Mobile Delta

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the environmental group Mobile Baykeeper has standing to sue Alabama Power over how the utility company handles a twenty million ton coal ash pond on the banks of the Mobile River. APR Gulf coast correspondent Cori Yonge’s story on a trio of elderly women who banded together to warn of the potential threat of coal ash helped inspire the documentary “Sallie’s Ashes,” which premiered last year at the Telluride Film Festival.

Thousands of American lotuses carpet the water's surface, faces turned toward the morning sun. Bright yellow warblers flit among cypress trees along a creek bank. A paddlefish jumps as a motorboat rounds a bend. The Mobile-Tensaw Delta — a lush, vibrant and surprisingly intact over 400-square-mile expanse of cypress swamps, oxbow lakes, marshland, hardwood stands and rivers — is teeming with more aquatic species than almost anywhere in North America.

Rough waters may be ahead for the Mobile Bay Basin.The 2017 Most Endangered Rivers report named the Mobile River and Mobile Bay Basin as the fourth most…