Apalachicola River

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The Apalachicola runs about 160 miles from Lake Seminole at Chattahoochee down to Apalachicola Bay and the Gulf, and Blountstown sits on its bank. Its basin covers roughly 19,500 square miles. The lower thirty miles are swamp and wetland, with large tracts of floodplain forest, and where the river meets the bay it creates more than 230,000 acres of delta at varying salinity, tidal marsh and seagrass meadow, set aside as a research reserve. The watershed holds some of the highest biological diversity east of the Mississippi River and some of the finest remaining old growth forest in the southeast, including the endangered Florida torreya. For a county this size the river is not scenery. It is the reason the towns are where they are. The river is also the end of a dispute that has run for three decades. The Apalachicola, the Chattahoochee and the Flint form one basin, and Florida argued in court that Georgia was drawing off so much water upstream that the oyster beds in Apalachicola Bay collapsed, as they did in 2012. The Supreme Court ruled on April 1, 2021, that Florida had not shown clear and convincing evidence, and found fault instead with Florida's own management of the beds. Georgia was told it still has to use the shared water reasonably. Florida had already closed the bay to oyster harvesting for four years in December 2020 to let the beds recover