Criminal Defense Attorney in Whitemarsh Island, GA.

When Hurricane Irma hit Savannah in 2017, Betsy Cain's house on the back side of Wilmington Island flooded. In videos from the day, water laps at the back of her house while her neighbor's dock bobs and floats away like a wooden marsh monster.

Being close to the tidal range, watching the coastline and the movement of the water, Cain said the house is an inspiration for her artwork. She's lived there for decades, and she said she understands it's a choice to stay put despite the house's precarious location. She said the county has offered to buy her out of the property, but she and her husband turned down the offer.

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Coastal residents are plenty used to storms and flooding, and with Tropical Sorm Ian on the horizon many are battening down the hatches for the rising water level. Some of those residents, like Cain, have taken extra measures such as raising their houses to prepare for future storms.

"We've been there since 1993," Cain said, "and never had any flooding until Irma." She said they'd always had high tides and king tides — during one king tide, she said she and her husband kayaked in their yard — but her "beautifully sited" little house on the side of the marsh hadn't experienced major flooding until 2017.

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When Hurricane Irma arrived, a combination of high tide waters and the storm inundated Cain's house. She said the community really supported her after the damage to her house, but for a year, she and her husband were out of their house while it was renovated for damages. In 2018, they began the process to apply for a FEMA grant to lift their house out of the water's way.

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"We've been in the process of (lifting the house) since last March, it's been very slow going, but with this storm we don't anticipate water coming into our house unless there's a 16-foot storm surge," Cain joked. Right now, the house is lifted over 10 feet, but the lifting job hasn't been completely finished yet.

'It's called Lowcountry for a reason': Expert anticipates coastal flooding

Hurricane Ian has already caused severe damages as it passes through the Caribbean and Florida, but Enki Research's Chuck Watson, a Savannah-based hazards researcher and hurricane expert, said Savannah doesn't look like it will get the worst of the storm.

"The Lowcountry ... it's called that for a reason," Watson said. Much of Savannah is surrounded by tidal creeks and marshes, and it's hard for people to grasp how much water gets stored in those marshes at high tide. For the same reason Savannah had trouble with Irma and other winter storms over the years, Watson said Hurricane Ian has wind blowing out of the east onshore causing the water to stack up and store in the marshes. When the storm does come, the tide will already be seasonally high, causing larger flooding.

"If you look at the tide gauges, it just starts ramping up every tide cycle. More and more water gets pumped in but can't quite get pumped out," Watson said. Looking at the Fort Pulaski tide gauge, he said tomorrow's high tide around noon should be around 8 feet, but instead will have an extra two feet of water, putting the tide around 10 feet high.

Around 10 feet is when Highway 80 starts to flood, and the water creeps up on low-lying areas like Tybee and Wilmington Island.

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Winds could reach sustained tropical storm force (39-73 mph) on the islands, but in Savannah it'll be gusty without sustained winds. With the rains starting Thursday night, Watson expects urban flooding that Savannah usually sees during a heavy rainstorm — "They call it Waters Avenue for a reason."

When the main winds from Hurricane Ian arrive Friday morning, Watson said there's a potential to get three or four feet above the normal high tide.

He estimates Friday's high tide around 11 feet and, in context, he said Hurricane Matthew brought a high tide of 12 feet. While there will be flooding in marsh-front properties and low lying areas, he said this storm is not shaping up to be as bad as past storms like Matthew and Irma.

As for Caine, in anticipation of Ian, she is still preparing for her yard to flood. Yet, there's some comfort in knowing the house won't be inundated now that it's been raised. She said she knows, and doesn't feel like, their house is invincible — they still have an old roof that needs work — but she said they feel "halfway secure."

Marisa Mecke is an environmental journalist. She can be reached at mmecke@gannett.com or by phone at (912) 328-4411.

WILMINGTON ISLAND, Ga. (WTOC) - As Tybee Island continues to sort out how to manage short term vacation rentals in the city, other islands are seeing the same kind of debate over residents who have lived there for a long time and new investors looking to capitalize on desirable locations.

In years past, it hasn’t been uncommon for people that work on Tybee Island to live in less expensive places nearby, like Wilmington Island. However, people that live on Wilmington say that scenario is becoming less common, because it’s becoming more expensive to live there.

“With the investments, these corporations, all these investment corporations buying up all the property and raising the mortgages and rents so high, I think it’s hard for regular people. Police, fire, nurses, waiters, I mean, how are they supposed to live?” Wilmington Island Resident Ellen Gross said.

It’s a growing problem on the Island one that Chatham County is aware of. 4th District Commissioner Patrick Farrell says they have to respect the rights of people or investment firms that want to buy property but they’re doing what they can to mitigate costs for long-term residents.

“We rolled back the millage rate in the unincorporated tax, and the countywide tax, so we’re doing our part to keep costs down for property owners,” 4th District Chatham County Commissioner Patrick Farrell said.

Even if people can afford to buy a home that doesn’t mean there’s a home to buy. Gross says her neighborhood used to be full of families but now many of the houses sit vacant.

“There are three houses on this street that I think have been bought by investors. They’ve been empty for months or sometimes even years, and I think people are just putting a little money in them and either reselling them or renting them out,” Gross said.

Some homes on the island have also been turned into short term vacation rentals.

The State of Georgia now takes a hotel/motel tax from STVR’s and Chatham County is adding its own regulations.

“The County requires anyone operating in that mode with the home to get a business license, so the County is aware of who they are and who’s the contact person,” Farrell said.

Tybee Island currently has a moratorium in place on vacation rentals, but there’s currently nothing like that in place here on Wilmington Island or any of the other islands surrounding it.

Copyright 2022 WTOC. All rights reserved.

Wanda and David Scott fell in love with their Whitemarsh Island property separately more than three decades ago, each finding the charming 1938 marsh-front home on their own and rushing to tell the other of their discovery. They bought the house and moved here from Liberty County. The couple raised their three boys here, and now it’s where they continue to operate their marine survey business.

As they walk out to their dock on a warm winter morning, it’s clear how in sync they are, not just with each other but with also this property on Richardson Creek.

Their shoes crunch on the dock’s causeway, an old-fashioned access grandfathered in from a time before the state enacted marsh regulations.

It’s a feature that makes the couple even more in touch than most coastal Georgians with how the water has been creeping up over the years. They plan dock parties around the tides so guests won’t get their feet wet. Lately the usual handful of impassable times turned to a long stretch.

“We had king tides and we had 75 days where every day this was flooded,” David said. "Seventy-five days in a row on high tides.“

And they have concerns that go deeper. Literally. Septic systems lie under the neighborhood yards, including the Scotts’. Halfway along her gravel walkway out to their dock, Wanda turned to look at their backyard, green with winter rye grass.

“It seems it makes sense to me that if septic is this close to the marsh and the marsh floods at high tide more regularly now, then ... a part of the septic is (in the) outflow.“

Septic, septic everywhere

The integrity of septic in the face of sea level rise is not just a concern for Whitemarsh Island. In Georgia’s six coastal counties, state officials have identified almost 60,000 septic systems, both disused and active.

Over the last decade, University of Georgia Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant compiled a comprehensive, electronic inventory of these septic systems to help locate and manage failing systems that threaten water quality. The publicly available inventory, called Welstrom, also serves as a resource for understanding private wastewater infrastructure.

Chatham County has the most coastal septic with over 12,000 documented, but these systems blanket the coast, servicing everything from mobile homes to mansions. On tony ocean-front Sea Island, 97 septic systems serve what real estate database Zillow reports is the highest priced zip code in Georgia, boasting a median home price of $2.4 million. Some of these tanks and drain fields are just steps from the beach.

How climate change threatens to overflow toilets

Septic systems send a household’s waste water — from the sinks, toilets, showers, the washing machine and dishwasher — into a buried water-tight tank in the yard. There the solids settle and the liquid wastewater flows into a nearby drain field where soil microbes treat it as it percolates through, ultimately discharging to groundwater or rivers and streams if they’re close by.

“To function adequately, you have to maintain a certain level of separation between the septic drain field and the groundwater table so that the effluent flowing to the drain field has space to percolate through the soil and be treated by all the microbes in there,” said Scott Pippin, a faculty member with the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government.

As climate change accelerates sea level rise, the groundwater is rising, too, along the coast. Global sea level has risen by about 8 inches since reliable record keeping began in 1880, according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment Report. It is projected to rise another 1 to 4 feet by the year 2100.

That means coastal septic systems are getting squeezed. Especially vulnerable are the drain fields, which require a few feet of dry soil separating them from the water table to filter pollutants.

“And as the groundwater table rises, that separation is going to be limited,” Pippin said. “So the first impact is going to be less treatment of the effluent that comes out of the septic systems. So that's going to translate potentially into pollution transmitted to drinking water wells and other water resources that are nearby, but also into surface waters and wetlands and streams and beaches and places like where people might encounter it and have public health impacts.”

Sewers vs. better septic

There are solutions. Septic can work well to manage wastewater. It can be improved where sea level rise is encroaching on it. And sewer lines can be brought in where appropriate.

But coastal residents first have to recognize the problem, as some already have.

Wanda Scott noted where neighbors had improved their septic. A mound of earth in one front yard raises that drainage field a few feet above the high water, giving more room for filtering. It’s a solution more coastal counties are turning to.

She also pointed out a new development called Turner’s Pointe in the southeast part of the neighborhood. No septic there.

"In order to develop that property, the developer had to tap into the sewage lift station and that's on the other side of Highway 80,“ she said.

That’s another solution, though sewerage is also susceptible to the effects of sea level rise.

"Failing septic system is a relatively discrete source of pollution, but a cracked sewer pipe can be a much larger scale,“ Pippin said. ”So they're rarer, but they're bigger. And so it's a trade-off of risk that you're taking on.“

Nearby Wilmington Island saw the downside of that trade before Christmas when heavy rains overflowed a sanitary sewer, causing a major sewage spill of 60,000 gallons about a third of a mile from the Wilmington River.

The Scotts and their neighbors view Richardson Creek as their backyard playground, a place to crab and fish, even a gathering place. Every Fourth of July they jump off a nearby bridge together and enjoy a group float. The thought of human waste in the water appalls. They’ve been organizing to do regular water testing before it becomes a problem they can see or smell.

And it can get to that, said Jason Evans, interim director for the Institute for Water and Environmental Resilience at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida. Evans worked on a climate resilience plan for Tybee when he was at UGA. Now in Florida he’s seen that state’s septic problems flow into local waterways, like in Oak Hill, Florida.

“I was just out there about six months ago and I was in this canal,” he said. “And you could actually smell the human waste because of the failing septic tanks. And so that's a really extreme situation there.”

This story, which is part of an occasional series, was produced in partnership with Georgia Public Broadcasting with a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center as part of its national Connected Coastlines project.

This article was reported by Savannah Morning News reporter Mary Landers and Emily Jones of GPB. Contact them at mlanders@savannahnow.com and ejones@gpb.org.

Connected Coastlines is a nationwide climate reporting initiative in U.S. coastal states. The initiative is building a consortium of newsrooms and independent journalists across America to report on the local effects of erratic weather patterns on coastal populations using the latest climate science.

Currently, the Pulitzer Center is supporting 16 reporting projects and will cover climate change issues on every coastline in the mainland U.S. — the East Coast, Great Lakes, Gulf Coast and West Coast—along with Hawaii and Alaska. See the ongoing work at http://bit.ly/connectedcoast.

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WILMINGTON ISLAND, Ga (WSAV)- Wilmington Island Farmers Market with DONATOS Pizza on Saturday.

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