Seawall & Bulkhead Guide: Myrtle Beach, SC

The Region Just Chose Sand Over Seawalls, at a $72 Million Scale

Coastal property protection generally splits into two families of tools. "Hard" armoring — seawalls, bulkheads, revetments, rock rip-rap — places a fixed, engineered structure between water and land. "Soft" strategies — beach and dune renourishment — instead rebuild the natural sand buffer itself, letting a wider beach and taller dune system absorb wave energy the way an unaltered shoreline would. The two aren't interchangeable: a seawall can protect the specific structure directly behind it, but it can also accelerate erosion on the beach in front of it and on neighboring, unarmored lots, while renourishment restores public beach and natural dune function broadly, at the cost of needing reinvestment as sand migrates and storms strip it away again.

The Grand Strand is currently running the soft approach at real scale: a $72 million project, 100% federally funded through emergency authorization by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, placing roughly 2 million cubic yards of sand — about 200,000 dump-truck loads — across 26 miles of beach spanning North Myrtle Beach, Myrtle Beach, and the Surfside Beach/Garden City area. Contractor Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Company was awarded the contract in December 2024, construction began in spring 2025 on an roughly 18-month timeline, and the project explicitly responds to storm-driven erosion from Hurricanes Debby and Ian. That is a direct, dollar-figured statement of this region's preferred coastal-protection strategy: rebuild the beach, not wall it off. Anyone weighing a hard-armoring project on a Myrtle Beach waterfront property is, in effect, considering a different tool than the one the region itself is currently investing tens of millions of dollars in next door.

South Carolina's Statewide Framework: A Real Statute, Not Just a Soft Preference

South Carolina's presumption against new hard armoring isn't just informal policy — it's a real, codified statute. The Beachfront Management Act, passed in 1988 and codified at South Carolina Code Title 48, Chapter 39, opens with legislative findings, at Section 48-39-250, that hard erosion-control structures on the open beach have not proven effective at protecting the structures behind them and that they can increase the vulnerability of beachfront property to storm damage while degrading the dry-sand beach in front of them. Because the legislature made that finding part of the statute itself, the general restriction on new "erosion control structures" — a term Section 48-39-270 specifically defines to include seawalls, bulkheads, and revetments — seaward of the state's baseline and setback line isn't a case-by-case discretionary call; it's built into the law. Section 48-39-290 sets out the actual mechanics: no new construction is generally permitted between the baseline and the setback line, with a short, specific list of exceptions (things like walkways, small decks, fishing piers, certain golf-course repairs, landscaping, and dune revegetation) plus a narrow special-permit pathway for other cases.

This is general, statewide South Carolina law — it applies the same way on every South Carolina beachfront community, Myrtle Beach included, not just on islands like Hilton Head where this site has documented the framework in more site-specific detail. The state has also been actively revising how the baseline and setback lines themselves get drawn: the Beachfront Management Reform Act of 2018 replaced the original 40-year "retreat" policy, under which setback lines were meant to keep migrating landward as the coast eroded, with what the legislature termed a "beach preservation policy" that generally bars a jurisdiction's setback lines from moving seaward of earlier-established positions, while still barring most new hard armoring on the open beach in the meantime. The exact baseline and setback distance for any specific Myrtle Beach parcel is line-specific and erosion-rate-specific — this page does not have that Myrtle Beach line-by-line detail and does not invent it (see the honest-gap section below).

Who Actually Regulates This Now

The agency name matters, because it recently changed. South Carolina's Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC), which formerly housed the Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management, was split effective July 1, 2024, into two successor agencies: the South Carolina Department of Public Health and the South Carolina Department of Environmental Services (SC DES). Coastal permitting — including beachfront critical-area permits and erosion-control-structure permits under the Beachfront Management Act — now sits with SC DES's Bureau of Coastal Management, not DHEC. A lot of older material still online references DHEC by name; for a current Myrtle Beach seawall or bulkhead question, SC DES's Bureau of Coastal Management is the correct state agency to contact, alongside the City of Myrtle Beach's own building and planning staff for any local zoning or permitting layer on top of the state rule.

The Storm History That Makes This Question Come Up

The reason a hard-armoring question surfaces at all on this coast traces back to real, dated storm history, not hypothetical risk. Hurricane Hazel made landfall almost exactly on the South Carolina/North Carolina border on October 15, 1954, as a Category 4 hurricane with winds exceeding 130 mph — one of only two Category 4 hurricanes to strike South Carolina since 1851. Hazel destroyed more than 80% of oceanfront property along the Grand Strand, from Pawleys Island to Little River. The U.S. Weather Bureau's Raleigh office described the aftermath bluntly: "All traces of civilization on the immediate waterfront between the state line and Cape Fear were practically annihilated." Rather than retreat, the region rebuilt directly into the tourism-driven identity it holds today — a rebuilding decision, not an argument for or against any particular protection method, but the reason this coast takes storm-surge risk seriously in the first place.

More recently, Hurricane Ian made landfall near Georgetown, South Carolina, just south of the Grand Strand, on September 30, 2022. It did not strike Myrtle Beach directly, but storm surge reached up to 7 feet in coastal Horry County, and thousands of protective dunes were destroyed along the shoreline — North Myrtle Beach alone sustained at least $13 million in damage across 1,659 structures. That dune destruction is precisely the kind of loss the region's current $72 million renourishment project is rebuilding from, and it's a real, concrete illustration of why the natural sand buffer matters as much as any engineered structure sitting behind it.

Barrier-Adjacent Geography: Why the Setback System Applies Here, Not Just on Islands

Myrtle Beach sits on a barrier-adjacent stretch of South Carolina's coastal plain, oceanfront the entire length of the city rather than fronting a bay or sound on one side the way some other coastal markets do. That means the Beachfront Management Act's baseline-and-setback system described above is the relevant statewide framework for essentially any oceanfront Myrtle Beach parcel considering new hard armoring — there isn't a bay-front carve-out the way there might be on a peninsula community with water on two different sides. It also means the region's flood and storm exposure should be assumed citywide rather than concentrated in one corner of town, consistent with how this site's own Myrtle Beach flood-zones and hurricane-risk pages treat the area's exposure.

The Honest Gap: No Myrtle Beach-Specific Permitting, Cost, or Case-Study Data Here

This page will not invent Myrtle Beach-specific detail to sound more complete than the research behind it. Unlike this site's Hilton Head, SC seawall and bulkhead page — where a documented island-specific line report, a named five-year lawsuit over an unpermitted seawall, and a 2024 legislative fight over loosening the rule could all be cited directly — no Myrtle Beach-specific seawall or bulkhead permitting ordinance, no local baseline-and-setback line data, no local permit cost or timeline figures, and no named Myrtle Beach hard-armoring case study were found in the research behind this page. That's a genuine, disclosed gap, not an oversight smoothed over with generic language.

What that means in practice: treat everything above this section as the real, general South Carolina statewide framework that applies here, and treat anything about Myrtle Beach's specific local process, fees, existing structures, or precedent as unconfirmed until you check it directly. Given how much a seawall or bulkhead decision turns on the exact baseline and setback position for a specific lot, any City of Myrtle Beach ordinance layered on top of the state rule, and the state's eligibility standards for new construction, the only responsible next step for a specific Myrtle Beach property is a direct conversation with three sources: the City of Myrtle Beach's own building and planning department, SC DES's Bureau of Coastal Management, and a licensed South Carolina coastal engineer who can assess the specific parcel and its realistic options under the Beachfront Management Act.

Practical Takeaways for a Myrtle Beach Buyer or Owner

If you're evaluating an oceanfront lot or condo tower, assume the harder regulatory path is the default: South Carolina's Beachfront Management Act generally restricts new hard erosion-control structures seaward of the state's setback line, and the region's own current, large-scale investment in beach renourishment signals a clear policy preference for sand-based solutions over new armoring on this coastline. Ask directly whether the parcel already has an existing seawall, bulkhead, or revetment, since repairing or maintaining an existing lawfully permitted structure is a different legal question than permitting a brand-new one — and confirm which of the state's baseline zones and setback distances actually apply to that specific address, since those figures vary by location and are periodically redrawn.

Before making any decision, confirm current rules, current baseline and setback positions, and current costs for the specific property directly with the City of Myrtle Beach's building and planning department, SC DES's Bureau of Coastal Management, and a licensed South Carolina coastal engineer. Coastal engineering and permitting requirements are parcel-specific and change over time — nothing on this page should be treated as a substitute for that direct, current confirmation, and nothing here is legal, engineering, or insurance advice.