Santee River
| Santee River | ||
 Catchment area of the river |
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| Data | ||
| Water code | US : 1250783 | |
| location | South Carolina , United States | |
| River system | Santee River | |
| origin | Confluence of the Wateree and Congaree Rivers 33 ° 45 ′ 21 ″ N , 80 ° 37 ′ 10 ″ W |
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| muzzle | In the Atlantic Ocean Coordinates: 33 ° 14 ′ 7 " N , 79 ° 27 ′ 34" W 33 ° 14 ′ 7 " N , 79 ° 27 ′ 34" W |
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| Mouth height |
0 m
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| length | 235 km | |
 The Interstate 95 bridge over Lake Marion, the old bridge is used by anglers. |
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The Santee River is a river that runs for 230 kilometers in the state of South Carolina in the southeastern United States . The catchment area of the Santee and its tributaries is one of the major navigable river systems of the coastal plain of South Carolina and flows into the Atlantic Ocean 708 kilometers from the origin of its most distant source river, the Catawba River in North Carolina . A large part of the upper course of the river is dammed up by the almost 13-kilometer-long Santee Dam to form the horn-shaped Lake Marion reservoir. The dam was built in the 1930s as an important source of energy for the state to generate electricity from hydropower .
course
The Santee is formed around 40 kilometers southeast of Columbia in the central region of South Carolina by the confluence of the Wateree and Congaree Rivers . It then flows into Lake Marion, eight kilometers away, which stretches in a wide arc about 50 kilometers to the Santee Dam. A navigable canal, first built around 1790, runs from the southern tip of the lake to a reservoir on the Cooper River called Lake Moultrie . Today's modern canal is managed by Santee Cooper and is part of a project to generate hydropower in the two rivers.
Below the reservoir, the river flows first to the east, later to the south-east, and forms the north-eastern end of the Francis Marion National Forest . About 16 kilometers before the mouth, the river divides into two river basins, the so-called North Santee and the South Santee . These two flow into the Atlantic Ocean , separated by a tongue of land called Cedar Island just over 3 kilometers wide at Santee Point , just 25 kilometers south of Georgetown .
history
The river was named by early European settlers after the indigenous people who inhabited the bank of the middle section of the river, the Santee people . The first contact with Europeans was with the Spanish explorers who sailed up the river around 1660. After the Santee were defeated in the Yamasee War , they were captured and resettled as slaves on the West Indies . This made the region free for settlement by British colonists and part of the Carolina Province .
In the late 18th century, Francis Marion , a member of the Patriots in the American Revolutionary War, lived on the banks of the river. His house is located in the area of today's reservoir, the reservoir was named in his honor.
Construction of the 35-kilometer-long Santee Canal, which connects the river with the Cooper River, began in 1793 and ended in 1800. It allowed the transport of goods and a direct connection between the rear of South Carolina and Charleston, which is located at the mouth of the Cooper on the Atlantic . The canal was in operation for 50 years before it lost its importance with the construction of a railway line.
During the Great Depression , South Carolina established the Santee Cooper Electricity Program . The main energy source for the program was a hydroelectric power station near Charleston. From 1939 the Santee was dammed, the lakes Marion and Moultrie were created and the water volumes of the Santee were partially diverted into the Cooper River by another hydropower plant in Pinopolis. The project was completed in 1941.
Although the program achieved its goal of cheap electricity generation for rural South Carolina, it had unexpected consequences for the lower stretches of both the Santee and Cooper Rivers. The Santee, supplied with a much lower amount of water than before, became significantly saltier, which led to changes in the ecosystem on the lower course of the river. The Cooper was supplied with much more water, and with it sediments, which resulted in a huge increase in the cost of dredging Charleston Harbor. In the 1980s, the US Army engineering corps built a canal to return some of the water to the Santee. This measure improved the situation.