Call Center Company in Columbia, SC

Are you planning a big family vacation this summer or will you cut back?

Let’s face it, everything is more expensive these days. From food, to gas, and hotels — costs keep rising. And then there’s the growing economic uncertainty from the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China.

And yet, there’s still plenty of fun to be had in South Carolina for those on a budget. For instance, have you considered Columbia?

Whether you live in the Soda City or are just visiting, Columbia is full of entertainment for the whole family that won’t break the bank.

Here are the 10 best-rated and budget-friendly things to do in Columbia, according to Tripadvisor.

Few children are likely to turn down a trip to the zoo. Riverbanks first opened its gates on April 25, 1974, and today is one of the largest mid-sized zoos in the U.S. as well as among the state’s leading destination attractions.

The zoo boasts more than 3,000 magnificent animals. And then there’s the botanical garden, which first opened in 1995 and today features more than 5,700 species of native and exotic plants.

Located in downtown Columbia, the state museum features four floors of permanent and changing exhibits, a digital dome planetarium, a 4D interactive theater, and an observatory. It’s the largest museum in the Southeast, boasting 210,000 gross square feet and 100,000 square feet of exhibit space. And the museum is more like four museums in one, with sections on art, history, natural history, science, and technology.

You can’t get much more budget-friendly than free. Featuring 4 miles of flat, easy-walking paved trail, Riverfront Park opened in 1983 and was built around the city’s original waterworks. The park is about 167 acres and separates the Historic Columbia Canal and the Congaree River. There is also a brick amphitheater and a self-guided walkway by the old parts of the water plant.

The historic South Carolina State House was built in 1903, replacing the previous State House in Columbia that was destroyed by fire in 1865 during the Civil War.

Tours are offered every half hour beginning at 9:30 a.m. and ending at 3:30 p.m. No tours are offered at 12 p.m. or 12:30 p.m. The State House is also open on Saturdays, with tours given at 10:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 1:30 p.m. and 2:30 p.m.

Unless you’re planning to enroll, the University of South Carolina is a cheap way to do some historic sightseeing and get your steps in. The more than 200-year-old campus has plenty of interesting buildings and sites, but a visit isn’t complete without a glimpse of the historic Horseshoe. The U-shaped original campus — once called South Carolina College — includes the architectural design and influence of Robert Mills, the nation’s first federal architect and designer of the Washington Monument.

Below are five more budget-friendly activities to try in Columbia:

6. Soda City Market

7. South Carolina Military Museum

8. EdVenture Children’s Museum

9. Columbia Museum of Art

10. Sesquicentennial State Park

Asperitas clouds are a distinctive, but relatively rare cloud formation that takes the appearance of rippling waves.

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Early Wednesday morning, parts of the Columbia area saw rain to start the day with scattered showers and storms. This made for a rainy morning commute for many individuals. As the storms approached, an unusual type of clouds were spotted ahead of the rainfall. This created a stunning sight for those that were able to see them.

Asperitas clouds are a distinctive, but relatively rare cloud formation that takes the appearance of rippling waves. These wave-like structures form on the underside of the cloud to make it look like a rough sea surface when viewed from below.

These unique clouds can be found amongst two cloud types: altocumulus and stratocumulus. These two cloud types are low to mid level clouds and are common ahead of storms, but added turbulence can create the unusual waves.

I spotted these rare clouds this morning just after 7:30 a.m. in Columbia ahead of some storms that moved...

Posted by Meteorologist Brianna Mowery on Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Asperitas clouds typically form ahead of a thunderstorm. As rain from that storm falls to the ground, the surrounding air is cooled and rushes out ahead of the storm. This is called a downdraft. The air can move like waves in the ocean, lifting clouds up and down. This process is nearly identical to dropping a stone in a pond.

These clouds can be found at heights ranging from 4,000 to 10,000 feet.

Though the formation itself does not produce rainfall, asperitas have been linked to thunderstorms. The likely unstable atmospheric conditions required to form the wave cloud base could also allow the growth of convective rain clouds.

Credit: WLTX

The cloud formation was added to the World Meteorological Organization's International Cloud Atlas back in 2017.

As a vibrant and growing city of the New South, Columbia, South Carolina, has developed a carefully crafted vision for its future, aimed at providing efficient, reliable and responsive municipal services for its residents. As part of that goal, the city and its water utility, Columbia Water, embarked on a comprehensive water meter upgrade project that would not only improve customer service and make utility operations more proactive but also support sustainability and smart city initiatives well into the future.

Columbia Water serves more than 400,000 people across a 320-square-mile service area in the Midlands region of South Carolina, with more than 157,000 metered accounts. Until recently, despite many technological advances in the city, one thing had not really changed since the early 1900s: how water meters were read.

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Company will provide a full suite of smart water technologies and services to the City.

Asset Management

Company recognized with Smart 50 award for the role of its smart water meter technology in modernizing an aging water infrastructure system.

“We were reading meters the old-fashioned way,” said Frank Eskridge, director of utility operations for Columbia Water. “We would send a person in a vehicle out to the meter. They would get out of the vehicle, walk over to the meter, open the lid, look at the meter and then punch in numbers on the handheld.”

It was a manual, labor-intensive process that required a team of 30 technicians reading 15,000 meters every two days to produce monthly bills. If anything got in the way of a meter read, such as a car parked over a meter or a major storm, Columbia Water would have to issue an estimated bill. Not only did this affect revenues for the utility, but it also led to complaints when customers eventually received bills reflecting their actual usage.

“We would have these makeup bills and people would get furious. They [would] go to the city council [to complain about it],” Eskridge said. As a result, “there was a gradual erosion in the confidence of the accuracy of our meter reads,” he explained.

To accomplish the City’s goals, Columbia Water needed to move away from reactive water management practices. As an early adopter of BlueEdge by Badger Meter, the utility gained control of customer water usage through actionable insight and proactive action to improve consumer confidence. Today, Columbia Water has transitioned operations and realized greater levels of customer support for its services.

Columbia Water previously experimented with automated meter reading (AMR) and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) pilot projects in 2012. Although the technologies were promising, the utility had too many competing priorities at the time to justify the investment. Then, in 2017, with help from consultant Jacobs Engineering, Columbia Water was finally ready to tackle its aging water metering infrastructure and provide the measurement accuracy and transparency its customers were asking for.

The project was put out for bid and, ultimately, Columbia Water selected Badger Meter as its partner to modernize the outdated metering system with several smart water technologies, including BEACON Software as a Service (SaaS), ORION Cellular endpoints, Recordall Disc Series meters and E-Series Ultrasonic meters. These solutions deliver accurate measurement data, viewable from anywhere in the field or office.

Using existing cellular networks, BEACON makes meter reading more efficient (15-minute interval data is accessible from anywhere in the network) and scalable for the long term. Rather than maintaining a separate communication system, utility staff are free to tackle other work.

“We viewed that as an opportunity for us to focus as a utility on our core competencies of providing excellent water, excellent customer service and let another party [manage] communication technology,” said Clint Shealy, Columbia assistant city manager.

The AMI installation began in March 2019 and continued over three-and-a-half years. Because of the size and scope of the project, Columbia Water engaged the Badger Meter Turnkey Operations (TKOps) team for project management, expertise and to ensure that the proper steps were followed during the meter change-out process.

This proved especially valuable when a global pandemic midway through installation threatened to affect the supply-chain and other resources. The TKOps team ensured that installation was completed on time and under budget, while mitigating risk to the utility and ensuring proper installation. To date, the Columbia Water project is one of the largest AMI installations in the U.S.

Using BlueEdge, Columbia Water has a holistic view of the utility and its metering system performance at a glance. With the BEACON software, the utility was able to be more efficient and proactive after a multi-day freeze event in 2022.

“On Christmas weekend, we were flowing 90 million gallons a day because we had water mains breaking all over the place,” Eskridge recalled, noting he turned to the analytics capabilities of BEACON. “Not a mile from where I was sitting, there was an office building that had been using 1,000 gallons a minute since the middle of the afternoon on Christmas Day [when no one was in the building]. That was 1.5 MGD in one place!”

The BEACON dashboard provided the location of a burst fire line, and the utility was able to dispatch a crew to the location within minutes to shut off the water.

That dashboard also displays accurate meter reads automatically at 15-minute intervals from ORION Cellular endpoints, bringing Columbia Water other operational benefits, including a 96% reduction in monthly service calls. Prior to the AMI installation, “the confidence in our reads was so bad that we were having to send a technician in a truck out to conduct a re-read a thousand times every month,” Eskridge said.

The number of times that the utility had to send a technician into the field before moving to a cellular-based AMI network went from more than 1,000 times per month to as little as 30 times per month. Furthermore, with the increased meter accuracy, Columbia Water has seen a 21% decrease in the number of inactive accounts consuming water. By lowering the amount of non-revenue water in their system, operators are approaching system management proactively.

There has also been a marked improvement in employee morale.

“I noticed my meter reading staff was happier,” Eskridge said. “They were more relaxed … because they weren't having to read 15,000 meters every two days.”

Columbia Water’s AMI system includes the EyeOnWater consumer engagement tool, which provides customers with access to their own water consumption. They can view water usage in near real-time, set alerts and catch issues early—before they result in high bills.

“If the customer doesn't realize that they've got a leaking toilet or a leak on their irrigation system, they get the shock of a high water bill,” Shealy noted. With EyeOnWater, however, customers can set a leak alert notifying them that there’s an issue. “[They can] call a plumber, investigate, and minimize that shock, minimize that impact, [and conserve more water]."

These capabilities have become invaluable in customer conversations about water bills.

“We have found that the information from EyeOnWater has transformed our ability to talk to our customers about what's going on at their house,” Eskridge added.

With the 15-minute interval reads, concrete details on water use can be communicated to customers to help them reduce bills and identify problems before they get out of hand.

“We can tell them down to the hour when the water was used, which specific day it was used, and that is a benefit for not only the customer service representative but also the customer,” said Angela McCullough, Columbia Water special projects administrator.

While the benefits have been a boon operationally, at the end of the day, improving the customer experience has become a beacon of pride for the city.

“For the city of Columbia, and Columbia Water as an organization, customer service is really important for us,” said Shealy. “It's one of the more critical things that we do.” Sending accurate water bills to customers ensures “that we operate with core values of accountability, transparency and integrity,” he added.

Columbia Water’s AMI system was built with extensibility in mind. In the future, the utility can add BlueEdge capabilities, such as water quality and pressure monitoring to their system, for deeper insights into water system performance.

A $75M gift from Peter and Bonnie McCausland will expand research, faculty hiring, and paid internships at USC’s largest college, now renamed in their honor.

COLUMBIA, S.C. — The University of South Carolina's College of Arts & Sciences, the school's largest college, was renamed Wednesday morning after the announcement of a 'transformative gift' of $75 million from a prominent alumnus and his family.

As of April 23, the official name is McCausland College of Arts and Sciences, recognizing the gift from Bonnie and Peter McCausland and The McCausland Foundation.

Peter McCausland is a 1971 graduate from USC who earned a bachelor's degree in history and a law degree from Boston University in 1974, and went on to found Airgas, Inc. As chairman and CEO of Airgas, a medical and specialty gas company, he successfully defended the company against the longest attempted hostile takeover in history, 2009-2011. McCausland sold the company in 2016. The McCauslands previously established the McCausland Brain Imaging Center, the McCausland Faculty Fellowship, and The McCausland Foundation at USC. In 2022, Peter McCausland was the recipient of the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award, honoring those who are seen to place service before self-interest.

With this $75 million gift, the college will create a career development program for students in the liberal arts and sciences, expand research and teaching in neuroscience and brain health, and support faculty excellence. Specifically, providing paid internship stipends for up to 150 liberal arts and sciences students per year; creating research funds for students and faculty in the college's neuroscience major; and continuing to support and strengthen the McCausland Faculty Fellowship by providing funds to recruit and retain world-class faculty.

“Through this gift, I hope to continue the legacy of excellence of the faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences, while expanding the opportunities for students majoring in Arts and Sciences to leave USC with the curiosity and critical-thinking skills to help them pursue their dreams,” Peter McCausland said.

USC President Michael Amiridis said, “The McCauslands’ commitment will strengthen the work of faculty and staff who offer to our students the knowledge and skills needed for robust careers and meaningful contributions to society. The broad reach of this investment in the arts, humanities and sciences will expand opportunities for USC students and impact the state of South Carolina for generations to come.”

“At the University of South Carolina, Peter McCausland discovered his passion for history, which helped him develop the confidence, critical thinking and communication skills necessary to pursue a successful career,” said Joel H. Samuels, dean of the McCausland College of Arts and Sciences. “This gift empowers our college to do this for even more students as we begin this next chapter of our history.”

The McCausland College of Arts and Sciences joins an esteemed group of named colleges at USC, including the Darla Moore School of Business, the Arnold School of Public Health, the Joseph F. Rice School of Law, and the Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing.

A hotly anticipated new restaurant has made its debut in Cayce.

Tacos Nayarit, which has long had a popular Mexican restaurant on Percival Road in Columbia, opened the doors Tuesday at a second location at 1100 Knox Abbott Drive in Cayce. Tacos Nayarit shared in a Tuesday Facebook story that it is in a “soft opening” phase this week, with a grand opening set for April 26.

The Cayce Tacos Nayarit was initially announced two years ago, and the restaurant is located in what formerly was a bank building, right next door to the Ocean View seafood restaurant. It’s less than a half-mile east of the intersection of Knox Abbott Drive and 12th Street.

The original Tacos Nayarit is known as one of the best Mexican restaurants in Columbia and has a colorfully decorated spot on Percival Road that features indoor and outdoor dining.

The menu at the new Cayce Tacos Nayarit has offerings that will be familiar to fans, including tacos, burritos, tortas, quesadillas and more. The location has a full bar, as well as indoor and patio seating. An editor from The State visited the Cayce location Tuesday evening, enjoying birria tacos and a Mexican Coca-Cola in the glass bottle.

Knox Abbott Drive in Cayce continues to be a popular, high-traffic commercial corridor just across the Congaree River from downtown Columbia. About 25,000 cars per day travel down Knox Abbott, according to state Department of Transportation data.

This story was originally published April 23, 2025 at 10:26 AM.