The Salt Line, Vol. 132: Insured, Uninsured, and the Long Middle Where the Paperwork Lives
The Lead: A Figure That Counts Only the Houses That Counted
Two weeks after landfall, the state’s Office of Insurance Regulation says insured losses in Florida from Hurricane Isaias approach $582 million, with claims still rolling in from the October 9 storm. It is a large number, and it has the particular authority of large numbers: it sounds like a measurement of the damage.
It is not. It is a measurement of the damage that has been reported, by people who hold a policy, to a company that has agreed to take the call. The word doing the work is the first one: insured. Everything the figure leaves out has to be inferred, which is a poor way to run a recovery and an excellent way to run a press release.
Down the beach, Navarre Beach homeowners are working through the next step, which local legal experts advise begins with making the claim and goes on from there. Anyone who has lived on this coast through a storm knows how much territory “goes on from there” covers. It contains the adjuster’s schedule, the contractor’s schedule, the lender’s schedule, and the homeowner’s schedule, which is the only one of the four that consists entirely of waiting.
Here is what the number means for those of us who live on the Key and in Orange Beach. The headline figure will fall into the news cycle and be replaced by a larger one, and the households inside it will still be at the kitchen table with a folder. Recovery on a barrier-island coast is mostly an administrative undertaking dressed in the clothes of a construction project. The lumber arrives eventually. The signature is the scarce material.
So the useful civic question is not how big the number gets. It is how long the middle lasts, between the claim filed and the roof finished, and who is accountable for the length of it. A coast that sells itself on the beauty of its edge ought to be able to explain, in plain words, what happens to the people living at it when the edge moves.
The Rest
A Holiday Inn, Sold Out as a Matter of Infrastructure
In Pensacola, a Holiday Inn is staying sold out for weeks because it is housing the recovery crews who came from across the country after the storm. Tourism economists like to say that a hotel room is a perishable good. Here is the rarer case where it is a utility. The crews who restore the town need somewhere to sleep, and the rooms that would ordinarily hold October visitors are doing quieter work. Worth remembering when someone remarks that the shoulder season feels slow.
A Festival, Resurrected in a Smaller Size
The cancellation of the 53rd National Shrimp Festival left artists and vendors with inventory and no crowd. Now some of them get a second chance at a pop-up in Gulf Shores. There is a sturdy lesson in this about small business on the Gulf: the plan is a suggestion, the storm is the editor, and the people who make things for a living will set up a tent wherever the editor leaves a gap. If you were going to buy something at the festival, this is the polite moment to follow through.
Two Turtles, Returned to the Water They Were Pulled From
Two sea turtles caught at the Gulf Shores fishing pier, rehabilitated at the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, were released into the Gulf from Dauphin Island. Few civic projects on this coast reach the end of their timeline and deliver exactly what they promised: an animal went in damaged, an animal went out whole. It is a modest result, and a good measure of how rarely we get one.
The Closer
A coast keeps two sets of books: the one with the dollar figures, and the one with the people waiting on them. Only the first tends to make the evening news, and the second is the one we will be reading from next spring.
— Chris
P.S. Know a restaurant, charter, shop, or event we’re missing? Add it — free, Florida side or Alabama side: /submit/
