AN ASSESSMENT OF PEACH CREEK AS A NATURAL STREAM, HORRY COUNTY, SOUTH CAROLINA

Peach Creek in Horry County, South Carolina, flows from Island Green into the Waccamaw National Wildlife Refuge, where it joins the Waccamaw River. It has been claimed that Peach Creek is man-made. The natural origin of Peach Creek and its retention of a dominant natural character rests on three principal lines of evidence, which are (1) the description of Peach Creek in government documents (2) the static appearance of the Peach Creek drainage network as seen in the sequence of topographic maps (3) the consistency of the Peach Creek drainage network with the laws of natural drainage networks. The USACE refers to a Peach Creek as a “stream” that is “all or part tidal influenced” and as “navigable waters of the U.S.” up to its tidal limit. Peach Creek is referred to as a “stream” (as opposed to a “canal” or a “channel”) in the USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS). The entire Peach Creek drainage network shows no change and no evidence of construction in USGS and USACE topographic maps dated 1943, 1944, 1973 and 2017. The most accurate and detailed mapping of the Peach Creek drainage network is available from the USGS South Carolina StreamStats model, which was developed from Lidar data in 2018 in cooperation with the SCDOT. The StreamStats model shows that Peach Creek is a fourth-order stream with a drainage network that includes 37 first-order streams, 10 second-order streams, and three third-order streams. The StreamStats model was used to show that the Peach Creek drainage network is an excellent fit to the Law of Stream Numbers (R² = 0.999), the Law of Stream Lengths (R² = 0.996) and the Law of Drainage Areas (R² = 0.998). The constant ratio of number of streams of order U to number of streams of order U + 1 (R_B = 3.33), the constant ratio of the arithmetic mean length of streams of order U + 1 to the arithmetic mean length of streams of order U (R_L = 2.02), and the constant ratio of the arithmetic mean drainage area of streams of order U + 1 to the arithmetic mean drainage area of streams of order U (R_A = 4.18) are well within the typical ranges of 3-5, 1.5‑3 and 3-6, respectively, for natural drainage networks. The consistency with the laws of natural drainage networks implies that the entire Peach Creek drainage network is dominantly a natural system formed by random processes and not an anthropogenic system that would show evidence of intention or design.