Damaged

CHAPTER 38

This would have been a day off for Liz Bailey if it wasn't for Isaac churning a path directly at the Florida Panhandle. New projections had the storm making landfall sooner than what was earlier predicted. The wind and waves suggested the new projections were accurate.

Liz was accustomed to being out in winds like this. She wondered just how used to it Lieutenant Commander Wilson was. He tight-fisted the controls and fought against each gust. It felt like being in a car with the driver constantly accelerating, braking, and accelerating again, combined with an occasional roller-coaster plunge.

Kesnick looked at her. With his back safely to Wilson and Ellis, he rolled his eyes. She held back a smile.

From above they watched boaters coming in early, heeding the weather advisories. All the marinas were full, with lines of crafts waiting to tie up. There was no surefire protection outside of pulling your boat out of the water and hauling it as far north as possible. Some people were trying to do that by motoring up rivers and paying to dock their boats in places out of the storm's path.

They were seeing an early surge. Waves already pounded seawalls and crashed up the beach, reaching the sand dunes. Surfers dotted in between the waves, bright spots of color bobbing up and down, disappearing and springing back into sight.

In the helicopter, Liz kept reminding herself to take it all in and remember how everything looked before Isaac hit. In 2004 Hurricane Ivan had decimated the area, ripping apart and chewing up everything in its path. The Florida Panhandle was where pine trees met palm trees, and the national forests that covered acres of land became shredded sticks, many snapped in two. Four-lane highways looked like a monster had taken a bite out of the asphalt, chewed it up, and spit it out. The massive live oaks, hundreds of years old, that lined Santa Rosa Sound were blown over, their tangled roots two stories high.

Pensacola Beach is about eight miles long and only a quarter mile at its widest, a peninsula with Santa Rosa Sound on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other. During Ivan the two bodies of water looked like one, meeting in the middle.

Liz remembered that it had taken years to sift and separate the debris from the sand. Huge machines had occupied the coastline. Cranes became a part of the skyline. Blue-tarped rooftops were seen in every neighborhood. Hurricanes never discriminated.

The three-mile I-10 bridge between Escambia County and Santa Rosa County had taken three years to repair. It had been crippling for a community connected by bridges to have all four major ones compromised in some way by the storm's massive surge.

Liz hadn't been here for Ivan, only for the aftermath. She had just finished training in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. For some reason she always regretted missing the actual storm. Silly. Not like she could have made a difference. It was probably some form of survivor's guilt. Perhaps she would be able to make a difference this time.