Horry County’s manufactured wire reef (MWR), the largest in the state of South Carolina, continues to grow in the Garden City marsh.

On Monday, with the help of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources and Loris High School’s Future Farmers of America chapter, Team Horry deployed 200 MWRs into Main Creek off of Cypress Avenue.

Manufactured wire reefs are a natural and sustainable solution for water filtration and erosion control.

“These, manufactured wire oyster reefs are really important because oysters, in their adult forms, can filter two and a half gallons of water in one hour,” highlighted Kevin Swain, wildlife biologist for SCDNR’s South Carolina Oyster Recycling and Enhancement (SCORE) program. “And when you think we get five to seven thousand oysters recruited to each one of these baskets that we'll be deploying, that's tons of water being filtered, out here just in this system.”

In all, SCDNR calculates the baskets added this week will filter a total of 3.5 million gallons of water every hour.

From the deployment of the baskets in the inlet to their production, this initiative is a team effort. Over the last several months, both Stormwater employees and FFA students worked together to build the baskets with oysters from right here in our community.

“These oysters were actually, recycled here in Horry County. So that's an important part of this initiative -  that any oyster from Horry County stays in Horry County. They’re put back into the marsh to procreate more oysters,” explains Brent Carey, watershed planner for Horry County Stormwater. 

The Garden City MWR began taking shape around a year ago when the first 200 baskets were placed just south of the 2025 site.

There are plans to continue to expand the reef as well. 

“We're just kind of slowly stair stepping our way up this kind of shallower part of Main Creek. This is a really big outfall area for stormwater drainage. So, anything we can do to help with kind of mitigate that stormwater and help filter out those nutrients is going to be really beneficial for the bodies of water in Murrells Inlet,” explains Swain. 

It’s a project Horry County is committed to seeing through.

“Horry County Stormwater plans on doing this kind of project in perpetuity. So, we'll continue to do this every spring,” said Carey. 

The MWRs are an environmental initiative with added educational benefits for the students unafraid to jump in to help.

“I think that is very important for our students to be a part of this, because they're able to get their hands on and see the environmental impact that they are doing while building the reefs and then placing the reefs, and seeing the water that they are going to help filter and purify with all these oyster builds,” said Claire Hammonds, an agriculture teacher from Loris High School. 

The oyster baskets will be monitored over the years to gauge oyster growth and local impacts. 

You can help expand the reef by simply donating your oyster shells.

Residents can currently drop off oyster shells at the following recycling locations:

- 1860 21st Ave. N., Myrtle Beach, SC 29577
- 559 Sea Mountain Hwy, N. Myrtle Beach, SC 29582
- 1186 Highway 90, Conway, SC 29526

Click HERE to learn more.