Gulf Coast Media

The Alabama Department of Environmental Management issued advisories late last week for three popular swimming areas in Baldwin County due to high levels of bacteria, and as of Monday, June 8, they each remain active. Resampling is expected today.

Both the Orange Street Pier in Fairhope and Gulf State Park Pavilion Beach recorded the highest levels of enterococcus, a f***l indicator bacteria, in more than 20 years of testing, while Fairhope Municipal Park recorded its highest levels of the bacteria since April of 2025.

ADEM, in cooperation with the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH), has been monitoring public recreation sites along the Alabama Gulf Coast since 1999 and now tests 25 sites in Baldwin and Mobile Counties. Publicly available testing data on the agency’s website goes back to January 2006.

The Environmental Protection Agency considers water safe for swimming in coastal areas when the bacteria count is below 104 Most Probable Number of bacteria per 100 mL of water (

City of Daphne is considering a moratorium that would temporarily pause multifamily residential developments.

According to documents, the moratorium would apply to “any application for rezoning, pre-zoning, site plan approval, master plan approval, planned development approval or other development approval for any new multi-family residential development” within the city’s corporate limits. These include apartments, townhomes, condominiums, duplexes and “similar residential developments containing more than one dwelling unit on a single lot or unified development site.”

City officials said if approved, the moratorium would last six months.

Daphne hasn’t enacted a moratorium on residential developments since September 2021, when city council voted to impose a six-month pause on rezoning applications for apartments, mid-rise condominiums, townhomes and PUDs that included multifamily residences. The moratorium was then extended for an additional six months in March 2022.

✍: Colin James / Gulf Coast Media

It's been six seasons since a strong, incredibly slow-moving Category 2 hurricane crawled ashore in Gulf Shores.

Now, there is the potential for a storm of the same name to make the kind of waves we don't want to see in south Alabama.

The National Hurricane Center, which is responsible for the Atlantic Basin, uses six lists to name a disturbance that intensifies into a tropical storm. The separate set is used each year and rotates back to the first one once all are used. That means the list used for the 2020 hurricane season, which included Hurricane Sally, is the one being used this year.

A storm's name can be retired if it is "so deadly or costly that the future use of its name for a different storm would be inappropriate for reasons of sensitivity," according to NWS.

If that occurs, the World Meteorological Organization committee votes to replaces the name with another and strikes the "offending name" from the list.

The Alabama Gulf Coast's two other hurricanes of lore, Frederic in 1979 and Ivan in 2004, which was previously the most recent named storm to make landfall on the Alabama Gulf Coast, are both retired. The three that were retired from Sally's year are Laura, Eta and Iota.

In 2020, there were so many named storms that NWS had to start using the Greek alphabet after going through the complete list of rotating names. Now, there is an alternate name list to be used in such a busy season rather than Greek letters.

Hurricane Sally was responsible for four direct fatalities, including one in the Wolf Bay area of Baldwin County, two in Escambia County, Florida, and one near Atlanta, Georgia. There were also five indirect fatalities, including one in Foley, one in Baldwin County, one in Pensacola and two in Georgia.

According to RHI and NWS, Sally caused a national total of $7.3 billion in damage.

✍: Kayla Green / Gulf Coast Media