Who reads the gauge, and why it took nine years to get it back
A profile of the office that counts the fish by hand, and the nine-year argument over whose number it is.
The office has four staff, two of them seasonal, and it has produced an unbroken daily count since 2017.
For the first six of those years the count was unofficial. The official number came from a gauge read by the utility, published quarterly, and reconciled to nobody.
The agreement moved the gauge. That sentence took nine years to write, and it is the reason the number in the first paragraph of this week's lead story is a number this community produced.
The office is two rooms above the shop. There is a whiteboard with the daily count, a filing cabinet of tally sheets going back to the first season, and a laminated card by the door listing the four things that get written down for every fish: time, direction, condition, and who saw it.
The seasonal staff are usually students. Several of them have come back for three and four summers, which the office treats as its actual succession plan.
The four things on the laminated card are not arbitrary. Time and direction produce the count. Condition flags fish that are injured or spawned out, which is the data the biologists actually want. And 'who saw it' exists because in the second season a count was challenged and there was no way to ask the person who made it.
That challenge is the reason the office keeps paper. Everything is entered digitally the same evening, but the sheets go in the cabinet, and the cabinet is the thing the office would save in a fire.
Corrections and clarifications: tell us what we got wrong.