FAIRHOPE, Ala. — A customer is waiting as Patrick Gormandy steers his deep-water trawler — the Captain Sam B — back to the dock after a day of shrimping on Mobile Bay.
Gormandy shovels plump shrimp from the boat's holding tank into plastic tubs that look like old-fashioned laundry baskets.
"If only there were more of them," Gormandy says. Today's catch is less than half of what he would typically harvest in the middle of summer. Gormandy has a notebook scribbled with pages of orders he can't fill.
"It seems that every year is worse than the last," he says. "This one is the worst one on record." Alabama oyster harvesters say their catch is also down.
Gormandy blames the decline in part on a federal project to expand and maintain the Mobile ship channel, the route through the bay that allows big ships to get from the Gulf of Mexico into the Port of Mobile.
Dredging waterways for navigation is a centuries-old practice, but this project is drawing controversy because the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has a permit to put the material they dig out of the channel into other parts of the expansive Mobile Bay, which critics say is choking the estuary with dredging mud.
"They have just ruined all the places that we work," he says. "It needs to be stopped."
Gormandy, 47, has been shrimping these waters since he was a boy and took over his father's boat about ten years ago.
He says shrimpers here already contend with problems associated with the rapid development along the Alabama Gulf Coast, like sewage spills in a heavy downpour. And now the dredging operation. He gets emotional thinking about whether the business can survive.
"I understand why they should do that, but what they're doing with the material is our problem," says Gormandy. "We want to leave this bay better than we found it, and it's going to be hard to do that."
Gormandy is a part of a wide-ranging and unlikely coalition that includes both commercial and recreational fishing interests, property owners, environmental groups, and Republican elected officials. They are lobbying Congress to ban the dumping of dredge material into Mobile Bay.
"We're not against economic development," says Henry Barnes, the mayor of Bayou la Batre, which bills itself as the seafood capital of Alabama. "But there's a right way and a wrong way to do it, and the way they are doing it is wrong."
Barnes builds and repairs shrimp nets for a living.
"I'm a third-generation elected official and third generation net man," he quips. He took that perspective recently to Washington, D.C., to meet with members of Alabama's congressional delegation.
He'd like to see fishermen compensated for their losses. Barnes says it's hard enough for the seafood industry to survive as it is, without having to battle the federal government too. "The federal government probably looks at us like the back end of a northbound horse is about as delicate as I can put it."
"We're fighting foreign imports. Domestic regulations out the wazoo. I mean, it's crazy," he says. "But yet they can come and just dump on us? You know, that's ridiculous. Makes no sense to me."
The group leading the fight is Mobile Baykeeper, which has been monitoring the offshore dredging operation.
"Let her rip," says Baykeeper executive director William Strickland as he navigates a boat across the Mobile Bay ship channel to the dredge pipe outfall.
"See that? Smell it too?"
Seabirds flock to a spot where dark mud spews into the water. "That's the smell of low-oxygen dead stuff. And then you can see the birds trying to pick what they can out of that heaping mess," says Strickland.
Baykeeper has been trying to get the Corps to stop the practice for years, and is now asking Congress to intervene by banning it in the upcoming appropriations bill, or through the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) next year. This type of disposal of dredge spoil in Mobile Bay was previously prohibited by WRDA between 1986 and 1996.
Strickland says they don't want to stop the dredging, just the way it's being disposed of. The group has filed notice of intent to sue the Corps under the Endangered Species Act. "And we believe there's many other various environmental laws that have been violated in this practice. So certainly we're willing to do whatever it takes," he says.
Strickland wants to see the Corps use more of the dredge material for coastal restoration projects, or take it offshore to the open Gulf, as was the practice between 1986 and 2014.
"They know how to do it," says Strickland. "We can keep our channel open. We can have a healthy ecosystem. We want to have both."
But Corps officials say keeping the dredge material in Mobile Bay is good for the ecosystem.
"It's important from our perspective to keep the sediment in the system," says Justin McDonald, chief of civil works programs and project management branch of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Mobile District. "The sediment renourishes the system and you need to keep the sediment in the system. It's not good to haul it out," he says. "That's where the real disconnect in the public perception right now is."
McDonald says they dredge four million cubic yards of material a year on average, the equivalent of about 200,000 large dump truck loads.
He says about 20-30% of that is put on what's known as hopper dredges and taken out to the Gulf. Another portion is used for coastal restoration. But he says there are not enough restoration projects or hopper dredges available to handle the sheer volume of what they dredge.
So most of that material is put back into Mobile Bay using what the Corps calls a thin layer placement technique, spraying a 12-inch layer in a specified zone. The zones are rotated over time to allow the habitat and water quality to recover.
McDonald says the environmental impact is short-term and temporary, and will benefit the bay in the long run.
"I will acknowledge that if you fly a drone over a dredge and you see a turbidity plume coming off the back, that it looks bad," McDonald says. "But the bay is so highly variable. And turbidity, if you get a good south wind blowing, or you get a big rain event, the bay turns to chocolate milk."
The Alabama Port Authority supports the project because it will allow the Port of Mobile to accommodate the much larger cargo ships now coming through the Panama Canal.
That's an economic driver for the state says former Republican Congressman Bradley Byrne, President of the Mobile Chamber of Commerce.
"There is no port on the Gulf of Mexico presently that can take any of those ships."
He says the chamber supports the Corps permit in part based on assessments from the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "They're the ones that are going to be the most concerned about what this is doing to the biological life in the bay. And they have signed off on this," he says.
Byrne, who lives on Mobile Bay, has heard complaints from neighbors but says he hasn't noticed a problem. "There's no more silt around my house on Mobile Bay today than it was when I moved in 24 years ago."
Still, the coalition's fight against what it calls "mud dumping" is gaining traction.
Republican Senator Katie Britt of Alabama questioned Corps officials about it during a June subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill. She suggested the agency can strike a better balance. "We can make sure that we have the economic engine that is the Port of Mobile, and we responsibly preserve our natural resources," she said. "It is imperative."
Britt is pushing to require that at least 70% of dredge material be used for beneficial purposes like habitat restoration or wetland creation. "And I am not going to move off of that," Britt said.
State officials are also considering action.
"These look great. I'd like to get five pounds of big daddies," says Alabama state Senator Chris Elliott, looking over the iced-down tubs of locally-caught shrimp at a rustic waterfront seafood market in Bon Secour, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay.
"This is an old fishing and shrimping village," he explains.
The Republican lawmaker has signed onto a letter urging Congress to act.
"This isn't good for the bay. This is universally almost opposed by the people that live here. And there are better ways to do it."
Elliott says the legislature may also have a role because state waters are at stake. He's looking at a Maryland law that prohibits this kind of dredge disposal in Chesapeake Bay.
"I just want to make sure that what we're doing for the big guys, for the port to keep that up and operating so that big container ships are coming in, which I'm fully in favor of and supportive of, that it doesn't squeeze out these locals, these guys that have been here forever that are trying to make their living catching seafood."
A local heritage, he says, that's worth protecting.
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