Dauphin Island Mayor Jeff Collier says he can trace the entire shape of his adult life back to a single storm. In September 1979, Hurricane Frederic tore through the Alabama coast just as Collier, a fresh high school graduate, was preparing to leave for the University of South Alabama. Instead of moving into a dorm, he found himself standing in the wreckage of his family’s business, wondering how long it would take the island to recover.
“The biggest hit was the bridge,” Collier has recalled of the storm’s aftermath. With the only span connecting Dauphin Island to the mainland destroyed, he faced an immediate choice: head off to college as planned, or stay behind to help his parents put the Dauphin Island Golf Course and their storm-damaged home back together. He chose to stay, delaying his enrollment by what he assumed would be a matter of months.
It turned out to be three years. Rebuilding the bridge took far longer than anyone expected, and in the meantime islanders had to reorganize their entire way of life around a ferry system. The first car ferry could haul only 20 to 25 vehicles at a time, with a one-way trip lasting roughly two hours. Miss the boat, and the wait for the next one could stretch to four hours. As a result, most residents crossed to the mainland sparingly, sometimes only once every week or two, planning trips with military precision.
Electricity was another challenge. Alabama Power trucked in room-sized generators and staged them near Ben Buerger’s Ship and Shore store, a modest market that Collier credits with holding the island community together during those lean years. Because the store carried basic supplies, fewer people needed to make the long ferry crossing just to shop. When a cooler was eventually added, Collier remembers it as a genuine luxury. “It was a luxury to get a cold drink or ice cream,” he has said of those days.
Traffic finally returned to a rebuilt Dauphin Island Bridge in July 1982, nearly three years after Frederic hit. By then, the storm had already reshaped Collier’s path. He went on to work in the golf industry through the PGA program, and in 1988 he won a seat on the Dauphin Island town council. A decade later, in 1998, he was elected mayor for the first time, a post he has held for decades since.
Looking back, Collier doesn’t describe the hurricane as simply a disaster he survived. He describes it as the event that set the direction of his entire career and civic life. Had the bridge not gone down, he says, he likely would have left for college on schedule and never returned to serve the island in local government. Instead, the storm tied him permanently to the place he now leads, a connection that residents say has shaped decades of decisions about how Dauphin Island prepares for, and recovers from, the next big storm.