The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Riviera: An Insider's History of the Florida-Alabama Coast

17. The Last Summer

279 n june 17, the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision in Stop the Beach Renourishment, Inc. v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection et al., and the city of Destin, along with a lot of folks in the tourist industry, breathed a sigh of relief. The court held that the state could rebuild beaches, that rebuilt beaches were public, and that beachfront homeowners were not due compensation for what they claimed was “taken” from them. But no one danced in the street with joy or jumped from the Destin Bridge in despair. Except for the beachfront folks who sued, city officials, the tdc, and a handful of people who had wanted the case to be all about property rights and “judicial taking,” nobody seemed to give a rip. Apart from the short Associated Press story that was expanded to reflect local views and an editorial or two, Panhandle newspapers had surprisingly little comment on the subject. A few days after the decision , one of the litigants wrote a column in the Destin Log arguing, more or less, that because his beach had not been nourished and probably would not be for a while, his beach was still private—the picture of the author, tuxedoed and smiling, seemed to underscore the difference between those who claimed to own the beach and the ones they wanted to exclude, the difference between upper crust and lower. The comments that appeared with the online column showed little sympathy for him or his cause, but few bothered to comment. O s e v e n t e e n The Last Summer 280 chapter seventeen When compared to the acrimonious debate that preceded the decision, the response was a near-deafening silence. Some locals suggested that the city shouldsuetheoneswhohadfiledtheoriginalsuitsotaxpayerscouldrecover some portion of what had been spent winning the case. Others asked if the private beach owners were going to allow cleanup crews to trespass on their sand to get the oil when it washed ashore. Then, a few weeks later, the county agreed to leave the beach claimed by the column writer’s condominium out of the coming restoration project, a move some felt might have prevented all this controversy at the outset. The agreement still had to be approved by an administrative judge but with that compromise, for the moment at least, things settled down. As for the good old boys and good old girls who had wandered the beaches as if they were their own, the decision (if they knew there was one) had little impact on their lives, so they paid it no mind. What they wondered, along with everyone else, was whether or not the folks who were supposed to be in charge would clean up the beach so they could wander it again. Oil was already washing up on Okaloosa Island and it was almost into Destin Pass and the bay. Oil was also threatening to halt the dredging of the pass and the nourishing of Holiday Isle. Although the antinourishment folks hinted at more litigation, most figured that the highest court had spoken and that was that. Four days later, on June 21, more than sixty days after the blowout, I loaded my family and Libby the Lab for our annual trip to Seagrove Beach. My mood was somber. During the week before the trip, I had followed news that had become increasingly depressing and bizarre. Someone had finally got hold of bp’s 582-page regional spill plan for the Gulf and discovered that among the “sensitive biological resources” that the company was going to protect were walruses, sea otters, sea lions, and seals. Signing off on this assessment was a “national wildlife expert” who just happened to have died four years before the plan was submitted, not that it mattered to the Minerals Management Service. Apparently unconcerned with logic or facts, s approved the plan, which explained, finally, why bp didn’t have a clue what to do when the well blew. In a sardonic attempt to look on the bright side, someone observed that if bp could reanimate the dead, and get the deceased to sign this “dumb-assed report,” restoring the Gulf Coast should be a piece of cake. the last suer 281 Things were not going well for bp. Its stock lost nearly half its value as word circulated that the federal government was pressuring the...