Santee River

Catchment area of the river

The Interstate -95 bridge over Lake Marion, the old bridge serves anglers.

Template: Infobox River / Obsolete

The Santee River is a river that runs over a length of 230 kilometers in the state of South Carolina in the southeastern United States. The catchment area of ​​Santee and its tributaries is one of the main navigable river systems of the coastal plain of South Carolina and flows 708 km from the origin of its most distant source of the River Catawba River in North Carolina in the Atlantic Ocean. A large part of the upper river course is dammed by the nearly 13 -kilometer-long Santee Dam to the horn-shaped Lake Marion reservoir. The dam was built in the 1930s as an important energy source for the state to generate electricity by hydropower.

Course

The Santee is approximately 40 kilometers southeast of Columbia formed in the central region of South Carolina by the confluence of the Wateree and Congaree River. It then flows into the eight kilometers away, Lake Marion, which extends in a wide arc about 50 kilometers to the Santee Dam. A navigable channel, first built in 1790, stretches from the southern tip of the lake to a reservoir of the Cooper River called Lake Moultrie. Today, modern channel is managed by Santee Cooper and is part of a project to the production of hydroelectric power in the two rivers.

Below the dam, the river flows first east, then to the south-east and forms the northeastern conclusion of the Francis Marion National Forest. About 16 miles off the mouth of the river is divided into two river basins on, the so-called North Santee and South Santee. These two flow, separated by a little over 3 kilometers wide headland called Cedar Iceland on Santee Point, just 25 kilometers south of Georgetown in the Atlantic Ocean.

History

The river was named by early European settlers on the indigenous natives who inhabited the banks of the middle section of the river, the people of the Santee. The first contact with Europeans the Indians had with the Spanish explorers who sailed up the river in 1660. After the Santee were defeated in the Yamasee War, you captured them and placed them as slaves to the West Indies to. Thus, the region was free for the settlement by British colonists and become a part of the province of Carolina.

In the late 18th century, Francis Marion, a member of the patriots in the American Revolution lived on the banks of the river. His house is in the area of ​​today's reservoir, it was named in honor of the reservoir.

The construction of the 35 kilometer long Santee Canal, which connects the river to the Cooper River was begun in 1793 and completed in 1800. He allowed the transport of goods and a direct connection between the rear part of South Carolina and situated at the mouth of Coopers on the Atlantic Charleston. The channel was 50 years in operation before it lost its importance by the construction of a railway line.

During the " Great Depression" South Carolina Santee Cooper electricity established the program. The most important energy source of the program was a hydroelectric plant near Charleston. From 1939, the Santee was dammed, created the lakes Marion and Moultrie and the amount of water the Santee were diverted by another hydroelectric power plant in Pinopolis partially into the Cooper River. The project was completed in 1941.

Although the program was able to achieve its goal of low-cost electricity for rural South Carolina, it had unexpected consequences for the lower sections of the river, both of Santee, as well as the Cooper River. The Santee, supplied with a much lower amount of water than before, was significantly saltier, which led to changes in the ecosystem on the lower river course. The Cooper was supplied with much more water and thus transported sediments, which led to an immense increase in the cost of dredging the port of Charleston. In the 1980s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a duct for recirculating a portion of the amounts of water into the Santee. This measure has improved the situation.