Watch for gators! Recent Myrtle Beach area storms may have altered their hangout spots
Recent storms may have shifted some Myrtle Beach area alligators’ whereabouts, so watch out! They can float down flooded streets or stroll through a neighborhood in search of other bodies of water once flooded areas clear up.
One Myrtle Beach resident, Eric Ness, saw an alligator swimming into his neighborhood gazebo in the Island Green part of Horry County on Friday.
“I see gators often and I love to watch them,” Ness said. “Since all the new construction and development, I’ve seen a huge shift in wildlife and roadkill. It’s really pretty sad.”
For an earlier story in The Sun News on alligators, we spoke with Morgan Hart, the alligator project leader for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. She said it is possible for alligators to inhabit any body of water in South Carolina below the fall line, or from Columbia down to the coast.
“If it’s freshwater, there could be an alligator in it,” Hart said. “And that’s true of private HOA ponds or public rivers and lakes and even swampy areas where the water is fairly shallow.”
Rough weather from the past few days caused a lot of flooding in various parts of the Myrtle Beach area, leaving temporary bodies of water around and an excess of water in existing bodies of water. This is what happened in Ness’ neighborhood, causing local alligators to swim up to places they would not normally be able to.
There has been an uptick in South Carolina alligator attacks in recent years, according to reporting from The Associated Press.
“In May 2020, a woman was attacked and killed by an alligator in the gated community where she’d gone to do a homeowner’s nails. A 90-year-old woman walked out of a Charleston nursing home in 2016 and was killed, while a 45-year-old woman walking her dog was fatally attacked on Hilton Head Island in August 2018,” the AP reported. “David Lucas, a spokesman for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, said then that the state had never recorded a person killed by an alligator before those attacks.”
It is not rare to see gators around the Myrtle Beach area, according to Hart, so it is important to know what to do if you see one.
“If there’s an alligator in your backyard, first check with your HOA if you’ve got one. ... Property management groups are aware of the alligators in the neighborhood and already have permits and tags to deal with those alligators. ... The other thing is just stay well back from the alligator and try not to gather around it,” Hart said.
The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources has a phone number to call if all else fails. The 24/7 emergency number is 1-800-922-5431.
Hart said people should not feed alligators, because these hungry modern-day dinosaurs might not want to leave or they might become very likely to return to residential areas.
