Loading...
Ground-water resources of Richland County, South Carolina
Newcome, Roy South Carolina Land, Water, and Conservation Division
Newcome, Roy
South Carolina Land, Water, and Conservation Division
Abstract
Richland County, in central South Carolina, obtains nearly all of its public and industrial water supplies from the City of
Columbia water system, which processes 62 million gallons per day from the Broad River at Columbia and Lake Murray on the
Saluda River just west of the city. The Fall Line, on which Columbia is located, divides the county’s physiography and hydrogeology into two parts. The
northwestern third is in the Piedmont, with its igneous and metamorphic bedrock exposed; and the remainder is in the Coastal
Plain, which comprises sand-and-clay formations. Ground-water availability and quality in the two areas are greatly different.
In the bedrock area, water wells generally are several hundred feet deep and have low yields, commonly less than 10 gallons
per minute. The water is usually alkaline, moderate in total mineralization, and hard. In contrast, wells in the Coastal Plain
aquifers are capable of much larger yields—depending on location, as much as 2,000 gallons per minute. The water is acidic,
extremely low in mineral content, and has almost no hardness; it frequently is within the range of rainwater’s chemical quality.
Wells in the bedrock are widely used for domestic water supplies in the northwestern part of Richland County. Of more than
900 wells drilled in the county in the years 2001-02, one-third were bedrock wells.
Wells in the Coastal Plain sediments are used for domestic and small-irrigation supplies and, in the southern end of the
county, for industrial supplies. In the Eastover area, several large industrial and farm-irrigation wells pump 2,000 gallons per
minute or more. The county, below the Fall Line, has considerable additional ground-water supply potential. Its development is
somewhat restricted, in places, by exceedingly deep water levels that reduce the drawdown available to wells in certain aquifer
zones.
Issue Date
2003-10-23
Keywords
Groundwater--South Carolina--Richland County
Type
Text
Rights
Copyright status determined to be in the public domain on April 27, 2020 by United States Supreme Court ruling (Georgia et al., Petitioners v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc. : 590 U.S.__(2020))
Digitization Specifications
This South Carolina State Document was either saved from a document available publicly online in PDF format or converted to PDF using Adobe Acrobat DC.