The Propeller Club of Mobile scheduled a special meeting at 6:30 p.m. Monday at the International Trade Club downtown to take up the question that had divided the waterfront for months: where to put a new Interstate 10 bridge over the Mobile River.
Organizers billed the session as “critical to the Mobile maritime community and others,” language that reflected how close the matter had come to a decision.
The state of play
Transportation officials were nearing a choice on a route for the multimillion-dollar bridge, intended to relieve the traffic congestion caused by the bottleneck at the Wallace Tunnel in downtown Mobile.
Of the 14 routes originally proposed, 11 had been eliminated. The three that survived all crossed mid-river, which is precisely what alarmed the people who make their living on that river.
The objections came from nearly every direction:
- Maritime and shipbuilding interests concerned about clearance, construction and the working waterfront
- Downtown redevelopment advocates worried about a massive structure and its ramps cutting through the city center
- Cruise terminal supporters anxious about the future of Mobile’s passenger ship business
- Historic preservationists defending some of the oldest neighborhoods in Alabama
The speaker
Marsha Anderson Bomar, president of Street Smarts, a transportation planning and engineering consulting firm engaged by Keep Mobile Moving, was scheduled to address the meeting.
The involvement of an outside consultant was itself a signal. The bridge debate had grown technical enough that the competing interests were arming themselves with expertise, and the maritime community wanted to hear the traffic engineering case explained by someone who could speak the language of the state and federal agencies making the decision.
Why the Propeller Club
The Propeller Club of the United States is a maritime industry association with ports, or chapters, in shipping cities across the country. Its Mobile port draws its membership from the people who run the terminals, the shipyards, the stevedoring companies, the towing outfits, the pilots’ association, the maritime law firms and the freight forwarders. It is, in effect, the trade organization of the Mobile waterfront.
When that group calls a special meeting about a bridge, it is not an academic exercise. The Port of Mobile was, and is, one of the busiest in the country and the anchor of the region’s industrial economy. A bridge in the wrong place, at the wrong height, with piers in the wrong water, can foreclose decades of terminal expansion and vessel traffic.
The underlying dilemma
Everyone agreed the Wallace Tunnel was failing. Built to carry a fraction of the traffic it was handling, the twin tubes under the Mobile River choked daily, backed up for miles when a truck jackknifed at the eastbound approach, and forced hazardous-material haulers onto surface streets through downtown because they are prohibited from the tunnel.
The disagreement was about the price of the cure. A bridge tall enough to let ships pass and strong enough to carry interstate traffic is an enormous object. Placed at mid-river near downtown, it would loom over the Church Street and De Tonti Square historic districts, over Down the Bay, and over the cruise terminal that Mobile had just spent public money to build.
The meeting was open to the public, admission was free, and seating was limited. Reservations were recommended. The International Trade Club was located at 250 North Water St.
Whatever the audience heard that Monday evening, the decision itself belonged to transportation officials, and the window in which the maritime community could still influence it was closing.