Alabama's Gulf Coast, Hurricanes, Oil, and the Living Reef

Alabama has one of the shortest Gulf coasts of any state that touches the Gulf of Mexico, about fifty-three miles from the Florida state line to the Mississippi line. But those miles contain an ecology and an economic history that is anything but small. The barrier islands and the bays, Mobile Bay, Perdido Bay, Wolf Bay, form one of the most complex estuarine systems in North America.

Mobile Bay is the fourth-largest estuary in the United States by volume of freshwater discharge. The rivers that drain it, the Alabama, the Tombigbee, the Cahaba, the Coosa, carry water from across the state. The bay was a highway long before the roads came, and it remains one of the most productive commercial fisheries in the region, known for shrimp, blue crab, oysters, and a local delicacy called the Eastern oyster that has been harvested from these waters for at least four thousand years.

The coast also experiences a phenomenon called the Mobile Bay Jubilee, a seasonal event in which shrimp, flounder, crabs, and eels crowd into the shallows along the eastern shore of the bay in the predawn hours, apparently fleeing oxygen-depleted deep water. Local residents have historically rushed to the shore with nets, buckets, and anything else they could find to harvest the cornucopia. It is real, well-documented, and no other estuary in North America is known to produce it reliably.

Hurricane Katrina struck the Alabama coast in August of two thousand five. The storm made landfall as a Category Three on the Mississippi-Louisiana border and pushed a surge northward and eastward that flooded the Alabama barrier islands and significantly damaged the town of Bayou La Batre, the commercial fishing center sometimes called the Seafood Capital of Alabama. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April of two thousand ten, the BP platform explosion that killed eleven workers and sent nearly five million barrels of oil into the Gulf, directly affected Alabama's coastal waters, its fishing economy, and its beaches for years.

The full ecological recovery is still being assessed. The spill happened sixty miles offshore, but the currents and the tides brought it here.