The Salt Line, Vol. 120: Ninety-Five Percent Is a Fine Number Until You Are the Other Five
Every recovery has a number, and the number is always a percentage. This week it is ninety-five. FPL says its target is to restore electricity to 95 percent of affected customers across Escambia and Santa Rosa counties by midnight Monday, and the Sunday night reporting had restoration work still under way. That is a real goal, and nobody on the Key should be anything but grateful to the crews chasing it.
It is still worth reading the sentence slowly. Ninety-five percent of affected customers is a measurement of the utility’s progress. It is not a measurement of how many people have a working refrigerator. The two figures are cousins, not twins, and the gap between them is where a perfectly good goal goes to disappoint someone. A restoration goal is written from the control room, where the unit of account is a feeder line. It is lived at the kitchen table, where the unit of account is a household with a freezer full of shrimp and a phone at nine percent.
The same Sunday night report from the cooperative side is a useful companion. Escambia River Electric reported 678 outages remaining in Escambia County and 9,444 in Santa Rosa as of 11:45 p.m. Those counts are shrinking, and they are also the counts of people at the end of the longest roads and the last poles, the street that is always the final one on somebody’s list. The percentage describes the crowd. The remainder describes the neighbor.
What the coast should want from this week is not a smaller goal. Ninety-five percent by midnight is the right kind of ambition, and a utility that promised a hundred would be lying with a straight face. What we should want is a vocabulary for the last stretch that is as plain as the first one. “Restored” is a word that gets spent early and loosely. Better to say what remains, where, and roughly when, and to keep saying it after the cameras have gone to the next storm.
For anyone planning a trip to Perdido Key or Orange Beach, the practical translation is simple. The cam and the flags at /beach-today/ tell you what the water is doing. They cannot tell you whether the condo’s breaker panel is awake. Call the rental company, ask about power and water, and be patient with the answer.
Debris, with a Deadline and a Definition
Escambia County says storm debris collection will begin later this week, with a target start date of Wednesday, October 14, and that it covers only material generated by Hurricane Isaias. That clause is the interesting one. A pile at the curb is, to the eye, a pile. To a public works contract it is a legal category, and the old couch that has been in the garage since the spring is not in it. Expect creative storytelling about where the mattress came from. The county has to be generous about the storm and strict about the garage, which is a harder balance than it sounds.
Photographs as a Civic Instrument
Escambia County is asking residents to report storm damage with photos as recovery continues. It is a small, modern bit of governance: the county cannot see every driveway, so it deputizes everyone who owns a phone. The ask is sensible, with a quiet catch. The damage that gets counted is the damage that gets documented, and the people with the least time and the weakest signal are the ones most likely to be left out of the tally. If you have a minute and a bar of service, report your neighbor’s fence too.
The Airport Opens Its Doors, and the Road Home Is Still Being Cleared
Pensacola International Airport reopened on Sunday. It is the first honest sign of normal, and it is worth a small cheer. It is also a reminder that an airport can be open while the road from it is not. Reopening is a statement about a runway. Recovery is a statement about everything between the runway and the front door, and that takes longer to certify.
A storm leaves behind two kinds of work, the kind that photographs well and the kind that does not. Ninety-five percent is the first kind, a clean line on a graph. The rest is the second kind, a long, quiet stretch of people knocking on doors. A coast is measured by whether it keeps doing the second after it stops getting credit for the first.
— Chris
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