Extreme Drought Grips South Carolina's Pee Dee Basin as Loris Doubles Water Rates

The drought that has strained water supplies from North Carolina to Texas this summer has now settled hard over the South Carolina coast. On July 1, 2026, the City of Loris activated its Drought Management Plan and imposed mandatory water restrictions — including a rate structure that doubles the price of water above 6,000 gallons a month — as extreme drought expanded across the Pee Dee River Basin. The move makes Loris one of the first Grand Strand-area systems to escalate from voluntary appeals to enforceable rules, and it extends a pattern WaterVerge has tracked all summer of utilities running out of slack. It also opens coverage of a state that had, until now, mostly avoided the worst of the 2026 drought.

What the Restrictions Require

Loris did not phase in gently. Effective July 1, all city utility customers are under mandatory conservation rules that:

Limit water use to 75 gallons per person per day, with a household maximum of 200 gallons per day
Prohibit washing down driveways and sidewalks
Ban vehicle washing and the filling of swimming pools
Double the volumetric rate for any usage above 6,000 gallons per month, with escalating fines for violations

The rate penalty is the sharpest tool. Rather than relying on voluntary goodwill, Loris built a price signal directly into the bill — a design that spreads the cost of scarcity onto the highest-volume users and is meant to force behavior change faster than a request to conserve.

How Bad the Drought Is

The July 9 U.S. Drought Monitor pushed extreme drought — the second-most-severe category — across the Pee Dee River Basin. The affected footprint now encompasses all of Horry, Georgetown, and Williamsburg counties and parts of Florence, Marion, and Dillon counties. A building heat wave over the Fourth of July weekend accelerated the deterioration, drying soils and drawing down the streams and shallow aquifers that many small Pee Dee systems depend on.

Loris is not alone. Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach have urged residents to conserve, and North Myrtle Beach has moved toward its own mandatory restrictions with escalating fines. The clustering of coastal systems tightening at once signals that this is a basin-wide supply problem, not a single utility’s local shortfall.

Why Drought Is Also a Water-Quality Issue

Scarcity is not only about running out of water — it degrades the water that remains. When river flows and reservoir levels fall, the same contaminant load is diluted by far less water, so concentrations of nitrate, salts, and organic matter climb. Warmer, slower, nutrient-rich water is also prime habitat for harmful algal blooms and cyanotoxins, which can force treatment changes or advisories. And lower flows raise the relative share of treated wastewater in a river, concentrating disinfection-byproduct precursors that plants then have to manage.

For customers on hard groundwater, drawdown can also worsen mineral content and scale — our water hardness guide explains why that matters for plumbing and appliances during a dry stretch.

What Residents Should Do

If you live in the Pee Dee Basin or another drought-restricted area:

Know your system’s stage and rules. Restrictions and penalty thresholds differ by city — Loris doubles rates above 6,000 gallons, but neighboring systems set their own limits. Check your utility’s website before you get a surprise bill.
Prioritize the cheap wins. Fix leaks, run only full dishwasher and laundry loads, and stop all outdoor washing — these are usually the difference between staying under the penalty tier and blowing past it.
If your water tastes, smells, or looks different during the drought, it may reflect concentrated minerals or an algal event upstream, not a treatment failure. Our tap water testing guide explains how to check.
Watch your annual water-quality report. Drought years often show shifts in contaminant levels — our guide to reading the CCR walks through what to look for.

The Broader Pattern

South Carolina now joins a long 2026 roster of drought-stressed regions WaterVerge has covered, from Richmond and central Virginia to Tampa Bay’s supply warning and Corpus Christi’s Stage 3 emergency. The common thread is that mid-sized and small systems — the ones with a single reservoir or a shallow-aquifer source and little redundancy — are hitting mandatory restrictions earliest, because they have the least room to absorb a bad hydrological year.

What Comes Next

Whether Loris and its neighbors can hold at extreme drought or slide into the exceptional category depends on rainfall through late summer, and the forecast offers little near-term relief. If conditions worsen, expect more Grand Strand and Pee Dee systems to convert voluntary appeals into mandatory rules and rate penalties, and for county governments to weigh basin-wide coordination rather than a patchwork of city-by-city ordinances.

How WaterVerge Tracks This

WaterVerge integrates EPA and state water-system data into city pages, so residents can see their utility’s source, size, and compliance history — context that helps explain why some systems restrict earlier than others in the same drought. Search your city to review its water profile.