On first encountering H. Stewart “Hank” Cobb Jr., a short, round 77-year-old, one would not necessarily guess he had taught Jimmy Buffett to sail, or that he believed he had solved the fight consuming Mobile over where to put a new Interstate 10 bridge across the Mobile River.
He had done the first. He was convinced he had done the second.
“I taught Jimmy Buffett to sail when I was a Sea Scout Skipper,” Cobb recalled. An Eagle Scout with 52 years as a Scouter and 42,000 miles of ocean racing behind him, Cobb spent a 25-year career as a federal contracting officer analyzing 20 to 40 multimillion-dollar contractor proposals a year. He liked problems. He liked them best when the experts had gotten stuck.
The fight he wanted to end
The proposed I-10 bridge was meant to relieve the bottleneck strangling a cross-country artery at the Wallace Tunnel. But every route on the table had enemies.
- Shipyards and waterfront interests warned a bridge would foul the lifeblood of the local economy
- The new cruise terminal, home to Carnival’s Holiday, feared a mammoth bridge footing would squash Mobile’s future as a cruise port
- Historic preservationists, downtown redevelopment advocates and Down the Bay residents all recoiled from a 200-foot-plus structure looming over them
Of an original 14 alternate routes, engineers had narrowed the field to three, all crossing mid-river. A northern option using the Cochrane-Africatown Bridge had reportedly been vetoed by federal highway officials.
Hidden in plain sight
“Where is this mysterious, elegant and simple location?” Cobb asked. “The answer is that it is hidden, hidden in plain sight!”
His route: from the I-65 merge with I-10, run straight east to the Broad Street overpass, rise on a straight approach ramp up and over the McDuffie Coal Terminal, cross the bridge at the tip edge of the mouth of the Mobile River, come down over Pinto Island south of the Battleship Alabama, and merge into a new Bayway in the center of the bay.
Three-mile approach ramps with a gentle seven to nine percent slope would let fully loaded cross-country trucks hold their speed. No sharp curves, no compound curves, no S curves. No entrance merges or exits from horizontal east to horizontal west. No exhaust plume settling over urban renewal neighborhoods. Little expensive right-of-way to acquire, since most of the land is vacant. And no long-haul traffic anywhere near downtown.
Not small, and not cheap
In Cobb’s lexicon, “simple, easy and obvious” did not mean modest. He specified a river clearance of at least 360 feet at neap tide, with a roadbed at 375 feet. Local engineers estimated support piers as high as 600 feet. Cobb put the cost at $800 million to $1 billion, or 10 to 25 percent more than the mid-river routes.
His justification for that height was a catalogue of hazards. Mobile Bay, he argued, sits between two earthquake zones: shifting tectonic plates on the floor of the Gulf, which produced a 6.8 magnitude quake 300 miles south of Mobile in 2006 and quakes centered at Atmore and Brewton in 2005, and the radius around the New Madrid fault. A major quake, he said, could set off a 20- to 50-foot tsunami in north Mobile Bay. Hurricanes Ivan, Georges and Katrina had already sent 20-foot surges up the bay and river. Citing National Geographic, he predicted polar ice melt would raise sea levels 20 feet over two centuries.
“Cochrane Bridge is not high enough for Texas Tower drilling rigs to move under it, as Katrina proved,” Cobb said. In 200 years, he added, 12- to 15-deck cruise ships would need to pass beneath the downriver bridge.
The savings he claimed
Cobb argued his route paid for part of itself. An eastbound toll plaza could sit on vacant land near the Dauphin Island Parkway or Michigan Avenue interchanges rather than in the storm-exposed middle of the bay. The east abutments would rest on clean land at the south end of Pinto Island, avoiding the toxic dredge spoil between Battleship Park and Atlantic Marine and saving federal highway officials $50 million to $100 million in cleanup. A shorter new Bayway would save another $40 million to $60 million. The old I-10, Wallace Tunnel and Bayway route could be renumbered I-210 and reserved for local traffic.
Architects, he insisted, would have the freedom to design something “comparable to the Golden Gate or the Verrazano Narrows.”
One request
“This list of suggestions answers all the realistic objections, except cost, that I can remember to the mid-river, close to downtown, bridge crossing,” Cobb said.
He asked for nothing in return but an invitation.
“If the new Raphael Semmes Bridge is located, designed and built as I have suggested, it will take seven or eight years,” he said. “I will be 85 years old when it is completed and opened, and I would very much like to be invited to be one of the people to participate in cutting the ribbon at the opening ceremony.”