Dauphin Island AL - Hit By Dozens Of Hurricanes, Rebuilt Repeatedly At Taxpayer Cost Of $100 Million
Last edited Thu Sep 5, 2019, 09:10 AM - Edit history (1)
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It isn’t hard to see why. The razor-thin section of coast where Dauphin Island lies is a veritable runway for late-season hurricanes sprinting up the Gulf of Mexico. The island is a complex geometry, bordered on the east end by the busy Mobile Bay Ship Channel, with towering sand dunes in the middle and virtually no shoreline or dunes on the pancake flat west end. It might seem surprising, then, that the largest and most expensive homes are located along the vulnerable west end, where Katrina gutted hundreds of vacation homes, sweeping some off their 15-foot-high stilts into the Mississippi Sound. Yet that’s where owners and investors want to build. “It’s flat and has the best views,” said Mayor Jeff Collier.
Under Alabama law, there’s little Collier can do, assuming he even wanted to stop them. The state has no requirements for setbacks. Property owners can — and do — build right to the water’s edge. In theory, there is a state construction line limiting building beyond it. However, the line was adopted in 1973 and now sits about a hundred yards offshore, under the Gulf of Mexico.
“The state has never gone back and reset the line to take into account erosion, storms, or sea-level rise,” said George F. Crozier, the former head of a marine research center on the east end. “It’s kind of a joke. It fell into the water.” “We’ve had a run of bad luck,” Collier allowed. “We’ve had a run like every year with a hurricane. The west end is especially vulnerable. It washes over in every storm. Like I say, the west end goes under in a heavy dew.”
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It is unclear how much federal aid Dauphin Island has received over time. The records are incomplete and don’t go back far enough. But it is at least $100 million and some put the figure as high as $200 million. Crozier told me it could be higher yet. But even the lower estimate works out to about $170,000 for each of the island’s 1,200 year-round residents. “Dauphin Island, and especially the west end, is a poster child for all of our failed public policies, local, state, and federal,” Crozier said. “Really, it is a case study of schizophrenia. The property owners want to be left alone, except when there is a storm. Then they want the taxpayers to pay for new roads and bridges and sand and [to] help them rebuild.”
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https://e360.yale.edu/features/on-the-alabama-coast-the-unluckiest-island-in-america
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