ORANGE BEACH, Ala. - If there are some residual effects from the 2010 oil spill still lingering in Cotton Bayou, the city of Orange Beach wants to know what they are.

The City Council recently OK’d the spending of about $30,000 leftover from a BP grant to hire Auburn University researchers to study the water quality in the bayou.  

“Whatever it is,” Coastal Resources Director Phillip West said. “And you have these suspicions and fears all over the area and so our feeling is let the scientists determine and do a robust bona fide study over the next several months.”

West says the length of study will allow the water to be thoroughly tested.

“This won’t be a snapshot time, this will be a prolonged study,” he said. “Let the laboratory and the scientists tell us with some sort of certainty what’s going on in Cotton Bayou.”

Residents who live on the bayou have expressed concerns about the quality of the water and whether or not oil or other substances are lingering there.

“Since the oil spill especially there have been among resident around here widespread suspicions the response from BP had used disperants here locally,” West said. “That’s not what we were told and I don’t necessarily believe that’s the case that they did use them here in local waters.

“But be that as it may, there’s the suspicion and fear and there’s a perception that there have been impacts to, for example, to Cotton Bayou that they believe are attributable to the spill - whether that be impacts from the oil itself, that may have changed or had an impact on the fauna - or whether it’s the disperant.”

West believes the study will not only tell the city what, if anything, is leftover from the spill in Cotton Bayou, but in other waters in the city as well.

“From what we find in Cotton Bayou I believe we can infer in the greater area,” he said.

And he wants the city to be in charge of any future testing of the waterways.

“If you want to tell anyone with any absolute certainty the condition of the water we feel the best way to can do is have our own independent labs and scientists doing work and reporting directly to us,” West said. “We’ll kick this off and if we can find the funding for it, it just may be something that we just want to do routinely anyway to just sort of keep a check on what’s going on.”

Cotton Bayou historically drains slowly and materials have a tendency to gather in its waters, West said.

“There’s also, typically, with this level of urbanization around a body of water that flushes very poorly and slowly – there’s not a lot of tidal exchange on a daily basis – toxins or nutrients can accumulate and obviously that will have an impact on the flora and biology in that system and that body of water,” West said.

“Hopefully the study with Auburn will give us a good idea. Not just a snapshot of the health of the bayou, but also maybe track and find out if there are anything having an adverse impact on the bayou and where it is coming from.”

Then, West said, the city will know if more action is needed.

“At that point we’re able to deal with something,” he said. “If you don’t know what it is, you can’t deal with it. That, in a nutshell, is why we’re kicking off this study.

“And we’re using some of our BP block money that we were using for independent testing and monitoring, just a little bit out of that pot to conduct this study.”

West said the money is from grants issued to monitor, prevent or clean up during the spill.

“There were three separate pots of money given to the state to distribute for response efforts or monitoring efforts over and above what the incident command was doing,” he said. “Baldwin County bought a bunch of boom and put them out everywhere. We did things a little bit different so some of that money is still available.”

In the end West said the goal is to make all the waters around the city healthier and more productive.

“Just like a farmer trying to increase his crop yield,” he said.