall was caused by a combination of a stalled upper-level area of low pressure and distant Hurricane Joaquin, which combined to feed tropical moisture into the state like a firehose, as the satellite image below shows.
Almost three years later, some of these same areas would be swamped by torrential rainfall from Hurricane Florence, which set all-time state tropical cyclone rain records in both North Carolina (35.93 inches) and South Carolina (23.63 inches).
Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been covering national and international weather since 1996. Extreme and bizarre weather are his favorite topics. Reach out to him on Bluesky, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.
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