Aerial footage captured over Fort Morgan in the days after Hurricane Sally made landfall shows the scale of destruction the storm left behind along Baldwin County’s coastline, from splintered piers and stripped rooflines to sand-covered roadways and downed trees.
Sally came ashore near Gulf Shores early Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2020, as a Category 2 hurricane with sustained winds near 105 mph, then slowed to a crawl over south Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, dumping as much as two and a half feet of rain in some spots and pushing a destructive storm surge into low-lying communities. The slow-moving system gave the Gulf Coast an unusually long, grinding exposure to hurricane-force winds and rising water, and Fort Morgan, situated at the western tip of the Fort Morgan Peninsula where Mobile Bay meets the Gulf of Mexico, took a direct hit from both.
Drone video shot in the storm’s aftermath shows homes along the peninsula with roofs peeled back, docks reduced to pilings, and stretches of Alabama’s coastal highway buried under sand pushed inland by the surge. Debris fields lined yards and roadsides, and several waterfront structures sustained damage to pilings and foundations from the pounding surf. Crews spent the following days clearing roads and assessing which homes were safe to reoccupy.
The storm was blamed for at least two deaths in Alabama and Georgia, and its effects reached far beyond the immediate coastline. By Thursday afternoon, more than half a million customers across Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Louisiana were without power, according to outage tracking data, as utility crews worked to restring downed lines and clear fallen trees from roads across Baldwin and Mobile counties.
Even after Sally’s center pushed inland and weakened, its remnants continued to cause problems well beyond south Alabama. Heavy rain bands trailing the storm brought flooding concerns to Georgia and the Carolinas, and forecasters warned that swollen rivers across the Florida Panhandle and south Alabama could bring additional flooding in the days that followed, even as the skies over the Gulf Coast began to clear.
In Fort Morgan and neighboring Gulf Coast communities, the cleanup stretched on for weeks. Baldwin County road crews and utility workers worked through debris piles and downed power poles, while property owners began the long process of drying out flooded homes, tarping damaged roofs and waiting on insurance adjusters. The storm’s slow track and heavy rainfall left it ranked among the more damaging tropical systems to strike the Alabama Gulf Coast in recent memory, and local officials pointed to the aerial imagery as some of the clearest evidence of just how hard the coastline was hit.