Sallie’s Ashes: The Fairhope Grandmother Who Turned Her Final Months Into a Fight for Mobile Bay
Some stories about the Gulf Coast are told from boats or beaches. This one begins in a screening room, at the Fairhope Public Library, where a 40-minute documentary called Sallie’s Ashes left its audience terrified and inspired at the same time — terrified by what sits quietly upstream of Mobile Bay, and inspired by the three Alabama grandmothers who decided to do something about it.
The film tells the story of the late Sarah “Sallie” Smith of Fairhope, who — facing a terminal cancer diagnosis — recruited two friends and set off on a late-in-life crusade to force Alabama Power and the Environmental Protection Agency to remove and recycle the enormous coal ash pond at the Barry Steam Plant, only 25 miles upstream of Mobile Bay.
A Pit the Size of 454 Football Fields
The facts of the case are stark. Alabama Power’s James M. Barry Electric Generating Plant, the state’s largest coal-fired power plant, has deposited its waste ash for decades into an unlined pit beside the Mobile River. The pond holds roughly 21 million tons of coal ash — about the size of 454 football fields — and a single dirt dike is all that separates the toxic stew from the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta and, ultimately, Mobile Bay.
The ash is laced with arsenic, mercury, and other heavy metals linked to cancer, heart damage, and neurological disorders. Scientists warn that a catastrophic breach of the dike would release billions of gallons of contaminated sludge — pollution advocates note the volume would dwarf the BP oil spill by orders of magnitude — devastating one of the most biodiverse regions in North America and the communities that depend on it. The pond has also become the subject of a federal lawsuit.
Sallie Smith, who admitted she “knew nothing about coal ash” when she started, put it plainly in the film: “When I see something that’s a problem, it tends to call my name… and once it’s done that, I need to see it through.”
Three Grandmothers and the Coal Ash Action Group
Smith called herself the instigator. She recruited her friends Diane Thomas as the researcher and Savan Wilson as the techie, and together the three retirees founded the Coal Ash Action Group — a grassroots campaign that came to be known around Baldwin County as the “Coal Ash Grannies.” Wilson, asked to describe the trio, delivers the film’s most quotable line: “We are the Golden Girls, meet Erin Brockovich.”
The group’s method was education. Smith and her friends made it their mission to make Baldwin County residents aware of the pond 25 miles north of Mobile — what it holds, where it sits, and what a failure would mean for the delta, the bay, and everything that swims, fishes, or swims there.
A Race Against Two Clocks
The documentary’s power comes from the second clock ticking alongside the first. When filmmaker Brennan Robideaux and producer Daniel Junge approached Smith about making a documentary, she bluntly told them that if they wanted to do it, they had better hurry — she had just been diagnosed with cancer for the second time, and this one was far more severe. Robideaux and his creative collaborator Allison Bohl DeHart traveled to Mobile and Fairhope two days later and began filming.
Smith died in 2023, at the age of 80, before the film was finished. The footage of her speaking about her impending death — and the visible joy she took in accomplishing something she believed mattered — gives the documentary its aching center. “When I started looking at it, that did it for me,” she says in the film. “That meant I had absolutely no choice here. I had to solve this.”
From a Radio Story to the Festival Circuit
The film’s path to the screen began with local journalism: Fairhope-area listeners first heard about the women when public radio reporter Cori Yonge’s story about the Coal Ash Action Group aired on Alabama Public Radio and NPR. A producer friend of Robideaux’s heard the broadcast in California and called him — “this is very interesting, don’t you live in the South?” — and the project was born.
Sallie’s Ashes, a 40-minute documentary, premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado over Labor Day weekend and went on to screen at the Hamptons International Film Festival, the Hawaii International Film Festival, the New Orleans Film Festival, and — fittingly, for a story rooted on the Eastern Shore — the Fairhope Film Festival, where it made its regional debut on November 13. The film was nominated for Best Short Documentary by the Critics Choice Documentary Awards, and the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival jury praised its “endearing portrait” of women taking on serious work with a character-driven, playful approach. National coverage has followed, positioning the short as a contender in the documentary awards conversation.
The Fight Continues
Smith did not live to see the film, but the campaign she started has continued. The Coal Ash Action Group has partnered with Mobile Baykeeper to keep pressure on Alabama Power, and the two organizations encourage citizens to contact the utility directly and write to local legislators. The utility, for its part, has agreed to “cap in place” — covering the pond — which environmental advocates say does not solve the core problem: because the pit is unlined, toxic elements continue to seep into the groundwater, and the dike remains the only barrier against a breach.
The Coal Ash Action Group’s position has not changed: complete removal, recycling, and closure of the pond at the Barry Steam Plant. Wilson and Thomas, who attended the Fairhope screening and spoke about the need to educate the community, continue to appear at public showings — including an upcoming screening at the Spanish Fort Community Center — as the film’s list of local showings grows.
Why It Matters on the Bay
Protecting the delta and the bay, the film argues, is not just an ecological question. It is about preserving the culture, history, and way of life of coastal Alabama: swimming, fishing, and raising families along the shores of Mobile Bay for generations to come. The Mobile-Tensaw Delta is one of the country’s great natural treasures, and the film makes the case that its defense should not wait for a disaster to prove the risk real.
Sallie’s Ashes runs about 40 minutes, and its central theme is the collision of two ticking clocks — the dike holding, and a woman running out of time. Smith did not live to see the ash moved. But the film closes on the argument she made with her last months: that the most unlikely voices can carry the greatest weight, and that sometimes the fight for the future rests in the hands of those who know they won’t live to see it.
Screenings of Sallie’s Ashes continue across the region, with dates and locations posted by the Coal Ash Action Group and partner organizations.