The creek comes back

The story turns around in this chapter, and the thing that turns it is the creek. Six cities formed a district in 2002 to clean up Five Mile Creek and open it back up to people, and Graysville and Brookside are two of them. In 2012 the Five Mile Creek Greenway became part of the area wide Red Rock Ridge and Valley Trail System, and in July 2018 the six cities and the Freshwater Land Trust bought 16.5 miles of corridor from CSX. That corridor was laid in the late 1800s as part of the Birmingham Mineral Railroad, to haul coal out of mines like the ones at Cardiff and Brookside, which means the road built to take the coal away is the path people walk on now, and an extension that opened in 2023 made it the longest multiuse trail in Jefferson County. None of that makes the water tame. Storms in May 2003 put Five Mile Creek through Cardiff and destroyed a number of buildings near it, and the same run of storms dropped ten inches of rain in ten hours and put water through downtown Brookside. The rest of the chapter is the ordinary business of small towns carrying on. A marker went up in Cardiff in May 2010 that a good deal of this page depends on, Graysville was named an Alabama Community of Excellence in 2011 and took an EF3 tornado through it in January 2012, the 2020 census counted 52 people in Cardiff where there had once been 562, and Brookside's police chief resigned in January 2022 in a matter the town settled in February 2026 for $1.5 million.