People used to tell him they used to be able to see the bottom of Mobile Bay in 10-12 feet of water.

He thought they were crazy.

“I attributed it to people being old,” said Richard Rutland, captain at Cold Blooded Fishing.

The muddying of the bay, a result of sediment being pumped into the same waters the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is dredging to expand the ship channel, painted an apocalyptic picture repeated in testimonies throughout the night across two recent town halls.

There’s no more seagrass in the dumping areas. When sunlight can’t reach it, it can’t photosynthesize. Mobile Bay has lost 66% of its native seagrasses since 1905. Speckled trout and shrimp have no place to live protected from predators. Where there used to be oyster beds two feet high, 9 square miles are bare bottom.

Dumped sediment has already “greatly harmed” aquatic life in the bay, says Mobile Baykeeper, a nonprofit that formed in 1997 to defend and revive coastal Alabama’s waters. Now, they say, the channel expansion project is set to deposit 90 million cubic yards over the next 20 years. That’s enough to cover the entirety of Mobile Bay with 2.5 inches of mud.

“No one should be allowed to dump this much mud in our waters, especially the federal government,” the group states in its materials on the issue. “Another 90 million cubic yards will decimate the little we have left and destroy the livelihoods of commercial and recreational fishermen.”

NOTHING NEW

The Mobile County Wildlife and Conservation Association got the Corps of Engineers to agree in-bay dumping was bad for the bay and to stop using the practice of “thin-layer placement” to dispose of dredge material in Mobile Bay, but the Corps got emergency permission to resume in 2012 because hauling it south of Dauphin Island caused the project to go over budget.

Alabama’s commercial oyster landings decreased from 14 million pounds in 1950 to around 7 million in 2000, representing a slight increase from 1980 through the ‘90s. A sharp drop-off was recorded in 2010 to around 1 million pounds, with 2020 marking a slight decrease from there.

The Port of Mobile is the only port in the country where in-bay dumping is allowed, yet 18 local restoration projects have been told there isn’t enough dredge material.

Despite Baykeeper filing over 60 pages of comment letters between 2017-19 to demonstrate the harms that would be caused by the ship channel, according to a timeline on their website, the Corps ruled it would have no environmental impact.

“It’s not like a clam or fish or shrimp. It can’t just get up and swim away. You put silt on an oyster, and you smother it,” Chris Nelson, president of Bon Secour Fisheries, said at Baykeeper’s first town hall meeting, which was held in Theodore May 15.

He said his grandfather was worried about the rate of siltation in the 1920s.

A speaker from the audience at the town hall in Fairhope on May 22, who said his family has been on Fort Morgan for 194 years fishing the Bon Secour Bay area, read from an article in The Islander discussing dredging impacts from 1943.

“This isn’t new,” he said. “This can wipe out all of us, and not just us doing business on the water, but everyone’s quality of life.”

Commercial fishermen and inshore charter captains started expressing their concern over dredge disposal practices in 2018. Last year, Baykeeper tried working with the Corps to mitigate impacts, but no progress was made. That summer, Eastern Shore anglers discovered dead fish in the dredge placement area.

“Our bay has a lot of shrimp, and there’s a lot of life throughout when you get into areas where there’s a lot of healthy grass and oysters and stuff like that for the shrimp to live in,” Patrick Garmeson, captain at Ugly Fishing and Daphne resident, is quoted as saying on the pamphlet that was distributed at the Fairhope town hall. He also spoke during both meetings. “But you go into these areas where there’s been a lot of this dumping, and that life doesn’t exist anymore.”

He said in Fairhope that continuing to let the project run unchanged means “we’re gonna say our taxpayer dollars are going to go to support this work and we’re just OK with losing this area to being a viable source for fishing and aquatic life.”

Maria Hoffmann, who owns an outdoor education camp called Little Roots Big Adventures, noted during the Fairhope town hall that 70% of Alabama’s endangered species are aquatic.

Even state Sen. Chris Elliot (R-Josephine) has spoken out against the in-bay mud dumping, asking his colleagues on the Senate floor to urge federal lawmakers to support funding a change in where the excess mud that is of no beneficial use is deposited.

“We’re going to have to make sure that our federal government partners increase funding for this project so that we can dispose of this material properly, so that the much-needed dredging of the ship canal can continue, so that we can continue to be an economic driver for the entire state. But to do so in a manner that does not harm our environment, that does irreparable harm to our environment. And so that’s my plea to our federal colleagues: Let’s do this right,” he said.

TRANSCENDING POLITICS

There must be a better way, Elliott said.

“Environmental degradation is seen in incremental damages, so it makes it hard to notice and support politically,” he said. “But anyone who sees this in motion can see it’s egregious.”

He speaks from experience. Earlier this month, he flew over the bay while the Corps was working on the ship channel deepening and widening project. Mud spewed out from the dredging equipment, like the back of a speeding motorboat. The water was black.

Stanton Lee, a 36-year-old who “grew up right by the Fairhope Pier” and considers the bay his babysitter growing up, called the practice cancerous.

“Dredging is a necessary evil, but it doesn’t have to be a secondary damage,” he said. “Those water systems provide a life worth living.”

He likened this effort Baykeeper is leading to the flounder population bouncing back after the BP oil spill. That only happened “as a result of people giving a crap.”

Peter Jordan moved to the area from Selma to attend the University of South Alabama in 2007. He met his wife down here, and they had four kids, “made a home here.” Now, he said, he gets to share “this place I grew to love” with his kids, to “see it through their eyes.” Digging for crabs. Taking them swimming.

“I’ve learned this place isn’t ours. We’ve got to give it to them,” he said.

He said he came to the town hall Baykeeper held in Fairhope last year and that people he spoke with told him they “shook every tree” they could. What more could they do? They didn’t “want to say anything too political.”

“This is our home, bud,” he said. “What are we willing to do to be able to pass it down to our children?”

CALL TO ACTION

Baykeeper’s call to action is not to stop the ship channel project.

“We want our port to be a competitive economic driver, but how do we mitigate the impact?” Baykeeper Executive Director William Strickland said as he led the Theodore town hall.

They want Congress to ban mud-dumping in Mobile Bay by passing the Water Resources Development Act of 2026. Republican U.S. Sen. Katie Britt has said she is committed to ensuring the Corps “responsibly” disposes of sediment. Baykeeper representatives recently traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, whose political prowess has led him to an expected run for governor. They said they were pleased with the attention and time the senator gave them.

“We felt like Coach was ready to go,” said Garmeson, of Ugly Fishing.

Their requests include a stop to in-bay dumping of sediment that has no “beneficial use”; being involved in approving future beneficial use projects; getting a formal study commissioned on wave energy mitigation along the ship channel; implementation of an in-channel dissolved oxygen system, similar to the Port of Savannah; the creation of a private cost-share program to convert waterfront property to living shoreline; and a large-scale public waterfront property conversion project to living shoreline.

Through their advocacy so far, 18,000 letters have been sent to Alabama’s federal elected officials.

“If we get together an unite on an issue, regardless of our background, we can actually make an impact,” Strickland said in Fairhope.

There is potential for that impact to come sooner than the 2026 session. This summer’s federal appropriations bill has funding for the Corps to continue the project. Baykeeper wants Congress to ban that funding from being used for transitional thin-layer placement or agitation overflow of dredged material in Mobile Bay, rather requiring the Corps to “continue upland or offshore placement of such dredged material consistent with the requirements of section 101 of the Water Resources Development Act of 1986.”

Currently, 35% of the sediment that is dredged each year falls back “into the ditch” and has to be dredged again, costing $11 million each year.

“The time is now,” Strickland said. “It’s right.”

Strickland said Baykeeper’s target is legislation, but at a certain point they will decide to pursue changes through legal action.

They send a Notice of Intent to Sue to the Corps in July 2024 over “their failure to protect Gulf sturgeon,” a threatened species since 1991 under the Endangered Species Act. Their population has been “greatly reduced or eliminated throughout much of their range because of overfishing, dam construction and habitat degradation,” according to NOAA Fisheries.

Protections for the Gulf sturgeon will also mean protections for commercial shrimpers, oysterman and inshore charter captains, Baykeeper says.

Baykeeper authored a paper disputing the Corps position on the environmental impact of in-bay dredging in December 2024.

“The federal agency has not defended its position,” they say in online materials, “with any legitimate scientific backing.”

At least 125 people attended the Theodore town hall, and Fairhope’s hosted around 95.