Canal plans lead to worries - al.com

Canal plans lead to worries - al.com: "GULF SHORES — When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently proposed granting 10 landowners permits to build 3,093 boat slips along the Intracoastal Waterway, questions quickly arose about whether doing so would preclude nearby property owners from ever having any dock space of their own.

Determining how much boat traffic the 10-mile-long, 125-foot-wide shipping channel can safely handle is the main objective of an environmental impact study that federal regulators have worked on for about three years at the request of the developers, who funded the $1.4 million endeavor. As such, the corps and its consultants have, in a draft of the study released this month, decided that 3,093 new slips would put as much recreational boat traffic on the canal as it could handle."