The Foley City Council voted July 5 to approve a project budget that will clear the Bon Secour River area of debris from Hurricane Sally. Three years later, residential properties are still flooding due to the damage the storm caused.

The river was cleared back in 2020 after the hurricane, but more debris has infiltrated the river since then.

Affected area includes the downtown Foley area and some city schools, including Foley Elementary and Mathis Elementary, according to the city.

“After Sally, a lot of the residents cleaned out the best that they could, but there’s an area when these two (streams) meet,” Darrell Russel, Foley public works director, said. “There’s a lot of buildup of sand and we’re not letting up the amount of water that this facility needs here. So we also have water backing up on these homes.”

GreenCo, a disaster management and recovery company specializing in debris removal, won the bid to perform the project. They budgeted the total cost of the project at $263,000.

Foley has been working with Baldwin County, the state and FEMA to clean the river, but after it’s been cleared, FEMA is expected to cover some future costs to maintain the affected area.

“The way it works with FEMA is the same way if you had an obstructed beach as Gulf Shores,” Mayor Ralph Hellmich said. “Once you build that beach and there’s any degradation from the storm, FEMA will pay you to put it back like it was.”

The project does not yet have an anticipated start date, according to Foley Communications Manager Guy Busby, but the city wants to get started “very, very quickly.”

“They did not set up a completion date on it,” Busby said. “A lot of that will just depend on when the crews are available and the weather.”