Siltmere's third watch logged the surge at 04:10. The stick lashed to Pier Six read nine hooves and two stripes. Wind on the pier was 34 knots, gusting 41, onshore. The Coastal Weather Works sheet, released at 18:40, had the fetch broken, the residual at two hooves, and the wind at 12. The break itself was signed complete at 01:12.
The first sill went at 02:40. By 05:15, sixteen houses on the West Stilts had water over the floor, and 240 yards of the west-run boardwalk were in the channel or riding it. The 09:00 plank inspection stayed on the morning card. Nopony at the Bolt Office scratched it.
The west-run planks had been chalked 1 through 80 overnight for that inspection. At 04:40 the channel held 1 through 61, in order. Planks 62 through 80 were still spiked down. The Bolt Office statement was given from plank 74.
Harl Keel, crew chief on the third watch, read the numbers off his board and left them as written. "Sheet said two hooves and twelve knots. I had thirty-four on the pier and a stick at nine. That's not a residual. That's the shift."
Keel's book shows four weather ponies on the clock and one reserve in the air. The Works roster for the coastal break listed eight fliers, airborne at 00:20, tank empty by 01:12, station released. At 02:00 the station shed was locked. The key was on a peg in the foothills office, which is a forty-minute glide in clear air and was not a forty-minute glide this morning.
Edra Voss flew the water anyway. She is a reserve. She is not on the poster. She made two passes, the second at 03:17, and came off with a strain in the left forewing. "Eight names on the roster, and I was the only one with wet feathers," Voss said. "Second pass I counted doors. Most of them were shut from the outside."
She marked eleven houses as cleared by the occupants and five as cleared by the watch, with one holdout at Stilts 4 who would not leave the ground-floor stock and was carried. The injury line in the third-watch book reads: Voss, left forewing, day-to-day, flew the count anyway. Thursday's poster card, printed before dawn at the Bolt Office, still shows the eight-flier formation. Voss's name is not on it. Neither is the strain.
Director Holm Vesper of the Coastal Weather Works took the question at the foothills tank room, which was dry. "The break was signed out at 01:12. Delivery is delivery," he said. "A coast that keeps building on sticks is asking the schedule to apologize."
The schedule did not apologize. It also did not match the pier. Between 02:40 and 04:10 the stick climbed from five hooves to nine. Keel called the Works at 02:52 and again at 03:30. Both calls were logged by the night clerk as local confirmation of delivery. The return form has one box for the coast. It was already inked with the sheet figure. There is no line under it for a pier reading. Keel wrote the times in the margin, which was the only blank the form had left.
Ivo Lamm, for the Bolt Office, stood on plank 74. The formation poster was still tacked to the kiosk behind him. The kiosk was wet to the hinge. The poster was not. "The flyover matched the card," Lamm said. "We don't put a stick reading on a card that has already been released."
Asked which flyover, he named the 00:40 pass, signed before the first sill. Asked who flew it, he read the eight names. Voss came on at 02:00. She was not in that pass. The office had no second list.
The Canterlot Council permitted the West Stilts in a packet dated 11 March. The packet certifies the row for a surge of three hooves and a wind of 20. Sixteen of the twenty houses on the row took water over the sill. Two of those took it at the upper window. The clerk who answers for permits said the packet was built to the sheet the Works provides, and that no revised sheet had come in. No revised sheet had been written. Vesper's office called a revision disorderly while the original break remained on the books as complete.
Voss will not fly Thursday. The third-watch book says so. The card on the kiosk still shows the formation intact.
The invoice the Works sent the Canterlot Council is stamped paid at 19:06, the night before the first sill. It bills eight fliers, one completed break, and 14,400 bits.
