Volunteers who care for two of Mobile Bay’s historic lighthouses say they are exploring new funding avenues after years of financial setbacks tied to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, including a possible request to a regional recovery panel that oversees hundreds of millions of dollars in Gulf restoration money. The group’s leaders describe a decade of chasing reimbursement for losses they say the spill caused, and a slow pivot toward raising money for the structures themselves, one event and one grant at a time.
The Alabama Lighthouse Association, an all-volunteer nonprofit that maintains the Middle Bay Lighthouse and Sand Island Lighthouse in Mobile Bay, says the spill disrupted its maintenance work for more than a year and left the group short on cash, labor and equipment just as both structures needed attention. The association has long operated on shoestring finances, relying on donated boat time and volunteer labor to reach the offshore structures, so a single sustained interruption was enough to stall projects that had been planned for months.
According to the association’s finance chair, Capt. Hal Pierce, waters around Sand Island Lighthouse were among the first closed after the spill, with restrictions later expanding to include Middle Bay Lighthouse. Federal and state responders restricted large portions of the Gulf and its bays during the response, and the closures made even routine access to the offshore lights impossible for volunteer crews.
The closures halted the group’s regular workdays, during which volunteers were typically ferried by boat to the offshore structures to perform upkeep. Painting, carpentry, electrical work and storm repairs all depend on getting a crew and its tools out to the towers, and each lost workday pushed the maintenance backlog further behind the wear the Gulf environment inflicts on the structures.
Nearly 14 months of lost work
Pierce estimated the association’s total losses from the roughly 14-month disruption at about $96,500, a figure he says accounts for lost volunteer labor, a boat that was diverted to spill-related mitigation work, equipment and materials, and donations that dried up as volunteers took paying jobs on other restoration projects instead of donating their time to the lighthouses. The valuation of volunteer hours is a standard accounting measure for nonprofits, and for a group with almost no paid staff, labor represents most of what it has to lose.
“It was 14 months before we got back on the lighthouse, but the problem was that when the waters were open, we didn’t have any money and didn’t have any people,” Pierce said, describing how volunteers who once worked for free began earning wages on other spill-related projects. The clean-up economy that grew up along the coast pulled experienced boat operators and tradesmen into paid response work, and the lighthouse crews found themselves competing for the same people they had long counted on for free.
“We lost our whole resource. We lost donated money, we lost volunteers.”
Pierce said he made numerous visits to BP claims offices seeking reimbursement for the association’s losses, and was initially told the group would be audited. He said he never received a follow-up on the results, and the claim was ultimately turned down. For a small volunteer organization without accountants or attorneys, navigating the claims process proved to be its own kind of full-time job, and the association came away from it with nothing to show for the effort.
Association president Dan Dealy said the group’s status as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit complicated its ability to document the kind of financial losses required to qualify for a claim. Because the association does not sell tickets or charge fees for the lighthouses, its income was already donations rather than revenue, and proving forgone income in the claims format was difficult to the point of being impossible.
“As a 501(c)(3), there is no way we can submit a loss statement of things that we didn’t get during that time period,” Dealy said.
A new route through RESTORE Act money
With the direct claims route exhausted, the association is now considering a proposal to the Gulf Coast Recovery Council, the state body that oversees the disbursement of Alabama’s roughly $599 million share of RESTORE Act funding, much of which is earmarked for projects benefiting Mobile and Baldwin counties. The council solicits and scores project proposals from governments and nonprofits across the region, and conservation, restoration and tourism projects have all found their way into the funding mix since the law passed in 2012.
Dealy said the group may seek support for an estimated $160,000 in needed railing repairs at Middle Bay Lighthouse. The railing work is a safety-critical item on an offshore structure that volunteers must climb and work around, and a grant of that size would rival anything the all-volunteer group has ever raised on its own.
The lighthouse group is also looking for ways to generate its own revenue closer to home. It recently received approval from the Alabama Historical Commission to host a wedding at Middle Bay Lighthouse, with liability stipulations protecting both organizations. The arrangement marks a new chapter for a site that for decades saw only maintenance crews and the occasional curiosity-seeker in a boat.
Dealy said the event went smoothly and could open the door to additional public gatherings at the site, such as Boy Scout outings and memorial services. The association hopes supervised access can turn the lighthouse from a maintenance burden into a modest revenue engine, while still keeping the historic structure protected from damage and overuse.
“If we can do events for the public to use the lighthouse, under supervision, that would help,” Dealy said. “We can generate revenue in other ways so that missing money won’t hurt so bad.”
The approach mirrors what other coastal preservation groups have tried in the era of shrinking public funding: rent the landmark out carefully, build a constituency of people who have actually visited it, and use the proceeds to keep the structure standing. For a group whose income once consisted almost entirely of donations, even modest event fees represent a structural change.
A hexagonal survivor from 1885
Built in 1885 and deactivated in 1967, the hexagonal Middle Bay Lighthouse is one of the few remaining screw-pile lighthouses still standing in the country, a style once common in shallow coastal waters. Screw-pile lights were set on iron legs twisted deep into the bay bottom, allowing them to stand over shallow water where a masonry tower could not be built, and they once lined the Chesapeake, the Gulf and other sheltered waters by the dozens before automation and demolition thinned their ranks.
The Alabama Historical Commission funded a $349,000 restoration in 2002 that included a new slate roof and repairs to corroded tie rods and damaged wood, and followed that with a $270,000 restoration project beginning in 2011 after rejecting an association proposal in 2008 to relocate the lighthouse ashore to Battleship Park. The state preservation agency’s willingness to invest repeatedly in the structure reflects both its rarity and its visibility — the light stands in open water where thousands of boaters and commuters pass it, and its loss would be permanent.
That roof would take further damage years later. Regular maintenance remains critical because of the lighthouses’ age and continued exposure to Gulf storms; roof repairs were needed again at Middle Bay after an April 2015 thunderstorm associated with the Dauphin Island Regatta produced high winds that killed six boaters and tore slate from two sections of the roof. The same squall line that turned deadly on the water left the 130-year-old structure exposed to leaks that volunteers had to patch themselves.
Sand Island Lighthouse, located about three miles offshore between Mobile Point and Dauphin Island, has an even longer history. First built for $10,000 in 1837, it was destroyed and later rebuilt in 1873 before being deactivated in 1933. The island the tower once guarded has eroded to almost nothing, leaving the masonry tower standing in open water at the mouth of Mobile Bay, where it serves today as a landmark for the ships and fishing boats that round Mobile Point.
The 125-foot structure is now owned by the Dauphin Island Property Owners Association. That private stewardship of a state historic landmark has made coordination between the owner and the volunteer maintenance association a constant feature of any repair project, and funding questions on Sand Island are necessarily shared between the two groups.
Small groups competing for big money
Pierce said he worries that smaller volunteer groups like the Alabama Lighthouse Association risk being overlooked amid a wave of large-scale funding requests from municipalities, counties and bigger organizations competing for the same pool of spill-recovery dollars. RESTORE Act processes favor applicants who can produce engineering studies, matching funds and professional administration, none of which come easily to an association whose officers are volunteers with day jobs.
“We have all kinds of people that never had a thing to do with the oil spill, weren’t hurt by the oil spill, and they are getting money,” Pierce said. “Here we are with lighthouses in a serious state and we can’t get anything.”
His frustration points to a broader tension in Gulf restoration funding: the money was meant to make communities whole after the spill, but fourteen years on, the competition has drawn in projects with only loose connections to the spill itself, while groups with documented losses and no paperwork trail remain on the outside. Whether the lighthouse association’s proposal clears that filter will say something about how Alabama weighs small, historic projects against large infrastructure requests in the years of RESTORE Act funding that remain.