The Salt Line, Vol. 114: The Creek Went Cloudy, Exactly as Designed
The Lead: the creek went cloudy, exactly as designed
Over a weekend of heavy rain, the water outside the Margaritaville resort going up at The Wharf in Orange Beach turned murky. Residents posted photos and called it runoff from the site. The firm building the resort has since issued a statement about the discolored water in Portage Creek, and its development principal, Jason Alley, told WEAR what did not happen: “To be very clear, we had no breaches. We had no loss of dirt.”
What did happen, by his account: the site’s rain gauges took more than seven and a half inches in 24 hours. With that much water moving through the stormwater system, the larger particles settled and some of the finer ones went on through and clouded the water. The word for that, he noted, is turbidity. The system, he says, worked exactly as designed.
I believe every word of it, and that is my complaint. No fence failed. The creek went cloudy because the plan, in a big enough rain, includes a cloudy creek. The line between a loss of dirt and fine particles leaving by water is a matter of grain size, and the creek doesn’t own a sieve.
Give the company its due. Crews were on the scene shortly after the calls came in. Alley says the Alabama Department of Environmental Management has been notified, and the company has contacted local environmental groups. More silt fencing, hay and rock are going in ahead of the next rain, and the water was reported back to normal in less than a day. That is a builder behaving like a neighbor, and plenty don’t bother.
But the argument worth having in Orange Beach isn’t whether there was a breach. It’s which storm the thing was designed for. Seven and a half inches in a day is a great deal of rain, and not a strange amount on this coast: the same weekend put more than nine on Foley and just shy of fourteen on Navarre. The resort is slated to open at the end of 2027, which leaves a good many wet afternoons between here and the ribbon. A system that works as designed and still clouds the creek was designed for a gentler coast than this one. Nobody needs an apology. The fix is a bigger design storm, and the extra silt fence going in suggests somebody on site has already reached that conclusion.
Foley grades its own paper
Foley’s streets are all open again after Sunday’s rain closed some of them, and Public Works crews spent Monday clearing ditches and culverts ahead of more heavy rain expected later this week. Mayor Ralph Hellmich put Sunday at more than nine inches. The city engineer said an inch fell inside twenty minutes, a couple of times over. Then the mayor assessed the drainage: “If I’d give it a grade, I’d call it a B-plus.” A B-plus is the grade you choose when an A would be laughed at and a B would be quoted. It may also be accurate. The city has put tens of millions into stormwater over two decades, the streets are open, and free sandbags are waiting at the old Public Works building on East Orchid Avenue. The exam offers a retake later this week.
In defense of “nuisance”
Santa Rosa County’s public safety director, Tom Lloyd, reported just shy of 14 inches of rain in Navarre and summed up the result as “some roadway nuisance flooding.” It reads like a euphemism, and for once it isn’t one. He had been out that morning and found no damage assessments to do, because no structures flooded. Water that stays in the road and out of the living room is a nuisance in the strict sense, and that is the best news the word can carry. Escambia County has a repair list of its own: washed-out trails at Carpenter Creek Headwaters Park are closed while crews fix them. Lloyd took no victory lap. Even past the peak of the season, he said, “it only takes one Ivan, one Dennis, one Opal, to be catastrophic.” Three first names, and nobody on this coast needed a footnote.
The shelter Sally is still building
Escambia County commissioners voted October 1 to accept the deed to the old Century High School gym from Pensacola State College, clearing the way for a multi-use storm shelter paid for by a $10 million disaster-recovery grant awarded after Hurricane Sally. Sally came ashore in September 2020. Six years on, the recovery has produced a deed and a design at the 30 percent mark. No final construction timetable has been announced, though work should begin in the coming months. The building can afford the wait. It went up in 1960 in steel, concrete and brick, and it has outlasted its own high school by three decades. Century’s mayor says it has good bones. The plans add an 812-square-foot computer lab, so the next evacuation can be spent the way this coast spends every storm, refreshing the radar.
The Closer
The weekend’s rain was an exam, and every drainage system from Navarre to Orange Beach sat for it. The papers have since been marked by the people who answer for the systems: worked as designed, B-plus, nuisance. Some of those marks are fair. The only outside examiner was a creek, and it reports in a color anyone can read from the bank.
— Chris
P.S. Know a restaurant, charter, shop or event we’re missing? Add it, free, Florida side or Alabama side: /submit/
