The Salt Line, Vol. 119: Closed Pending Assessment, and Other Acts of Candor
A short note before the mail. There is no joke this week about the storm itself, and there won’t be one. Hurricane Isaias hit the Panhandle on Friday night, and people on both sides of the state line are still counting what it cost them. What follows is about the paperwork of recovery, which deserves a little attention precisely because nobody enjoys it. The letters below are invented. The news inside them is not.
Dear Salt Line: the park is closed and I can see it from the road. Why can’t I just walk in?
An excellent question, and the answer is on a sign. Gulf State Park remains closed, the post says, because staff has not yet completed required safety assessments.
Read that sentence again, because it is rarer than it looks. Public institutions usually talk in the language of confidence: reopening soon, thank you for your patience, we appreciate your understanding. This one said the opposite. It said, in effect, we have not looked yet, and we will not tell you it is fine until we have. The sentence has no spin on it and no timeline it can’t keep. It does not promise a date. It promises a process.
That is the whole point of a closure, and it is the part visitors take personally. A beach park after a hurricane is not a beach park with some leaves on it. It is a collection of boardwalks, trails, parking areas and dune crossings that nobody qualified has yet stood on and called sound. Whoever keeps that gate shut is not being territorial. They are declining to hand you a risk that only becomes visible once you are already in it.
Here is my opinion, offered freely: a closed gate is the most useful thing a recovering coast can give a visitor, and we should stop treating it as an insult. A park that reopens a day late because somebody checked has nothing to explain afterward. Wait for the word. Then go, and enjoy it, and be glad the sentence on the sign was true.
Dear Salt Line: Monday is a school day, right?
Not in Escambia County, Florida. District campuses and offices will be closed Monday, October 12, while personnel continue to assess damage to facilities. Pensacola State College is staying closed too, Sunday and Monday.
The word to notice is assess, which keeps turning up this weekend, and it is the right word. Nobody can tell a parent a classroom is safe until somebody has stood in it. A school is where the county keeps its children, and an agency that is slow and sure about that is doing its job. If your plans for Monday involved a child and a schedule, your plans have changed, and the people who changed them would very much like you to know why.
Dear Salt Line: how many people still don’t have power, and what is the proper number to be annoyed at?
Be annoyed at no number. As of about 2:30 on Saturday afternoon, FPL reported 132,480 customers without power in Escambia County and 76,980 in Santa Rosa, with the report noting those figures were down from earlier counts.
Those are households with dark refrigerators and a phone at nine percent. They are not statistics for a column to be clever about. The useful thing to say about a restoration effort that large is only this: it moves in one direction, slowly, and the crews working it are not reading your text messages. Meanwhile, the Salvation Army has put canteens out serving free hot meals at four locations across Escambia County. That is the civic life of this coast at its most exact: a truck, a hot meal, a person handing it through a window.
Every disaster produces two documents. One is the damage count, which the cameras like. The other is the list of things that are closed until someone qualified says otherwise, which no one photographs. The second list is the one that quietly gets people home. When the signs come down, that will be why.
— Chris
P.S. Know a restaurant, charter, shop, or event we’re missing? Add it — free, Florida side or Alabama side: /submit/
