The Salt Line, Vol. 117: Who Is Allowed to Say Leave
A real storm is on this coast, so today’s Salt Line keeps its jokes in the drawer. What follows is a plain editorial about how the people in charge are talking to us.
The chain of permissions
Read the last two days of coverage in order and you can watch authority being handed down like a bucket. The state of Florida declared an emergency. Escambia County then held an emergency meeting and declared a local state of emergency, which, in the county’s own words, “allows Escambia County to spend operational funds if necessary for disaster response and recovery.” Across the line, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey ordered non-residents out of South Baldwin and Mobile counties.
None of this is a criticism. A declaration is not theater; it is the legal key that opens the checkbook, and a county that cannot spend on a Friday morning cannot do much on Saturday. But notice what the layering does to the person on the receiving end. A visitor in a Perdido Key condo hears “state of emergency” from Tallahassee, “Zones A and B” from the county, and “visitors are urged to leave” from the tourism office, and has to assemble these into one decision. Escambia ordered evacuations for Zones A and B beginning at noon Thursday, and the order named Perdido Key. The order for visitors on the Alabama side came from a different capital, with different wording, on a different clock.
The honest verdict is that the system works because the pieces mostly agree, and agreement is the part that cannot be legislated. Every body here said some version of the same thing: go, and go now. The weakest link in any evacuation is not the road or the shelter. It is the person who reads three similar notices, decides they must be about someone else, and has one more beach walk. The best thing these governments can do, and mostly have done, is say the same sentence in the same words until it is boring.
If you are in the zone, the paperwork is finished and the only open question is yours. Follow the National Hurricane Center and your county’s emergency management office for everything with a number in it. I am not going to supply any.
Closed for the season, by appointment of the weather
The list of what shuts down reads like a map of how this region moves. Pensacola International Airport’s terminal closes to commercial operations at 10 a.m. Friday. Gulf Shores International Airport announced it will temporarily close. NAS Pensacola and Corry Station set Hurricane Condition 1 for Friday. A coast that runs on arrivals shuts the arrival doors early, and the airports are among the first. The last exit is the one nobody should count on.
The trucks nobody notices until they do
The Florida Department of Transportation says its Road Ranger patrols are running 24/7 across Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa and Walton counties. These are the white trucks that normally spend their days on the interstate fixing other people’s bad afternoons. It is the least glamorous line in the whole emergency, and the one an evacuee stuck on a shoulder will be most glad to have read.
A resolution about a different kind of weather
One non-storm item deserves a mention, because the news did not stop. The Baldwin County Commission passed a resolution supporting ARC of Baldwin County, a group home and day facility for people with intellectual or developmental disabilities, as it fights state regulators over being shut down. A county commission picking a side against a state agency is rare enough to notice. Whatever you think of the merits, a resolution is a statement, not a ruling, and the people who depend on the place will want the outcome to be decided on the record rather than by press release.
The Closer
Emergency management is the one branch of government where success is invisible: the evacuation that worked is the one with nothing to report. The sentence this coast needs to hear today has been said by several different offices in several different voices, and it is the same sentence. Hear it once, in whichever voice you trust, and act on it.
— Chris
P.S. Know a restaurant, charter, shop, or event we’re missing? Add it — free, Florida side or Alabama side: /submit/
