Since construction of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, it also provides an alternative route into the Ohio River watershed.

The Mobile River Basin historically supported the greatest biodiversity of freshwater snail species in the world (Bogan et al. 1995), including six genera and over 100 species that were endemic to the Mobile River Basin.

During the past few decades, publications in the scientific literature have primarily dealt with the apparent decimation of this fauna following the construction of dams within the Mobile River Basin and the inundation of extensive shoal (a shallow place in a body of water) habitats by impounded waters (Goodrich 1944, Athearn 1970, Heard 1970, Stein 1976, Palmer 1986, Garner 1990).

[3] The James M. Barry Electric Generating Plant, owned by Alabama Power, has a leaking unlined Fly ash pit located "on land that lies within a hairpin crook of the Mobile River.

Currently the Alabama Department of Transportation is conducting an environmental impact study for such a crossing and into the widening of the Jubilee Parkway, which carries Interstate 10 over Mobile Bay.