The Salt Line, Vol. 5: Birds, Barons, and the Internet That Took a Beach Day
Welcome back to The Salt Line, the only local news column legally required to be read while sitting in traffic on Perdido Key Drive. It’s Vol. 5, it’s June, it’s already 94 degrees at 8 a.m., and the Gulf Coast is doing what it does best: being absolutely, magnificently unhinged. Let’s get into it.
🌐 A Contractor Walked Into a Beach… and Cut the Internet
On Wednesday, June 18th, AT&T customers on Pensacola Beach lost internet access. The culprit? A contractor who was working on the Pensacola Beach Gas Line and, apparently, found a bonus cable down there. Service was restored the next day.
Now look — we’ve all had a bad day at work. But there is a specific, elite tier of “bad day at work” that involves accidentally severing the Wi-Fi for an entire barrier island full of tourists who are already mad about the jellyfish. Those people needed their internet. They had Yelp reviews to write IN REAL TIME. They had to post that sunset. The sunset waited for no one, and neither did their data plan.
The good news: it’s fixed. The bad news: somewhere out there, a contractor is going home tonight and telling their spouse, “Honey, I had kind of a day.”
🐟 A Kid Did His Homework and Now There Are Reefs
In Foley, Alabama, what started as an Eagle Scout service project has quietly grown into a full-blown reef restoration effort beneath the docks of Coastal Alabama. The Eagle Reef Project is now expanding and helping restore marine life to local waters.
Let that sink in. A teenager needed community service hours, built some little underwater structures, and accidentally started healing the ocean. Meanwhile, the rest of us have been meaning to return that library book since 2019. An Eagle Scout is literally regrowing the sea floor. The bar has been located, and it is underwater, and it is teeming with new aquatic life.
⚾ A Fish, a Baron, and a Blown Lead Walk Into a Bar
The Pensacola Blue Wahoos split a Wednesday doubleheader with the Birmingham Barons — winning Game 1 comfortably at 6-4, then blowing a late lead in Game 2 to lose 6-3. Combined with a Biloxi Shuckers loss, the split still nudged Pensacola into second place.
I want to pause and appreciate that a team named after a fish beat a team named after feudal warlords, then lost to the same team named after feudal warlords, and STILL moved up in the standings because a team named after oysters also lost. Minor league baseball, ladies and gentlemen. It is perfect. It is chaos. It is ours.
🐦 Baldwin County Launched a Hummingbird to Alaska (Sort Of)
Researchers with the Banding Coalition of the Americas in Baldwin County tracked a hummingbird from Alabama all the way to Alaska using new technology. The tiny bird made the journey, answering what officials call “some big questions.”
I have so many big questions. How? Why? Does it have a tiny carry-on? Did it connect through Atlanta? Most pressingly: this hummingbird commutes farther than most people drive to work, weighs less than a nickel, runs entirely on flower juice, and does it all without cutting anyone’s internet cable. Frankly, the hummingbird is lapping us all.
The contractor from item one should take notes.
🚗 FDOT Planned a Thing, Then Un-Planned the Thing
The Florida Department of Transportation has officially scrapped its plan to convert MLK Jr. Drive and Davis Highway into a two-way street in Pensacola.
No explanation needed. No notes. FDOT spent an unknowable amount of time and taxpayer energy planning a major road conversion and then just… didn’t. This is Pensacola road infrastructure in its purest, most concentrated form. The plan has been scrapped. The roads remain. The traffic remains. All is as it was, and ever shall be, world without end, amen.
That’s Vol. 5. Stay hydrated, tip your servers, and whatever you do — don’t let a contractor anywhere near the fiber optic line.
— Sully