ESho summer hot and silty
We’ve had a pretty silty summer in my Eastern Shore neighborhood. Silty, like in red
clay flowing all over the place — eventually contaminating our local creeks and
ultimately, Mobile Bay. Now I realize that my neighborhood isn’t THE Eastern Shore
(though some of my neighbors behave as if it were), but if our experience over the last
several months is typical, by Veterans’ Day we might be able to pull on our hip boots and
walk on over to the battleship to attend ceremonies there.
Silt contaminated runoff into the bay is hardly a hot new topic here on the Eastern Shore.
I found a 1974 SkyLab4 photo of Mobile Bay with a silt plume coming out of D’Olive
Creek, clearly visible all the way down to Mullet Point. It was attributed to construction
in Lake Forest. I suspect that with a change in date and in attribution, we’d have a
contemporary picture. Not much visible progress in 35 years. Not much evidence of a
sense of urgency and not much passionate concern for our environment.
The BankcorpSouth site on US 98 provides a real-time demonstration of this behavior. In
May of this year heavy rainfall sent a mass of mud over a foot deep and stretching from
curb to curb down the north lane of Rock Creek Parkway — flowing right into Rock
Creek. I was leaving for Houston early that morning and came upon this mess as front-
loaders and men with shovels were trying to clear the road by helping the mud on its way
into the creek. The straw bales used to contain runoff were moving with the flow, in the
mix like marshmallows in Rocky Road ice cream. I could make out a collapsed silt fence
upstream of this mass of mud, while downstream equipment headlights illuminated a
detention pond, stripped of newly laid sod, with rapidly eroding sides.
In the aftermath, ADEM inspected and expressed great concern. The responsible
engineering firm explained how it happened — all this water, seemingly unprecedented
and unanticipated, came off US 98 and overwhelmed their protective measures. It
sounded as though someone unaffiliated with the project had done something to divert
water onto the bank’s property.
Best as I could determine, the only change to the US 98 water flow was the new entrance
drive — inadvertently acting as a sluice, diverting water coming down the hill into the
parking lot. This flood then exited the property through the lower driveway, carrying with
it the mud and debris that ended up in the public street, then the creek and finally Mobile
Bay. Sure looked more like a self-inflicted wound than an act of forces unknown.
Since that day in May, paving has been added and the landscaping is a bit more mature
and stable. What hasn’t changed is the detention basin. This basin is the last
environmental protection device before contaminated runoff enters Rock Creek.
While everything upstream was cleaned up and prettified in preparation for the opening
of the bank, this basin sat, eroding and gradually filling with silt until its outlet pipe was
partially covered. Ineffective and likely adding more silt flow into the creek than if it
weren’t there at all. After about two months green mats were added on the sides. But
when the first rain came some of these washed away exposing bare dirt. Just before
Gustav, dirt was added to these exposed sides, but most of this washed away — into the
creek, bound for the bay.
This casual concern for controlling runoff is hardly unique to this site. There are dozens
like it all over the Eastern Shore. As development has taken off so has the runoff. After
the rains associated with Hurricane Gustav, I checked out Fly Creek, Rock Creek and
D’Olive Creek. The fast-flowing water in each was a brownish-red and the source of the
coloration was clearly visible: nearby construction sites with ineffective barriers and
detention basins that were letting great volumes of silt into the waterways leading into the
bay.
I hear people talking about planning for 100-year or even 500-year floods. Good rhetoric,
but we can’t even effectively plan for coping with our normal annual rainfall. And when
we have a major failure like what happened at the BancorpSouth location, the developers,
engineers and inspectors responsible for preventing such an event act surprised:
“Whadda-ya-know, looks like we need to start thinkin’ about some way to keep all that
silt from flowin’ out into creeks and on into the bay when we have these really big rains.”
Not much evidence of thinking, just pro forma efforts: throw up some silt fencing, throw
down some sod and dig out a detention basin. When that doesn’t work, clean up and do it
again — and again — until the project is finished or drought sets in. Everybody seems to
miss the point of the exercise: it’s to stop contaminated runoff from entering our streams
and Mobile Bay.
This sequence of events which I’ve watched play out at the bank site brings to mind
Albert Einstein — not that this performance is Einsteinian in its genius, but because of a
statement usually attributed to him: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing
over and over while expecting different results.”
To break this cycle of insanity, we need mandated runoff controls that have been proved
to work in the real, wet world of Lower Alabama. Then, a serious, proactive enforcement
of these standards.
Otherwise, a future outing on the bay could mean a hike.
Contact Pete Gleszer at jubilee@lagniappemobile.com.
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