Hurricane Frederic and the Night the Bay Came Ashore

September twelfth, nineteen seventy-nine began as a late-summer evening and became the worst night the Gulf Coast had seen in nearly half a century. Hurricane Frederic, a Category Four storm, came ashore near Bayou La Batre at the height of a high tide and pushed ten feet of water into Mobile Bay. Out on the Gulf beaches to the south, the surge reached fifteen feet. Eighty percent of the buildings at Gulf Shores were completely destroyed.

Wind gusts at the top of the Dauphin Island Bridge registered one hundred and forty-five miles per hour before the instrument stopped working. Mobile Regional Airport recorded gusts of ninety-seven miles per hour. Ninety percent of the Mobile area lost electricity. The historic city hall took heavy roof damage. Throughout the residential neighborhoods, thousands of pine trees came down onto houses and cars and power lines, and the roads were impassable for days.

Five people died directly from the storm. The property damage in nineteen seventy-nine dollars was one point seven seven billion, which made Frederic the costliest Atlantic hurricane on record at that time. Over five hundred thousand people had evacuated ahead of it, the largest Gulf Coast evacuation ever recorded up to that point.

FEMA had been established just three months before Frederic made landfall. The storm became one of the new agency's first major tests. Federal aid to Alabama alone totaled one hundred and eighty-eight million dollars. The city rebuilt. The pines grew back. The bay has not promised to stay where it belongs.