Charleston-The Annual Charleston Comedy Festival was 1-20-1/23rd for 4 days with 38 shows @ 9 venues. Also, the Charl Boat Show at the Convention Center & Coliseum was 1/22 to 1/24. This was the largest turnout in the Shows 27 year history. Attendance=10,140! There were more than 95 boat lines as well as the latest in marine accessories, products & services. The Charleston Lowcountry Oyster Festival at the Boone Hall Plantation in Mt Pleasant used 65,000 lbs of oysters at their 23rd annual affair & limited it to 10,000 tickets! In March is the 59th Annual Festival of Homes & Gardens from Mid-March thru Mid-April. It will feature the interiors & gardens of approx 150 historic pvt homes in 10 Colonial & antebellum neighborhoods. Don’t forget the Family Circle Cup top tennis finals-celebrating over 3 decades in women’s professional tennis. The largest yet container ship, ‘RITA,’ docked in Mt Pleasant 2/25 –measuring 1063’long & 141’ wide w/a 45’ draft when fully loaded w/containers. The Charleston District of the US Army Corp of Engineers dredges 2M-3M cy yds of material from the harbor annually @ a cost of $10-15M ea year—(just 1M cu yd of silt would fill a football field & stack 39 stories high!) On 1/11, the Post & Courier reported that the city needs $16M for tunnel repairs as failure threatens in W Ashley – sure enough, it failed this month! (Congress had authorized the money but it was never appropriated. (The total for the project was $43M). Boeing is making progress on it’s huge construction but now the papers are flooded with articles on WHO is to pay for the road expansions VERY MUCH required at this time - & even more so over the next few years. Problems have been dramatic with the downtown Charleston flooding. Charleston had hoped that the fed stimulus funds would pay for a massive downtown drainage system. The city HAD RE-QUESTED $146.3Mil in fed funds-but it will only get $10Mil to improve the expressway (which is part of Rte 17). The city has already spent more than $7M on design & engineering work for the drainage project & was prepared to go out for bids next year, had the requested fed grant come through. (The expressway was built in the 1960’s-much of it on top of filled-in creek beds & Charleston officials feel that the fed gvt should be responsible for funding the draining improve-ments). Flooding in the area blocks the ONLY fed hiway across the peninsula. The Crosstown is a key hurricane evacuation route & the road to the VA Med Center & the Med Univ of SC which is the state’s only Level One Trama Center. Photos show cars in water above their wheel wells!.
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