Archived report · 3 min read · Set in The Marlowe Building ·
The Rota of Fogs
A bound port rota assigns individual mornings to fog, the stores issue mist equipment to match, and the fog keeps every date it is given.
- filed: "at the shipping season open"
- reference: "MB/RB/23"
1. This report is compiled at the opening of the shipping season from the registers of the Marlowe Building, Port Office, and concerns the morning rota kept in the Signals drawer and the issues of mist equipment made against it from the store below. It covers three closed seasons and the season now beginning.
2. The rota is a bound book ruled in weeks across the top and mornings down the side. Each morning carries one ruling in a steady hand: cleared, or fog, with hours of fog where given. The hours column is ruled to the quarter. The hand throughout is that of Miss E. M. Considine, signal clerk, retired 1981. The rulings continue to the present week in that same hand. No serving officer claims the pen. The book is signed for by the lock on the drawer and by nothing else, the drawer is opened at eight and closed at five by the duty clerk, and the rulings are never altered once written.
3. Against the morning's ruling, crews sign out mist equipment ahead of the day: the fog boards, the two service lamps, the spray sets, and the signal keys. Issues are dated, initialled on issue, initialled on return, and none is outstanding. The masters sign the return column themselves. The storeman, Mr. T. Brickett, signs nothing he has not counted, and he has not once signed short in three seasons.
4. Checked against the independent record — the pilots' reports, timed to the minute off the station clocks, the visibility boards, and the tug logs — the rota held on all of the forty-one mornings sampled. Every morning ruled fog fogged, on the hour the rota gave it. Every morning ruled clear held at or above the working minimum, including two mornings in the third season on which a general mist advisory covered the coast and the rota still read cleared. The advisory mist did not arrive, and the Met has raised no query on the difference between its own record and ours.
5. The fog keeps the schedule. That sentence is the finding and I do not dress it further. In one hundred and eighteen rota mornings across the three seasons there is no missing fog, no late fog, and no fog off the rota. Sixty-eight of those mornings carried no forecast of fog at all before the ruling was made. The store balances to the item.
6. One entry cannot be explained away by this office, and is set down as found. The issue ledger carries a sign-out of the full mist equipment, dated, receipted, and initialled, two days before any forecast of the same, for a morning ruled fog to the half hour. The fog began on the half hour. The receipt slip was torn from the ordinary pad and countersigned in ordinary time. The initial against it is in the Considine hand; the forename column is empty; and no roll in this building carries a person of those initials serving on that date, or on any date since the retirement of the lady whose hand it is.
7. No duty has been broken that this office can find. No equipment is missing. No officer has claimed the rulings or retracted anything before me. The rota is accurate, is kept, and is kept accurately by a hand the establishment does not employ.
8. The book is left in the drawer at the current week, and this report is filed at the season's opening rather than its close, because the rota is already ruled through the season to come. The question the office cannot close, and files open, is the direction of the reading: does the port keep the rota to the fog, or does the fog keep the rota to the port?