INSIDE

Whose job is it, anyway?

“This storm was a great eye-opener in how important our plan will be,” said Point Roberts Emergency Preparedness (PREP) group director Emily Smith. “In a lot of ways, we’re on our own.”

When tides and winds came together on the morning of February 4 bringing water and logs crashing over seawalls and flooding homes, Smith said the response many anticipated from the county didn’t come. At 11:30 a.m., after going to look at flooded areas, Smith said she called Don Boyd, interim deputy of emergency management under the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office. “I wanted to find out what their plan was for Point Roberts,” she said. “He said ‘what flooding?’ He had not been informed until I called.”

The storm had died down but in Maple Beach roads were under water and some property owners reported as much as six feet of water in and around their cabins. A volunteer firefighter had to wade through waist high water to evacuate one resident. On Edwards Drive members of the Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary were helping homeowners tie down propane tanks that were starting to float away. Crystal Water beach cabins were lifted off their foundations and pinned to the bluff by logs.

With flooding in several areas of the county Boyd said he and sheriff Bill Elfo had visited Gooseberry Point and that Elfo had moved on to Sandy Point, sending public works to Birch Bay. “First thing we did was respond to the areas that were having problems,” he said. A county state of emergency was declared and a center of operations established in the basement of the county courthouse.

Boyd said he received a telephone message from Point Roberts at 9 a.m. and alerted county public works to concerns about the seawall. “We sent public works up there to evaluate the situation and their determination was county roads were O.K.,” he said. Smith and fire chief Bill Skinner said someone from county public works arrived late in the afternoon to put signage on flooded roadways.

The first calls for public assistance came in to the fire department between 8 and 9 a.m. Skinner said, and continued non-stop for 12 hours. “Most of us ended up never going home, just going from one call to the other,” Skinner said. Volunteers put in a total of 336 hours on February 4, 56 on February 5 and 18 on February 6, not including unlogged time spent removing fallen trees from roadways. “On the Saturday morning calls were from people with flooding in their homes asking for assistance,” Skinner said. They also responded to several electrical fires, loose propane tanks and other hazards to public safety.

Flooding on roads in Maple Beach made responding to calls difficult, so the fire department started using fire engines pumps. “We went to our second call of the day for an electrical fire and with water four or five feet deep on the road we couldn’t access it,” Skinner said, so firefighters waded in. At another electrical fire on Edwards Drive firefighters had to wait for Puget Sound Energy crews to arrive in the afternoon to turn off electricity because of unusual wiring. The water they pumped out of the basement’s structure was hot.

Members of the Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary (CGA) Delta Unit 8, who keep their boat in the Point Roberts marina, had come down for training and alerted unit commander Rob Grant to the flooding. Grant paged unit members and 12 came down with immersion suits to help.

“This was not an official CGA task,” Grant said. “Volunteers did it on their own to help.” CGA members helped secure propane tanks and helped residents get their possessions out of flooded homes. “They were amazing and amazed we were getting so little assistance,” Smith said.
Skinner called the department of emergency management Saturday afternoon, he said, hoping to get help clearing water from the roads. “I was told there were no pumps available until Sunday. They were using them at Gooseberry Point,” he said. When the pumps were delivered on Sunday morning there were wrong attachments, insufficient hose and the county public works employee who delivered them did not intend to stay and run them. “The guy didn’t want to hang around,” Skinner said. “He was going home to watch the Super Bowl.”

On Saturday evening, Maple Beach residents chopped their way into the main culvert that drains the area, after noting at low tide that it was not flowing. A three-foot-tall spurt of flood waters ran most of the night, Smith said. “I’m no engineer but it was obvious that action reduced pressure and the waters were going down,” she said. “A lot of the damage was due to the fact there was no way for the water to get back out,” She also said residents are concerned about the seawall at Maple Beach, which separated from the roadway at the north end as a result of the storm. County roads superintendent Mary Green said a structural engineer was being hired to “tell us exactly what we need to do for the seawall.” She added crews had been sent to Point Roberts in the week after the storm to take care of downed trees, driftwood on roads and other storm-related issues. Culverts were inspected and repairs are scheduled.

Skinner said he had learned his requests to the county for help in an emergency needed to be early and very specific. “I was working on the assumption they would send up county crews and pumps and lots of hose,” he said. “The typical problem is getting things up here when there are problems in the whole county,” he said. Green agreed that for her crews to respond appropriately they needed abundant and specific information. “We need accurate information to help us set our priorities."

Smith said her group questioned why local sheriff’s deputies were not involved in helping the community or in communicating the situation to county emergency management. “Deputies do law enforcement,” Boyd said, and are not trained to handle other public safety concerns. “The division of emergency management doesn’t go out and rescue people, we assign resources,” said county sheriff Bill Elfo. “We get our information from a variety of sources: police, fire, citizens.”

“The question then is whose job is it to make the call?” Smith asked. “Emergency management is under the sheriff’s department so I don’t know where that communication is supposed to happen. If there is going to be this disconnect, if they are just about law enforcement, whose job is it to make that call? Mine I guess.”

As PREP develops an emergency plan for Point Roberts Smith said they need to take into account who the community can count on to help in an emergency. Boyd agreed that planning for an emergency needed to be taken up by families and communities. “We expect people to prepare on their own,” he said.

As property owners started cleaning up and repairing damage, many asked if government funding would be available. So far the answer is no.

Boyd explained a county state of emergency released funding to protect against “a situation that could threaten the public, property and the environment. Relief funding would come from the federal government after a state determination of the county’s eligibility.

“We need to go out and find at least 25 private primary residences or businesses countywide that have at least 40 percent uninsured damage based on the value of that residence or business,” he said. He added the numbers weren’t there to trigger federal aid. “The number one problem was that they were not primary residences and the number two was it is mostly insured damage,” Boyd said.