Home RemodelingIn Chesterfield, SC

KERSHAW, S.C. (WBTV) - A Lancaster County man has been arrested on drug charges after he was injured in a double shooting at a home in Kershaw last week.

The Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office said that deputies responded to the home on Artemis Place on Thursday, Jan. 19 just before 3 a.m., where they found 39-year-old Darrell D’Shawn Shropshire suffering from an apparent gunshot wound.

Shropshire said the incident happened after his dog started barking and alerted him to three men attempting to break into an outbuilding on his property. After exiting the home, he exchanged gunfire with at least one of the men.

Once deputies arrived, Shropshire was treated for a gunshot wound to his leg and was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Later that morning, a man in Chesterfield County was found suffering from a gunshot wound and was taken to the hospital. Investigators believe he was one of the men accused of breaking into Shropshire’s building.

During the investigation, authorities discovered drug-related evidence at Shropshire’s property.

Law enforcement obtained a search warrant for narcotics and discovered 287 grams of cocaine, 142 grams of methamphetamine, 217 grams of marijuana, suspected psilocybin mushrooms, and a large number of controlled substance pills.

They also seized several firearms and almost $19,000 in cash.

Warrants were then secured for Shropshire’s arrest.

He turned himself in on Tuesday and is facing the following charges:

Shropshire is also facing assault and firearm charges relating to the shooting incident on Jan. 19.

He is currently being held at the Lancaster County Detention Center without bond.

Investigators are continuing to gather evidence to identify and potentially charge other individuals involved in the initial incident.

“This is a very active investigation, and we expect to make additional charges on other people at the conclusion of the investigation,” Sheriff Barry Faile said. “I encourage anyone with information about this case to call us.”

Anyone with information about this or any other case is urged to call the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office at 803-283-3388 or contact Midlands Crimestoppers.

Copyright 2023 WBTV. All rights reserved.

The earthquake was registered near Jefferson, South Carolina Friday night.

CHESTERFIELD COUNTY, S.C. — An earthquake was registered in Chesterfield County Friday evening, according to the United States Geological Survey.

The earthquake was originally registered with a magnitude of 3.1, but USGS has updated the magnitude to a 2.4. It was registered near Jefferson, South Carolina at 7:42 p.m. Friday night.

The South Carolina Emergency Management Division is asking people near the epicenter of the earthquake not to call 911 to ask what it was, but to only call 911 if there is an emergency.

NOTE: USGS has updated the magnitude to a 2.4. Did you feel it? Report it here: https://t.co/LbQ8FzjtG3 pic.twitter.com/C2ymrtB72Z

— SC Emergency Management Division (@SCEMD) February 18, 2023

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FLORENCE – Counties in South Carolina’s northeastern region reported more than 1 billion dollars in new investment with over 2,400 jobs created.

“This has been a monumental year of announcements, job creation and developing projects for our region,” said Yancey McGill, a former S.C. lieutenant governor and North Eastern Strategic Alliance (NESA) executive committee chairman, “We are excited to see the amazing opportunities these announcements provide and the high potential for further growth and development.”

According to NESA – the non-profit regional economic development group serving Chesterfield, Darlington, Dillon, Florence, Georgetown, Horry, Marion, Marlboro and Williamsburg counties – the region had a record year with over $1.106 billion in new investment in 2022, as well as the creation of 2,440 jobs.

The regional unemployment rate was 3.8% as of December 2022. The lowest recorded unemployment rate for the year was in April at 3.2% and the highest was in February at 5.2%. Up until October 2022, the region averaged around 320 initial unemployment claims per week and a total of 13,471 claims were made. Employment in the NESA region at the end of December was at 316,088 which represented a 0.6% increase from December 2019.

Regionally, there were 15 announcements: seven were existing industry expansions and eight were new locations.

“There were many exciting announcements throughout the year in 2022,” McGill said. “We want to congratulate and commend each of these companies for making investments in our communities. To everyone, particularly the economic developers and county leaders, who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to bring these projects to fruition, we want to thank each and every one of you.”

“We are thrilled to welcome companies like Envision AESC and DC Blox that are bringing cutting-edge technology to the state of South Carolina and the NESA region,” McGill said. “Each company that either expanded or announced new investment are recognizing the opportunities here and the value of our hardworking people.”

Looking forward, McGill said he is optimistic about the year ahead.

“We will continue to proactively work with county economic developers, allied partners and entities at the state level to promote product development in the region,” he said. “We will continue to employ strategic recruiting initiatives and stay fully engaged to support each of our counties’ economic development efforts.”

McGill noted that the NESA staff provide tools to make it easier for searching and virtually touring available sites in the region. All of these tools, along with NESA’s 2022 Annual Report, can be found at nesasc.org. NESA had their annual meeting on February 9, 2023.

Williamsburg County updates and outlooks:

Population: 31,279

Unemployment rate: 5.3%

Average annual wages: $45,062

GDP: $679,602,000

2022 in review:

Hemingway Sewing Solutions, a textile products manufacturer, announced its plans to establish operations in Hemingway, S.C. in early 2022. The company’s $3.3 million investment will create 242 jobs.

Additionally, construction of the MUSC Health Black River Medical Center in Cades, S.C. was completed with diagnostic and treatment options that include CT, MRI, nuclear medicine and mammography.

The county also started construction on a 52,000-square-foot speculative building in the Williamsburg Cooperative Commerce Centre South, located on U.S. Highway 52 in Kingstree, S.C.

2023 expectations:

Moving forward, the Williamsburg County Economic Development Board will focus its efforts on expanding the county transit system to further aid local industry. The county is also managing several active projects with prospects from various sectors.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

We tell stories all the time about climate-fueled disasters that uproot people's lives - fires in California, hurricanes in Louisiana. Well, Jake Bittle's new book is about what happens in the years after those events. It's called "The Great Displacement: Climate Change And The Next American Migration." It goes from drought-hit farms in Arizona to flooded coastlines in Virginia. Jake Bittle, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.

JAKE BITTLE: Thank you for having me.

SHAPIRO: So displacement is an interesting word choice in the title. And you open the book by explaining why you picked that word even though climate migration is becoming a more common term. Why do you consider this a displacement?

BITTLE: Right. So migration - the word to me tends to imply an intentional movement from point A to point B. You know, somebody no longer wants to live where they do. So they get up, and they choose to move somewhere else that's better. And what I found was that in the United States and in other places, what's happening as climate disasters get worse is something much more chaotic. People tend to want to stay where they are for as long as they possibly can. In many cases, they find it devastating to leave behind the place that they are from.

But more than that, they also don't really move very far. They don't really know where they're going, and they often don't necessarily stay to the place they move for a long period of time. So I think that because climate change exerts so much economic pressure and because the movements that follow these disasters are so chaotic, you can't really use the word migration as we tend to think of it. And so I was trying to find a word that sort of captured that chaos or that sort of frothy nature of the movement after these disasters. And I felt that displacement was a more accurate term.

SHAPIRO: I think a lot of people imagine this to be something that happens elsewhere. You know, climate change is displacing people in Bangladesh or in the islands of the South Pacific. Did you have a hard time finding examples of people experiencing climate displacement in the U.S.?

BITTLE: No, I didn't have a hard time at all. And, indeed, the reason why I wanted to do the book was because I felt that there were a lot of people out there who had moved in the aftermath of disasters but whose stories we just didn't tend to tell. All it took was to sort of go to the places where there had been disasters a few years earlier and start talking to people. And it was very easy to find dozens and hundreds of people who had ended up slowly migrating away or just not being able to make it back after a storm or a big fire.

SHAPIRO: As I said, the book sort of hopscotches all over the country. What was your starting point? Where did you begin?

BITTLE: I started in Houston. I had to work on a story about a federal government flood buyout program in the city of Houston, where basically the government would buy out homes that had seen repeated flooding, knock them down and give people money to move somewhere else. And there was this sort of range of outcomes here that I thought was really fascinating. Some people thought this program was exceptionally effective, that it helped people get out of places that were, you know, prone to flooding again and again. Some people thought it was really not great. You know, the government would give people a stipend to move, and they would basically not check on what happened to them. And a lot of them ended up moving into places that were just as vulnerable as the neighborhoods that they left behind.

So this is a nationwide program. I wrote about it in Houston, but it sort of opened up this world to me of all these people who had - you know, tens of thousands of people every year who had moved after disasters. And we really just didn't know what happened to them.

SHAPIRO: Even though the patterns of displacement are chaotic and unpredictable, there are certain consistent themes. Like, you say climate displacement exacerbates income inequality. And one place that's really apparent is Northern California. You write about the Tubbs Fire, which roared through Santa Rosa. What happened after that?

BITTLE: So California was already experiencing a housing crisis, as everyone knows. But the city lost, you know, upwards of 4,000 housing units to the fire. And that took this already pretty severe housing crisis and just supercharged it to the point where wealthy people who had lost their homes were able to bid higher and higher and higher for rental apartments that were available. And in many cases, they actually took away rental apartments from people whose leases were expiring. So some people ended up doubling up with their parents. Some people moved as far away as Kentucky and only came back years later. But it was just kind of chaos. And the farther down you were on the income ladder, the less able you were to find housing in this sort of really severe post-disaster crunch.

SHAPIRO: And a question that comes up a lot is, who's left holding the bag? Like, is it up to the federal government? Is it up to the homeowners? You describe in Norfolk, Va., where rising seas are flooding neighborhoods, that it's like people are passing around a stick of dynamite, hoping not to be the person holding it when it explodes. So when the reality of these situations, whether it's flooding or drought or what have you - when that finally becomes undeniable, like, who do we put the onus on? How is our country answering that question?

BITTLE: Right. So right now we sort of have a partial and incomplete answer to that question, which is that the amount of money that gets doled out each year is nowhere near equivalent to the amount of damage, right? So the difference is usually made up by the homeowners and by the renters. The government and insurance companies don't distribute enough money to make up that difference. So homeowners end up bearing the cost of these excessively damaging disasters, whether that's through having to leave and exert themselves to find more affordable housing or having to dig into their savings to protect, you know, the life of their mortgage and make sure their house is actually worth something.

SHAPIRO: These are inevitably challenging, difficult situations with answers that are not easy. But were there scenarios that you thought, that was handled really well; people wound up in a good place after that policy was implemented?

BITTLE: Yes, there are a few of those. There's not a ton. So during the Obama administration, the federal government handed down a bunch of money, about a billion dollars, to sort of do a pilot program for different - what they called resilience strategies, different ways of adapting to climate change. And in an African American neighborhood of Norfolk called Chesterfield Heights, which has seen, you know, really, really frequent flooding from high tide events and from storms, the city was able to spend upwards of a hundred million dollars to create this park that would absorb tides to create these really beautiful berms along the water that would sort of stop storm surge from happening and also to fix this really outdated stormwater system that really wasn't handling rain events very well.

And it went from a neighborhood where property values were going to decline and nobody really wanted to move there because it was just - it was so vulnerable to flooding. And it went to a neighborhood that now has some of the best infrastructure in the city and certainly is going to be resilient in the coming decades to the rising sea levels that are happening off the coast of Virginia.

SHAPIRO: We're at the beginning of a trend that will only accelerate. So what does the future look like? I mean, how many Americans are likely to be forced to relocate because of climate change? Where are they likely to go? Can you paint a picture of what the U.S. might look like decades from now?

BITTLE: Yeah. It's really, really difficult to know with any certainty what the U.S. will look like decades from now. But I think what we can say with certainty is that people will continue to lose their homes - you know, hundreds of thousands probably on average each year. That's already, you know, a pretty good ballpark estimate of the number of people whose homes get damaged or destroyed by climate disaster each year. So you could imagine a situation where, from the coasts or from the hottest parts of the country, the parts that are most prone to wildfire, people start to move towards cities that tend to be a little more temperate while not being so far away that they're unfamiliar, right? So some demographers predict that people might move from Miami, say, to Orlando or Atlanta, or they might move from Houston to Dallas, but it will be very messy. You know, it won't be a coherent march northward. It will be a lot of churning and back-and-forth. And then eventually these trends might emerge over the decades.

SHAPIRO: Jake Bittle is the author of "The Great Displacement: Climate Change And The Next American Migration." Thanks a lot.

BITTLE: Thanks so much.

(SOUNDBITE OF ASGEIR SONG, "BLUE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

School district officials confirmed that 24 students were on the bus at the time of the accident. The eight students that were hospitalized were sent home.

CHESTERFIELD COUNTY, S.C. — The driver of a Chesterfield County school bus has now been cited by the South Carolina Highway Patrol after the bus overturned Friday afternoon.

According to SCHP, the driver of the bus was driving too fast for conditions along a dirt road, leading to the bus turning onto its side. Officials with the Chesterfield County School District said 24 students were on the bus at the time, and eight were sent to the hospital. All eight students were eventually released and back at home.

School district officials later confirmed that students from New Heights Middle School and Jefferson Elementary School were on the bus at the time of the accident. The bus overturned along McCaskill Road near the intersection with Angelus Road.

MORE NEWS: More than 4,000 CMS students could be without stable housing this year, district says

“Next thing we know, we just hear 'boom' and then we all fall onto the ground," Kylee Hatchel, 11, who was on the bus, said, "And we were rushing to get out the exits.”

Aside from bumps and scratches, Hatchel is okay. Eight other students were taken to the hospital with injuries, officials said.

"[On] one of the little girls they had started cutting up her pants -- I guess something was wrong with her legs," Ashley Cobb, Hatchel's mom, said, "There was a little girl that had a neck brace on and something like a brace on her back."

Cobb said she is relieved her daughter is okay and concerned about the other children on the bus. She doesn't, however, fault the bus driver for what happened. While authorities have not said what caused the crash, Cobb believes it's the dirt road the school bus was driving on that contributed to the crash.

“When I got to the scene, I could hardly walk the road, that’s how slick it was," Cobb said. "I was slipping."

Neighbors said it’s been a problem for years, and not just on McCaskill Road.

Resident Ethan Foard says there are many unpaved county-maintained roads in Chesterfield County.

“When it gets a little bit of rain on it, it turns into peanut butter," Foard said.

While officials have not released a cause for the crash, Foard and others want this to be a cautionary tale.

“These dirt roads are so bad that every year, buses have trouble getting up and down them," Nicole Simpson, also a resident, said. "That just happened to be one of the worst things that happened.

The condition of the eight students is unknown.

WCNC Charlotte viewer Nicole Simpson shared photos with reporter Indira Eskieva that showed the bus on its side. Simpson also got a look inside the bus before it was brought back on its wheels. A wrecker eventually towed it away.

MORE ON WCNC

Flashpoint is a weekly in-depth look at politics in Charlotte, North Carolina, South Carolina, and beyond with host Ben Thompson. Listen to the podcast weekly. SUBSCRIBE: Apple Podcasts || Spotify || Stitcher || Google Podcasts

Locked On is the leading podcast network for local sports and is owned by WCNC Charlotte's parent company TEGNA. Listen to Locked On here.

Wake Up Charlotte To Go is a daily news and weather podcast you can listen to so you can start your day with the team at Wake Up Charlotte. SUBSCRIBE: Apple Podcasts || Spotify || Stitcher || TuneIn || Google Podcasts

All of WCNC Charlotte's podcasts are free and available for both streaming and download. You can listen now on Android, iPhone, Amazon, and other internet-connected devices. Join us from North Carolina, South Carolina, or on the go anywhere.

Watch Wake Up Charlotte each weekday morning from 4:30 to 7 a.m. on WCNC Charlotte, and as always, join the conversation on social media using #WakeUpCLT!