Fifteen years ago, I found myself throwing oranges off bridges in an attempt to understand the hydrodynamics of Mobile Bay. The Deepwater Horizon oil rig had just exploded and sunk into the Gulf of Mexico, sending oil gushing from the wellhead towards our coast. As a local conservation leader, I wanted to do everything in my power to protect our delicate marshes from destruction, like understanding where the Bay’s currents might spread the oil to help inform how best to deploy protective floating booms and keep the oil out of sensitive habitats.
That summer in 2010, and for many years after, I attended countless public meetings where government officials sought input from the public on how to address the BP oil spill. At those meetings, many members of the public repeated the same refrain: restoring our environment restores our economy. The health of our communities and our economy on the Gulf Coast is intrinsically tied to the health of our ecosystem. One needed only to look at the shuttered seafood restaurants, the docked shrimp boats, or the empty beach hotels to understand how closely linked our part of the world is to our precious natural resources.
Fifteen years later, recovery continues, and from this tragedy has come an opportunity to restore coastal habitats while creating new jobs and economic opportunities across the Gulf Coast and beyond. Billions of dollars in fines have been allocated to restoring the habitats, wildlife, and coastal communities affected by the BP oil spill. Now that hundreds of restoration projects have been built and still more are underway, we’re beginning to see the real-world benefits of that environment-economy connection.
Take, for instance, the Pensacola Bay Living Shoreline Project, a large-scale project addressing erosion and habitat loss across three sites near the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. This project is creating healthier wetlands for wildlife and increasing flooding and storm protection for the greater Pensacola area, as well as the home of the Blue Angels. Plus, the construction of the project is creating jobs for engineers, surveyors, scientists, and more.
The Pensacola area suffered damage during the oil spill, adding to the decades of erosion due to development, storms, and sea-level rise. At one of the project sites, known as Sherman Inlet, roughly 400 feet of shoreline has eroded into the Bay since 1961. The encroaching waterline was now threatening a runway that the Blue Angels jets use regularly to take off and perform their high-flying stunts.
Escambia County’s Resiliency Program Manager Ryan Kirby described the need for restoration at one of the project’s three sites: “Just inside of the Pensacola Pass, swell, wind, waves, and wake from heavy boat traffic combine to batter the shoreline.”
To solve this problem, Escambia County enlisted engineers to design a living shoreline that would halt the erosion, restore the natural shoreline, and reduce wave energy in the Bay to protect the site from future land loss. Living shorelines are a nature-based solution to prevent erosion and flooding, using sediment, marsh plants, and breakwaters to beef up a coastline rather than concrete or metal structures.
Living shorelines can be more effective than human-made shoreline hardening projects, and they double as habitat for fish, oysters, sea turtles, birds, and other wildlife. Audubon Florida and partners have built similar a living shoreline in Alafia Bay near Tampa to calm wave energy and provide healthy mangrove habitat for Great Egrets, Brown Pelicans, and Roseate Spoonbills to nest.
In Pensacola Bay, the project leads set out to create 20,000 feet of limestone reefs and breakwaters both above and below the water, as well as 200 acres of marsh and seagrass habitat. Just one of the project’s three sites would require over 629,000 marsh plants to be planted. Dr. Bret Webb, a coastal engineer with South Coast Engineers, described the scale of this living shoreline as “a tall task.”
“This project is large, complex, multi-faceted, and transformational,” Webb said, “and there is no manual for designing living shorelines. Each one is uniquely designed for the site’s ecology, geology, and coastal processes.”
Many hands were needed to make such an undertaking possible. Engineers designed the project, horticulturalists were needed to grow marsh plants, construction workers are set to move earth and install the breakwaters. Barge operators float in materials and heavy machinery, surveyors plotted out the sites, and biologists took soil samples. As a project manager at the lead engineering firm for the project, Volkert, Inc., during the initial design phases, I myself was one of the many people proudly contributing to the success of this project.
“These types of large engineering design and construction projects have far-reaching, positive economic impacts, with a majority of the impacts going to the local communities,” said Mike Warnke, Principal Project Manager for Volkert.
Projects at this scale take many partners, multiple funding sources, and time to complete. Funding was provided through the BP oil spill settlement and a Department of Defense Community Infrastructure grant. Many more state and federal agencies provided finance and expertise, including the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
Altogether these partners invested $36 million in this project, resulting in work for eight different local businesses. While construction is still underway, this project has already created hundreds of acres of new coastal habitat and protects our critical military infrastructure in the Florida Panhandle.
“The return of this critical habitat is vital for the long-term restoration of our estuary,” said Kirby, “and will support recreational and commercial fisheries, the jobs generated by these activities, as well as tourism the overall resilience of the Pensacola Bay system.”
Projects like the Pensacola Bay Living Shoreline are essential not only after disasters like the BP oil spill but to guard against future threats like increasing storms and sea-level rise. Without a healthy coast, we stand to lose not just the beautiful habits that birds and other wildlife need, but also the services those habitats provide to us as humans. That loss comes at a cost—a global study estimates that we could lose $10 trillion in gross domestic product by 2050 if ecosystem services provided by nature continue to decline.
That’s why Audubon has set an ambitious goal of conserving 300 million acres of connected, climate-resilient bird habitat. By “bending the bird curve,” Audubon is working to halt, and ultimately reverse, the decline of birds in the Americas, including here on the Gulf Coast.
