I told you a lot of this park was rebuilt with money from a disaster, and it's such a strange and hopeful story that I've got to give it to you properly. This is the tale of how the worst thing that ever happened to this coast paid to make its park beautiful again.
Back on the twentieth of April, 2010, way out in the Gulf, an oil rig called the Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank. Eleven men died in the blast. And then, for months — for eighty-seven days — oil poured out of the broken well a mile down on the sea floor, the worst oil spill in American history, millions of barrels of crude fouling the water and washing up on beaches all along this coast. Tar balls on the white sand. Oiled pelicans. Closed beaches in the heart of the season. For the people of this coast, whose whole life is the water, it was a body blow.
The company responsible, BP, eventually paid an enormous settlement — many billions of dollars — meant to repair the harm done to the Gulf. And a share of that money came here, to Gulf State Park, well over a hundred million dollars of it, with a mission: don't just fix the park, reimagine it. Build it back better and greener than it ever was.
And that's exactly what you've been driving through. The storm-tough green Lodge. The restored dunes with their replanted sea oats. The improved trails, the nature center, the learning campus where kids come to study this coast. All of it, in large part, paid for by the very disaster that nearly ruined this place. There's something almost unbearable and almost beautiful about that — a wound that, in healing, left the coast stronger and wiser than before. Out of the worst day this Gulf ever had, they built this.
Photo: NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response · Public domain
