The Salt Line, Vol. 86: A Toll Booth Outlives Its Job, a Waterspout Punches In at 7 A.M., and $3.2 Billion to Make I-10 Behave
Labor Day is over, which on this coast means the numbers finally hold still long enough to count them. So this issue is the Index: real figures from the week, arranged in the order most likely to cause whiplash, each with the one line it deserves. Everything below actually happened. The commentary is the only thing I made up.
🚧 The Department of Concrete, Eventually
$3.2 billion — price of the I-10 bridge project the Alabama Department of Transportation says is “about to get real.” That’s a strange thing to say about a bridge. Bridges are supposed to start there.
End of next week — ALDOT’s deadline for locking down the financing. Alabama has been trying to build this bridge since roughly the invention of the traffic jam it’s supposed to fix. Next week is the week it gets serious. The Bayway has heard that one before, and the Bayway is patient.
“Mostly” — the qualifier on the promise that I-10 jams will become “mostly a thing of the past.” Somebody in Montgomery has driven through Mobile on a Friday in July and knows better than to promise all of it.
🧾 The Department of Things We No Longer Charge For
1 — toll booth Escambia County is about to demolish on Pensacola Beach Road, the Bob Sikes booth, “now that the summer season is over.” The county waited for the beach traffic to leave before tearing down the thing that slowed the beach traffic. That’s either good manners or the most Florida sentence of the week.
Gateway — the word the project uses for a road once you’ve removed the part that asks for money. Hold onto that booth. We’ll be needing it in a minute.
🌪️ The Department of Water Standing Up
7 a.m. — the hour Labor Day morning a waterspout formed near Portofino on Pensacola Beach. Early risers got photos. The rest of us got told about it at lunch, which is how every good thing that happens on this coast before nine gets delivered.
0 — named storms spent on it. It’s September in the Gulf; the water occasionally clears its throat to remind you who’s in charge. Nobody bought plywood. The generator guys stayed in bed.
24/7 — hours the same Gulf is on camera at /live-cam/, which is how I intend to see the next one: indoors, holding coffee, fully dry.
Green — the flag Pensacola Beach flew that same day, under clear skies and high temps, while a crowd “flocked.” “Flocked” is the verb reporters reach for once there are enough people to count as birds. The Gulf ran the other setting at seven and had the postcard back up by lunch.
🦫 The Department of Leaving
Before 11 a.m. — when Highway 59 North was already backing up near I-10 with people going home. Checkout is at ten. They tried. Everybody tried.
1 — road the story describes as busier than that: the Baldwin Beach Express, which we built so 59 wouldn’t do this, and which now does this too, a few miles east and with better scenery.
Three-quarters of a mile — one traveler’s estimate of the line to get into Buc-ee’s. Not to a pump. Into the parking lot. Another traveler called it “an American monument,” and he’s right: you wait in a line to see it and you leave with a souvenir. Beaver nuggets consumed: unreported, and the only number in this issue I refuse to guess at.
🖥️ The Department of Not Now
12 months — length of the data center moratorium the Escambia County Commission is moving toward hearings on. A full year of officially not building a data center, which differs from the last two months of not building one in that it comes with hearings.
2 — previous anti-data-center actions this would be “in addition to”: a July resolution “going on record” against them, and an August ordinance banning the big ones. A resolution going on record is a government writing a strongly worded letter to itself and then filing it. Escambia is now anti-data-center in layers, like a wedding cake nobody ordered but everyone keeps decorating.
So here’s the week. Alabama wants $3.2 billion for a bridge by next Friday, and Escambia is tearing down a perfectly good toll booth the same week. I’m not an engineer or a financier. I’m a man with a column and a sense of timing, and I’d like to note that one government has a booth it doesn’t want and the other has a bridge it can’t pay for. The booth is on Pensacola Beach Road, Montgomery. Bring a truck.
— Chris
P.S. Know a restaurant, charter, shop, or event we’re missing? Add it — free, Florida side or Alabama side: /submit/
