Image courtesy Jesse Biter: Aerial footage of Midnight Pass after Hurricane Helene.

No issue has so clouded the question of what constitutes environmental presentation as much as Midnight Pass. A waterway closed down in the 1980s for clearly selfish reasons, boaters and barrier island residents for decades fought for the waterway’s reopening, as environmental agencies and activists argued this would disrupt an ecology that came to exist over nearly a half century.

But a funny thing happened as Hurricane Helene pummeled Florida’s Gulf coast. The same storm surge devastating neighborhood and relocating boats from docks to highways also re-opened Midnight Pass.

Video shared on social media by numerous sources showed water clearly flowing Friday between the Gulf of Mexico and Little Sarasota Bay.

I’ll leave it to marine biologists to determine if this ultimately will be good or bad for the environment. But it’s an odd twist, presuming it sticks, for the struggle between the “We Dig Midnight Pass” crowd and those who say it would be a boondoggle for man to try and control ocean currents.

Sarasota County Commissioners just this month voted to begin a lobbying effort for the Florida Legislature to review laws prohibiting the reopening of the pass. It’s hardly the first time the county has pushed forward with plan to dredge open a channel. The Florida Legislature this year also budgeted $500,000 to study the benefits and ramifications of such a project.

It’s unclear what the ramifications will be on the fight to spend millions in taxpayer dollars on something that just happened on its own Thursday night or Friday morning. 

Of course, that assumes this environmental development sticks.

Glenn Compton, chair of Manasota-88, has put up arguably the most consistent opposition to dredging midnight pass for decades. He has his doubts whether some storm surge will genuinely reopen the pass for any meaningful period of time.

He has long argued that the tidal flow around Sarasota’s barrier island shifted considerably since 1983, and that even if the government dredged the pass open, it’s doubtful the efforts would be successful, it would quite likely close again on its own. “I’m doubtful it’s going to remain open for any period of time,” he said.

But while it is? Well, it looks like Sarasota will endure a real scientific experiment and the consequences of letting it flow. Those longing for re-opening say it proved catastrophic to the environment that existed decades prior when the waterway closed and promises to big a new pass to the north went unfulfilled. Opponents of reopening the pass long argued the estuary environment now would be compromised by saltwater intrusion of the Gulf.

But the funny part of the argument to leave nature as it is sits today is that nature just changed on its own yesterday. A Category 4 hurricane arguably isn’t the same thing as natural evolution, growth and adaptation over 40 years. But it wasn’t a man with a bulldozer and county permit who created this change, but a giant storm named Helene.

Social media now brims with people volunteering to dig the soft sand at the bottom of the shallow pass. And I know many long dreamed of a channel deep enough for boats the pass, not just the wading that takes place now. Bad weather may have just delivered the outcome politics had yet to achieve. And it did so in a way that leaves even the most recalcitrant willing to let the sweater run its course.

“If mother nature determines to reopen the Pass,” Compton said, “then so be it.” 

Jacob Ogles is contributing senior editor for SRQ MEDIA.

Image courtesy Jesse Biter: Aerial footage of Midnight Pass after Hurricane Helene.