The story began when Hinton called his local county emergency management office to ask about plans for protecting coastal waters and was shocked by the response.
"The first thing the guy said was, `People are blowing this thing out of proportion, it's just light crude," Hinton said. "I told him I don't care if it's light crude or dark crude or sweet crude, I don't want it in my damn river."
Baldwin County officials deny that anyone ever told Hinton such a thing. But whatever happened, Jamie Hinton was fired up.
Hinton and other leaders got together to kick around ideas for safeguarding their river shortly after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20 and sank in the Gulf of Mexico in about 5,000 feet of water off the Louisiana coast. Someone suggested using barges at the mouth of Weeks Bay to block waves out of the adjoining Mobile Bay, then adding layers of boom.
"It's not rocket science, but it sounded like it might work," Hinton said. The engineering didn't seem that hard since the passage into Weeks Bay is only about 530 feet wide and fairly shallow.
"That protects the Fish River and the Magnolia River. I thought, `that's awesome,'" he said.
Community members honed the plan, and Hinton set out to find barriers to supplement the single strand of narrow boom that BP provided, a meager allocation Hinton called "overly ridiculous." He submitted the blueprint in mid-May believing he'd get an answer quickly from the unified incident command in Mobile.
And then, with the oil oozing toward the northern Gulf Coast, Hinton waited. And waited. And waited.
After fits and starts, supposed approvals and later balks, Hinton finally got the OK last week on his fourth try to protect the river just as oil began washing ashore on Alabama beaches. With a $200,000 allocation from the $25 million that BP gave Alabama for oil spill response, rented barges, a tug and other barriers are now in the water.
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