Correction fluid sold out along the Florida Panhandle on Friday afternoon. Hardware shops reported the shortage before plywood, before batteries, before the bottled water. The cause sat in three state capitals: a single state of emergency declaration, shared between Alabama, Florida and Mississippi, which officials have now amended for the twenty-sixth time.
The document dates from 1969. Camille is still faintly legible under the layers. Ivan sits on top of that, then the one from 2005 that nobody in the building says aloud, then Michael, then a good number the Atlantic has since forgotten and the coast has not.
Isaias arrives late, the first hurricane of a season that had looked quietly cancelled. It is a category 3, with surge up to 7ft and waves near 30ft, and it will come ashore around the Alabama-Florida line on Friday night. One has sat through this franchise before. The budget goes up and the plot does not.
"We did consider a fresh sheet," a spokesman for the tri-state emergency office said. "But the signatures are all still good, and frankly the paper knows the way to the coast by now."
