It's hard to imagine a spot with more to lose from the Gulf oil spill than the Magnolia River. Gnarly trees shroud its slow-moving waters, rich with crabs and mullet. Docks have mailboxes; letters are delivered by boat. Seafood boils with friends are a weekend staple.
Jamie Hinton loves this place, just like everyone in this idyllic community off Mobile Bay, and he wants to do all he can to protect it from what he and others see as a twin threat — oil and bumbling on the part of both government leaders and corporate executives.
Hinton, chief of the Magnolia Springs Volunteer Fire Department, said Monday he spent three weeks tangled in red tape before finally getting approval to do something that's never before been needed, much less tried: using a combination of barges and oil-blocking booms to keep crude out of the Magnolia River.
On Sunday, the new system was finally in place at the mouth of Weeks Bay. Locals hope it will safeguard both the Magnolia River and the nearby Fish River, where the U.S. Postal Service operates what locals proudly call the nation's last waterborne mail route.
"What you've got here is a community that has taken charge of the situation and said, `To hell with the system,'" said Gib Hixon, an old friend of Hinton and chief of Fish River/Marlow Fire and Rescue.
"It's illegal to block this waterway. But if the oil comes, we're going to bring a barge in and use it as a gate to block it," said Hixon. "They can arrest me and Jamie if they want to."
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