“I shudder to think what would have happened if that thing had been a [Category] 3,” John Valentine, executive director of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, said of Hurricane Sally. “But I’ll tell you what. This was a nasty 2.”
Valentine spent much of Wednesday taking stock of the Sea Lab’s facilities. The news was not good.
“The more we walked, the more water we found in buildings,” Valentine said. “When we hit the primary research building, you couldn’t even walk down the staircase for the amount of ceiling tiling and insulation that was laying there. … We opened the door and I walked inside and I looked up and I could see sunshine. And at that point I knew we had a problem.”
“Our research building is heavily damaged,” Valentine said. “We’ve lost a good bit of roofing here and there, the graduate student dormitory has no roof on it to speak of.” Not every building is damaged, but there are “roofing nails everywhere,” which is never a good sign. One of the lab’s smaller boats was sunk. “We couldn’t get it out of the water because we had no place to take it,” Valentine said.
“It’s going to be complicated to try to get this thing back off the ground,” he said.
In a nutshell, work at one of the state’s premier research institutions has been brought to a screeching halt. Valentine said that’s not an academic problem, because the state looks to data gathered by Sea Lab scientists when it makes critical decisions about such things oyster harvests and red snapper seasons.
“Some things that stand out are people’s research,” Valentine said. “The faculty’s research. Our faculty work everywhere from Antarctica to the Arctic. All the analysis and the reports they’re writing and the presentations we’re doing on Zoom … All that stuff is at a screeching halt. And that’s revenue we bring to the state of Alabama.”
Valentine said the lab has a staff of more than 100, and in a normal season would have about 40 full-time graduate students in residence. Just finding temporary accommodations for researchers could take weeks, he said.
The facility also serves as an educational resource for field trips, teacher workshops and other activities. Those already had been severely curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic, cutting off an important revenue stream.
Valentine said the lab’s losses are also losses for the state and the island as a whole. It’s an economic engine, he said, with an economic impact many times greater than the state’s investment.
“We’ll have to sit down with the state of Alabama … and then set out a plan that will lead to the recovery of the facility,” he said.
Valentine said that for him, Hurricane Sally was strongly reminiscent of 2004′s Hurricane Ivan. The night before Ivan hit, he’d been sitting up with his school-age daughter. Ivan was 90 miles to the south and it looked like the island was about to take a direct hit.
“All I could think looking at her was, I made a mistake staying here,” said Valentine. But when the next day dawned, Ivan had hooked to the east, sparing the island from the worst of its wrath.
Sally did much the same, but even so, Valentine was shocked by what he found on Wednesday.
“Was surprised me was, no one would have expected that level of damage given the forecast,” he said. “That thing exploded. It reminded me of Hurricane Ivan in a whole lot of ways. It went from nothing to damaging in just no time at all.”
He was reminded once again, he said, of a feeling that stuck with him after Ivan.
“I’ve never forgotten,” he said, “how in a matter of just a couple of hours how our future changed on us.”