Red Clay: A Pox on our Snow White Beaches! Dennis Hatfield, President LLPS

How did our beaches get so white?  Our beaches are special! 99.97% snow white, pure quartz sand, with no natural clay, and a very small (.03%) percentage of dark iron and titanium rich heavy minerals  The source materials for the “Miracle Strip” are quartz and feldspar rich granites from the Appalachians  The quartz sand rich Miracle Strip is a “mature” product of numerous repeated episodes of erosion, and deposition. Physical transport and chemical weathering have removed all less resistant minerals and left only the quartz  Microscopic examination of individual sand grains tells a story. The sand is well sorted, and each grain is almost perfectly rounded, frosted, polished, and pitted

A “River of Sand” brings us our Sand From Apalachicola  Mobile Bay delivers a tremendous volume of distinctly different sediment to our coast compared to “Miracle Strip” sediments derived from Fla  A “river of sand” flows from Apalachicola to the mouth of Mobile Bay  The Fort Morgan Peninsula forms a barrier which effectively separates Mobile Bay sediments from “Miracle Strip” sediments

Red Clay on the Miracle Strip is like a “Road Alligator”  If we want Lagoon waters to remain relatively clear, and lagoon and beach sand to remain unique/special/white we have to say no to importing any and all red/yellow materials onto Pleasure Island  Clay is both a textural and mineralogical term-clay minerals and sized particles are 1/256 MM and smaller  Sediments turn yellow or red because the iron contained in them is “oxidized”  Oxidized clay sized sediment is very mobile-easily transported by water and wind  A small amount of oxidized iron rich material can stain a large amount of pure white sand for a long time, and once it is in our special pure white quartz sand environment, it can do damage over and over again

Red Clay is Illegal along the Fort Morgan Road  Uses: –Inexpensive (short term) road bed and house pad material –Inexpensive (short term) fill and grade material  Gulf Shores recently passed ordinance prohibiting colored materials for use south and in large areas north of the Fort Morgan Hwy  Code enforcement is currently lacking, numerous examples exist of code violations since new code passed  We (LLPS) can help by educating/understanding code, reporting code violations and following up to see that code is enforced, and violations punished