Orange Beach, Ala. – (OBA) – While the views from Waterfront Park and the Coastal Arts Center overlooking Wolf Bay offer stunning vistas, the shoreline along the south bank are under the constant threat of pounding waters from boat wakes and the north wind.

“There’s just a lot of erosion on that stretch of shoreline due to the increased amount large boat wake,” Orange Beach Coastal Resources Director Phillip West said. “Then, of course, the fetch from Wolf Bay and those northern winds, when they whip up that’s what batters that shoreline.”

A new federal grant to the Nature Conservancy in Alabama will help address some of those shorelines. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently awarded $27 million for projects in Baldwin and Mobile counties with the Perdido Watershed project getting about $12.8 million of that total.

About $1 million of that will go toward shoring up the shoreline at Waterfront Park including at the city’s Wind and Water Learning Center, home of the popular sail camp.

“There will be emergent marsh vegetation for the living shorelines, there will be a sandy pocket beach behind the Wind and Water Learning Center,” West said. “There’s one there now but it isn’t protected in any way. When the living shoreline projects get in, they’ll do a better job of protecting it. There may even be a breakwater that might be designed to be installed to help protect that beach.”

It's an annual project, West said, to make that beach accessible for summer sail camps at the facility.

“We have to truck in sand and put it there on the shoreline to get it usable every year,” West said.

The beach next to the Waterfront Park pier will also remain but besides stabilizing the shoreline, an extension of the boardwalk to the Wind and Water Learning Center is also planned.

“We’ve got rip rap behind the art center and that’s kind of helped stabilize that little short stretch of shoreline but the rest of it is very exposed and vulnerable,” West said.

Eventually, West said, the city would like to have a connection from Waterfront Park all the way to GTs on the Bay. The city owns the shoreline in between the two.

“This grant won’t pay for that but we have plans to connect by a boardwalk and a system of trails,” West said. “The boardwalk won’t go across the Wind and Water Learning Center. At that point, the boardwalk will come south and around the center, across the library lawn and reconnect to a boardwalk on the west side of that property to GTs. Our plan with the owner of GTs is to connect to that so people can walk from Waterfront Park to GTs and vice versa. I would think they would want that traffic.”

Other parts of the project in the Orange Beach area include completing restoration designs for Walker Island, Robinson Island and Gilchrist Island. West said he was unsure of what work might be proposed for Gilchrist since it is still privately owned.

“That’s between the owner and the Nature Conservancy,” he said. “The Walker Island and Robinson Island restoration comes to about $3.5 million.”

Other Baldwin County project areas include restoration designs for Lillian Swamp, Bronson Field living shoreline and other hydrologic restorations.

“For Baldwin County’s Perdido Watershed Initiative, the Pensacola and Perdido Bays Estuary Program, the City of Orange Beach and Mayor Tony Kennon, as well as Coastal Resources Director Phillip West, the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, Mississippi State University, Troy University, and Moffat and Nichol — alongside ADCNR, USA and TNC in Alabama — partnered to bring the grant application and project outline to fruition,” a release from the Nature Conservancy in Alabama states.