The sound of heavy broadaxes biting into seasoned white-oak timber rang out across the alleyways behind Fish Street as Eren Tal led twenty carpenters in framing the main high-water escape hall. Unlike the temporary timber stacked timber frame rushed into place during yesterday’s flood, this was permanent town public works, designed to give twelve hundred residents a safe, dry escape route if the river ever crested the levee low roof walls.
Eren stood on a four-foot ash frame stand, his sleeves rolled above corded forearms, sighting down the line of hemlock posts with his wooden level. Beside him, Pella Rook held Hal Rook’s brass measuring tongs, verifying the spacing between the support piers against her father’s original flood defense maps.
The morning air smelled heavily of fresh sawdust, pine resin. The sharp tang of pipe lime dust flaking from the older cellar walls where the new timber brackets were being bolted into the stone. Down below in the gutters, thin streams of gray water carried the familiar silt stench of the lower mud flats, reminding every worker that the river was only forty yards away.
‘We set the deck three feet and six inches above the record high-water mark of ’82,’ Eren shouted down to the framing crew. ‘That keeps the walking planks dry even if the entire canal backs up into the street. We frame the spans sixteen feet wide so two hand-barrows can pass each other without tipping an old woman into the soup!’
