Don Lee
0-7
JO: Testing
JO: We are at Gig Harbor Fire and Medic One on Bujacich Road NW on April 05th, 2019. This is Jane Olive interviewing Don Lee who will have his eighty-first birthday tomorrow and congratulations to him. After all these years of service and helping his community, he’s still alive and kicking, very busy and very active. So, well done! Let’s get some background on you, Don. Where were you born?
DL: I was born in Rio Tinto, Nevada in 1938, on April the 6th. Rio Tinto, Nevada no longer exists. I like to tell people that when I moved away there was no longer a need for the town. They closed it down. My dad was a miner who worked in the typically gold and silver mines, also in a mercury mine in California. During my early years as a Cub Scout age young boy, I learned to go underground with my dad and way up top on the top of the ‘head frame’ which is an elevated structure to draw the ore cars off and dump them either as slag or as ore. My job as a nine-year-old boy was to stand at the top of the shaft and signal the hoist operator whether the ore that came up was either ore or slag. I hope I got it right sometimes.
During that time, I learned to deal with dynamite, that’s an important part of mining, and subsequent to that, when I lived in southeast Alaska, I got a job during the summer as a quarryman drilling and blasting. The only training I had in that trade was as a nine-ten-year-old boy working with my dad.
I am married to Tonya. We married in 1962 in Fairfield, California. We have two daughters, grown now. One teaches chemistry and other sciences in Gig Harbor High School and the other is the chief financial officer of the Genworth Corporation working out of Richmond, Virginia. Talked to her this morning and she was enroute to Beijing, China as part of her job.
I’ve had a varied employment history and career. I was in the navy from 1957 to’59 aboard the submarine, USS Perch APSS 313. I attended electrical A and B school as part of my training there. Upon getting out of the navy, I’ve continued to dabble in electrical repairs ever since.
I went to San Jose State College in San Jose, California to get my bachelors and master’s degrees in science education and went back and got a master’s degree in instructional materials in 1969-70. From there I became an instructional materials specialist at The Dalls, Oregon. In 1970 I moved up to Pierce County, settled in Gig Harbor and worked for the county Superintendent of Schools running the film library and providing media services to the districts within Pierce County. After a few years of that, the State Board of Education reduced the number of educational service districts which had taken over the responsibility of the county superintendent. I found myself as low man on the totem pole when we merged with King County and I began to write grant applications; the hardest work I’ve ever done. I continued for about two years writing grant applications.
I was a volunteer firefighter when they decided to hire additional personnel. I thought, “Gee, I’d to be a fireman. So I tested at the age of 42 years old and became a full time firefighter. But, because the salary was less than what I had been making, I continued to work for the educational service district half-time, full time for the fire department, and would spend my days…six o’clock in the morning I would head off to King County to work at the ESD. At 4:30 I’d leave that, drive back to Gig Harbor, change shifts at the fire department, work twenty-four hours there, go home for eight hours, and do it all over again. After a year-and-a-half of that, I was able to drop the ESD job and worked for the fire district in Gig Harbor ever since.
My hobbies have included all sorts of repair and fix type things; generally, for people who are in need. I work with the church at Chapel Hill and people who need electrical repair or minor building repair. I can go work on that and keep things going.
I became involved with Pep-C in about 1997 as I recall, when the chief came in and said, “Don, Pep-C’s having a meeting today, but I really don’t have time for that, so I’d like you to go in in my place.” I’ve been doing it ever since. That’s about twenty-one years. Twenty-two maybe.
101
In the early years, the principal organizer was Joanne Gray. Joanne was a very dedicated individual who saw preparedness as a crusade. She kept the organization going. She didn’t take the major roles of president or general chair, but she was always on the sidelines making sure everything worked. She was the one who conceived of selling the water barrels for preparedness and to finance the Pep-C organization. That’s been our primary source of funding ever since. Joanne was really the guiding light that I saw during the very early years of Pep-C. Unfortunately, she had a severe stroke, and passed away, it’s been ten years now. But her work continues on.
In the early years of Pep-C, before I became a part of it, Pep-C was a ‘publishing machine.’ Almost all of the funding that came in was spent on publishing preparedness monographs of various types. The things we now get from government entities were not available, and so on typewriters and a copy machine, they would type up a monograph on the basic supplies you need for preparedness for two weeks. Or how to preserve or store water, how to make it safe. Or, Washington is earthquake country, this is what to expect. Wide, wide variety of publications that have now fallen into disuse because we have the slick printed versions available from the county and from the state and federal governments.
JO: Who was president when you came in? Was it Dave Watson? Or someone else between Dave and you?
DL: President of the organization when I first joined, I do not remember.
JO: Dave said he passed his materials on to that person and cannot remember that person’s name.
DL: This was before Dave was president. Dave Watson was a principal at Artondale Elementary and was a very important part of Pep-C’s goal to help schools be prepared. We did a lot, of course, with Artondale, and the other elementary schools, to get their individual ‘comfort pacts’ as part of what they did. Every child would bring or be provided with a comfort pack that was put in storage with their name on it so if something bad happened, they would have this. It’s like a go-and-grab bag. It had just a few items of food and something to drink and a comfort item that was important to them.
JO: That was a great idea.
DL: Yeah. It continued for some time, but it seems to have fallen into disuse because of storage problems and, quite honestly, they haven’t had to use it, and so, “Gee, if I didn’t use it in the last year, maybe it’s not necessary.” Never mind that the earthquake is coming; we all know that.
One of the projects that we took on in conjunction with the Department of Emergency Management (DEM) of Pierce County is retrofitting the lights of an elementary school with plastic sleeves around every fluorescent tube, because the fluorescent tubes are vulnerable to falling. We went out and had this whole raft of tubes to put around the bulbs. We did that and felt very good about one school. At the end of that they added up the costs involved in terms of labor and whatnot, and said, “You know, that wasn’t very effective. We need to look at a different way to make them good.”
We met with the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts and gave talks to them. Our stock in trade in the early years was to talk to any group that we could twist their arm into giving us time. We’d join them for their regular meeting and push preparedness. We did some formalized training, but mostly it was the personal preparedness talks. These are the things you need and this is how you get about it. We depended upon the fire department to provide the medical training and the CPR training because they were prepared to do it. They had all the training and the certification and why reinvent the wheel.
JO: How do you find things now? How many years were you president, first of all?
DL: I was president for two years, I believe. Before me, Marvin Nauman was president and he was president for about three years. And before him, it was Ken Roberts. Have to come back to that. He did a good job. He was only president for perhaps two years. Dave Watson was president for years and years and years because nobody else would step forward.
205
Well, let’s see. I had a thought in there. Oh! The Preparedness Fairs! The first fair was held at Chapel Hill Church, I believe it was in 2012,
JO: Were you president then?
DL: I don’t believe so.
JO: What years were you president? You just left when Curt Scott came in. This was Curt’s second year that ended so he’s going into his third year now. So, around 2016?
DL: Could have been. 2014-2016. Something like that. We held the Preparedness Fair at Chapel Hill. It was designed as a minimal cost fair. Chapel Hill provided all the facilities without cost. People were invited to contribute if they were a commercial organization, and the sum was huge! It was $25 per booth only for the ‘for profits.’ The nonprofits were provided booths at no charge. We had about nine hundred to a thousand participants come through. It just worked very well. I think it was at that fair, that Tom Miner who was with the Pierce County Sherriff’s Department gave the keynote speech. His topic was, “When bad things happen, you’re on your own.” We do not have the manpower to rescue you, so be prepared. It was very well met. The fire department, the sheriff’s department…all the agencies I could twist their arms, did a great job. Two years later in about 2014, we held a second one at Chapel Hill. We had a little over a thousand people go through. That one, Ken was the president and we had quite an active organization committee of which Ken was a part. We had the Boy Scouts that met at the LDS Church demonstrate Dutch Oven Cooking in the parking lot. We created a fire pit environment for them to use and that was well received.
JO: Was Ken LDS?
DL: Yes.
JO: I can track him down that way.
DL: I’ll figure out the name soon, because he’s still active but not with Pep-C.
We also began a series of meetings with the MACC, the Multi-Agency Coordinating Committee. That involved police, fire, utilities, roads, everybody who had a response to an emergency on the peninsulas was a part of that organization, including the hospital. It involved generally a quarterly meeting, sometimes a bit more often than that, where a discussion of operations was held. During the snow/ice storm, we had a severe snow and ice storm with a lot of wind that really raised havoc. The MACC opened up and they created a coordinated task force to handle the roads, the power, and the emergency response so we had fire, roads and power all working together. And it worked! It was textbook perfect. They got through the area like gangbusters when other regions were saying, “Help me! Help me!” They were doing it. It became a model for the state.
JO: Do they still meet? Are they still active?
298
DL: Shortly after this time it became apparent that the MACC was really too many groups all under one umbrella. There were responders. There were preparers. And there were hangers-on. The responders needed to talk about the details of their response. There was so much other clutter in the meetings that they were not effective. So, they are meeting separately on about a quarterly basis if I understand. Pep-C is not a part of most of those discussions. When preparedness comes into the agenda, Pep-C will be invited to participate. Dave Watson has been the principal representative of Pep-C to go to that.
JO: We’ve had a couple more fairs. They’ve switched to Gig Harbor High School
DL: Yes. The Peninsula School District and Gig Harbor High School have hosted the last two fairs. Very, very good venue for that. We had a much larger display area and more people displaying at the one two years ago now.
JO: I think that was in September, eighteen months apart.
DL: Attendance was OK. It was figured to be right around a thousand people. Then, this year we had another one at Gig Harbor High School. Smaller number of displays. The first fair, we had way too many classes and discussions where a person just couldn’t get around. We had the chief seismologist from the University of Washington giving a presentation in the gym. Attendance really wasn’t what it should have been for that quality of presentation. So, the one this year, we cut way back on the number of presentations and were competing with the first real nice weekend of spring. So, attendance was in the eight hundreds.
JO: I think that’s pretty good. I didn’t think it was that high.
DL: Well, it may not have been.
JO: We didn’t keep lists of it this year.
DL: It was down considerably.
JO: Well, this is wonderful. I had an idea, but it’s wandered away somewhere in this pit here. Did I hear that you were a fire chief at one time?
DL: I was a battalion chief. It was interesting, When I was hired as a firefighter, they doubled the size of our response group. They had had four full time firefighters; one per shift at a time, and one working weekdays. They hired four of us so that doubled the number so we had two people on shift at a time. There was no central dispatch so if we got an alarm, by lots we chose who was going to be dispatcher and who was going to be first out. If it were a fire alarm, the dispatcher would follow as soon as he dispatched the call and there would be nobody on the central radio. It was all the mobile radios on the response rigs. At that time, we had over a hundred volunteers in the district and we had two on duty firefighters.
JO: What year was that?
DL: It was 1980, the year that Mt. St. Helen’s blew until probably about 1985…could have been ’84. And then we were able to add more personnel. At about the end of the first year, they tested for captain because we were all just firefighters and one had more seniority than another, but he was still a firefighter. So they said, “We need a hierarchy,” and I was lucky enough to be selected after a year-and-a-half on the department. That position transisted into battalion chief. I held that until my retirement in the year 2000.
JO: That’s good to know. What did you think about Cascadia Rising? Did we participate in that at all?
400
DL: Pep-C did not participate in Cascadia Rising. We haven’t been involved in any or many of the regional exercises because our forte has been in preparedness. We’ve been the group that goes out and talks people into being prepared. We don’t have a significant role in response. So, as that happens, we don’t take a me-too role in the big exercises.
JO: As the population here is really growing, how do you feel we are doing in the sense of rescue, response…certainly, if there is the big one, nobody can get to anybody to help you out. The roads will be down, the freeway passovers will be a mess. They may be up, but the land around them may be down. So, I’m thinking, the population has grown, have the fire and police departments grown with the rest of the population?
DL: The fire department has kept reasonably well with the population growth. They now staff, I believe, five stations full time and they have a minimum of about fifteen firefighters on duty at every moment. Police, not so much.
JO: I hear police and sheriff. What is it in Gig Harbor?
DL: Gig Harbor city has its own police department. They have increased markedly, but still they have, I would doubt that they have four officers on duty at one time. The Sheriff’s Department, if they have two or three officers on duty for both peninsulas, that would be full staffing. One of the big differences between the different departments, the fire department is a junior taxing district. They are not beholden to the city of Gig Harbor or the County for their funding. The residents of the fire districts have voted a basic rate of taxation on themselves, and that pays for the fire services. The library works the same way. They are a junior taxing district. All of the junior taxing districts have a lid which cumulatively they cannot exceed without a special election of the people. So the fire district in 1978, they voted a bond issue to build new fire stations. At that time, nine stations were constructed under that bond to give equal coverage throughout the Fire District Five area. District 16, I can’t speak to because I wasn’t a part of that district.
JO: Now we’re running low on tape, is there anything you would like to add?
DL: Yes. One of the other areas I’m involved in is Shelter Manager for the shelter at Chapel Hill Church. Chapel Hill is the largest shelter on the Gig Harbor Peninsula. Key Peninsula has Key Peninsula Lutheran Church. This is a very active and good shelter preparedness organization. We have capability and emergency power to operate twenty-four-seven at Chapel Hill for the shelter. We haven’t had to open it except for minor emergencies and I hope it stays that way.
JO: All this preparation and we’re hoping never to have to use it.
DL: Exactly.
500
JO: Just like having a little insurance policy. You hope never to have to use your insurance policies either. Well, that’s great. We’re pretty much near the end of the tape. This has been wonderful. So much information.
DL: So I talked continuously; talked your leg off.
JO: No. No. It was all valuable.
DL: Well, thank you.
JO: Thank you! All right. Closing off.
THE END
JO: Testing
JO: We are at Gig Harbor Fire and Medic One on Bujacich Road NW on April 05th, 2019. This is Jane Olive interviewing Don Lee who will have his eighty-first birthday tomorrow and congratulations to him. After all these years of service and helping his community, he’s still alive and kicking, very busy and very active. So, well done! Let’s get some background on you, Don. Where were you born?
DL: I was born in Rio Tinto, Nevada in 1938, on April the 6th. Rio Tinto, Nevada no longer exists. I like to tell people that when I moved away there was no longer a need for the town. They closed it down. My dad was a miner who worked in the typically gold and silver mines, also in a mercury mine in California. During my early years as a Cub Scout age young boy, I learned to go underground with my dad and way up top on the top of the ‘head frame’ which is an elevated structure to draw the ore cars off and dump them either as slag or as ore. My job as a nine-year-old boy was to stand at the top of the shaft and signal the hoist operator whether the ore that came up was either ore or slag. I hope I got it right sometimes.
During that time, I learned to deal with dynamite, that’s an important part of mining, and subsequent to that, when I lived in southeast Alaska, I got a job during the summer as a quarryman drilling and blasting. The only training I had in that trade was as a nine-ten-year-old boy working with my dad.
I am married to Tonya. We married in 1962 in Fairfield, California. We have two daughters, grown now. One teaches chemistry and other sciences in Gig Harbor High School and the other is the chief financial officer of the Genworth Corporation working out of Richmond, Virginia. Talked to her this morning and she was enroute to Beijing, China as part of her job.
I’ve had a varied employment history and career. I was in the navy from 1957 to’59 aboard the submarine, USS Perch APSS 313. I attended electrical A and B school as part of my training there. Upon getting out of the navy, I’ve continued to dabble in electrical repairs ever since.
I went to San Jose State College in San Jose, California to get my bachelors and master’s degrees in science education and went back and got a master’s degree in instructional materials in 1969-70. From there I became an instructional materials specialist at The Dalls, Oregon. In 1970 I moved up to Pierce County, settled in Gig Harbor and worked for the county Superintendent of Schools running the film library and providing media services to the districts within Pierce County. After a few years of that, the State Board of Education reduced the number of educational service districts which had taken over the responsibility of the county superintendent. I found myself as low man on the totem pole when we merged with King County and I began to write grant applications; the hardest work I’ve ever done. I continued for about two years writing grant applications.
I was a volunteer firefighter when they decided to hire additional personnel. I thought, “Gee, I’d to be a fireman. So I tested at the age of 42 years old and became a full time firefighter. But, because the salary was less than what I had been making, I continued to work for the educational service district half-time, full time for the fire department, and would spend my days…six o’clock in the morning I would head off to King County to work at the ESD. At 4:30 I’d leave that, drive back to Gig Harbor, change shifts at the fire department, work twenty-four hours there, go home for eight hours, and do it all over again. After a year-and-a-half of that, I was able to drop the ESD job and worked for the fire district in Gig Harbor ever since.
My hobbies have included all sorts of repair and fix type things; generally, for people who are in need. I work with the church at Chapel Hill and people who need electrical repair or minor building repair. I can go work on that and keep things going.
I became involved with Pep-C in about 1997 as I recall, when the chief came in and said, “Don, Pep-C’s having a meeting today, but I really don’t have time for that, so I’d like you to go in in my place.” I’ve been doing it ever since. That’s about twenty-one years. Twenty-two maybe.
101
In the early years, the principal organizer was Joanne Gray. Joanne was a very dedicated individual who saw preparedness as a crusade. She kept the organization going. She didn’t take the major roles of president or general chair, but she was always on the sidelines making sure everything worked. She was the one who conceived of selling the water barrels for preparedness and to finance the Pep-C organization. That’s been our primary source of funding ever since. Joanne was really the guiding light that I saw during the very early years of Pep-C. Unfortunately, she had a severe stroke, and passed away, it’s been ten years now. But her work continues on.
In the early years of Pep-C, before I became a part of it, Pep-C was a ‘publishing machine.’ Almost all of the funding that came in was spent on publishing preparedness monographs of various types. The things we now get from government entities were not available, and so on typewriters and a copy machine, they would type up a monograph on the basic supplies you need for preparedness for two weeks. Or how to preserve or store water, how to make it safe. Or, Washington is earthquake country, this is what to expect. Wide, wide variety of publications that have now fallen into disuse because we have the slick printed versions available from the county and from the state and federal governments.
JO: Who was president when you came in? Was it Dave Watson? Or someone else between Dave and you?
DL: President of the organization when I first joined, I do not remember.
JO: Dave said he passed his materials on to that person and cannot remember that person’s name.
DL: This was before Dave was president. Dave Watson was a principal at Artondale Elementary and was a very important part of Pep-C’s goal to help schools be prepared. We did a lot, of course, with Artondale, and the other elementary schools, to get their individual ‘comfort pacts’ as part of what they did. Every child would bring or be provided with a comfort pack that was put in storage with their name on it so if something bad happened, they would have this. It’s like a go-and-grab bag. It had just a few items of food and something to drink and a comfort item that was important to them.
JO: That was a great idea.
DL: Yeah. It continued for some time, but it seems to have fallen into disuse because of storage problems and, quite honestly, they haven’t had to use it, and so, “Gee, if I didn’t use it in the last year, maybe it’s not necessary.” Never mind that the earthquake is coming; we all know that.
One of the projects that we took on in conjunction with the Department of Emergency Management (DEM) of Pierce County is retrofitting the lights of an elementary school with plastic sleeves around every fluorescent tube, because the fluorescent tubes are vulnerable to falling. We went out and had this whole raft of tubes to put around the bulbs. We did that and felt very good about one school. At the end of that they added up the costs involved in terms of labor and whatnot, and said, “You know, that wasn’t very effective. We need to look at a different way to make them good.”
We met with the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts and gave talks to them. Our stock in trade in the early years was to talk to any group that we could twist their arm into giving us time. We’d join them for their regular meeting and push preparedness. We did some formalized training, but mostly it was the personal preparedness talks. These are the things you need and this is how you get about it. We depended upon the fire department to provide the medical training and the CPR training because they were prepared to do it. They had all the training and the certification and why reinvent the wheel.
JO: How do you find things now? How many years were you president, first of all?
DL: I was president for two years, I believe. Before me, Marvin Nauman was president and he was president for about three years. And before him, it was Ken Roberts. Have to come back to that. He did a good job. He was only president for perhaps two years. Dave Watson was president for years and years and years because nobody else would step forward.
205
Well, let’s see. I had a thought in there. Oh! The Preparedness Fairs! The first fair was held at Chapel Hill Church, I believe it was in 2012,
JO: Were you president then?
DL: I don’t believe so.
JO: What years were you president? You just left when Curt Scott came in. This was Curt’s second year that ended so he’s going into his third year now. So, around 2016?
DL: Could have been. 2014-2016. Something like that. We held the Preparedness Fair at Chapel Hill. It was designed as a minimal cost fair. Chapel Hill provided all the facilities without cost. People were invited to contribute if they were a commercial organization, and the sum was huge! It was $25 per booth only for the ‘for profits.’ The nonprofits were provided booths at no charge. We had about nine hundred to a thousand participants come through. It just worked very well. I think it was at that fair, that Tom Miner who was with the Pierce County Sherriff’s Department gave the keynote speech. His topic was, “When bad things happen, you’re on your own.” We do not have the manpower to rescue you, so be prepared. It was very well met. The fire department, the sheriff’s department…all the agencies I could twist their arms, did a great job. Two years later in about 2014, we held a second one at Chapel Hill. We had a little over a thousand people go through. That one, Ken was the president and we had quite an active organization committee of which Ken was a part. We had the Boy Scouts that met at the LDS Church demonstrate Dutch Oven Cooking in the parking lot. We created a fire pit environment for them to use and that was well received.
JO: Was Ken LDS?
DL: Yes.
JO: I can track him down that way.
DL: I’ll figure out the name soon, because he’s still active but not with Pep-C.
We also began a series of meetings with the MACC, the Multi-Agency Coordinating Committee. That involved police, fire, utilities, roads, everybody who had a response to an emergency on the peninsulas was a part of that organization, including the hospital. It involved generally a quarterly meeting, sometimes a bit more often than that, where a discussion of operations was held. During the snow/ice storm, we had a severe snow and ice storm with a lot of wind that really raised havoc. The MACC opened up and they created a coordinated task force to handle the roads, the power, and the emergency response so we had fire, roads and power all working together. And it worked! It was textbook perfect. They got through the area like gangbusters when other regions were saying, “Help me! Help me!” They were doing it. It became a model for the state.
JO: Do they still meet? Are they still active?
298
DL: Shortly after this time it became apparent that the MACC was really too many groups all under one umbrella. There were responders. There were preparers. And there were hangers-on. The responders needed to talk about the details of their response. There was so much other clutter in the meetings that they were not effective. So, they are meeting separately on about a quarterly basis if I understand. Pep-C is not a part of most of those discussions. When preparedness comes into the agenda, Pep-C will be invited to participate. Dave Watson has been the principal representative of Pep-C to go to that.
JO: We’ve had a couple more fairs. They’ve switched to Gig Harbor High School
DL: Yes. The Peninsula School District and Gig Harbor High School have hosted the last two fairs. Very, very good venue for that. We had a much larger display area and more people displaying at the one two years ago now.
JO: I think that was in September, eighteen months apart.
DL: Attendance was OK. It was figured to be right around a thousand people. Then, this year we had another one at Gig Harbor High School. Smaller number of displays. The first fair, we had way too many classes and discussions where a person just couldn’t get around. We had the chief seismologist from the University of Washington giving a presentation in the gym. Attendance really wasn’t what it should have been for that quality of presentation. So, the one this year, we cut way back on the number of presentations and were competing with the first real nice weekend of spring. So, attendance was in the eight hundreds.
JO: I think that’s pretty good. I didn’t think it was that high.
DL: Well, it may not have been.
JO: We didn’t keep lists of it this year.
DL: It was down considerably.
JO: Well, this is wonderful. I had an idea, but it’s wandered away somewhere in this pit here. Did I hear that you were a fire chief at one time?
DL: I was a battalion chief. It was interesting, When I was hired as a firefighter, they doubled the size of our response group. They had had four full time firefighters; one per shift at a time, and one working weekdays. They hired four of us so that doubled the number so we had two people on shift at a time. There was no central dispatch so if we got an alarm, by lots we chose who was going to be dispatcher and who was going to be first out. If it were a fire alarm, the dispatcher would follow as soon as he dispatched the call and there would be nobody on the central radio. It was all the mobile radios on the response rigs. At that time, we had over a hundred volunteers in the district and we had two on duty firefighters.
JO: What year was that?
DL: It was 1980, the year that Mt. St. Helen’s blew until probably about 1985…could have been ’84. And then we were able to add more personnel. At about the end of the first year, they tested for captain because we were all just firefighters and one had more seniority than another, but he was still a firefighter. So they said, “We need a hierarchy,” and I was lucky enough to be selected after a year-and-a-half on the department. That position transisted into battalion chief. I held that until my retirement in the year 2000.
JO: That’s good to know. What did you think about Cascadia Rising? Did we participate in that at all?
400
DL: Pep-C did not participate in Cascadia Rising. We haven’t been involved in any or many of the regional exercises because our forte has been in preparedness. We’ve been the group that goes out and talks people into being prepared. We don’t have a significant role in response. So, as that happens, we don’t take a me-too role in the big exercises.
JO: As the population here is really growing, how do you feel we are doing in the sense of rescue, response…certainly, if there is the big one, nobody can get to anybody to help you out. The roads will be down, the freeway passovers will be a mess. They may be up, but the land around them may be down. So, I’m thinking, the population has grown, have the fire and police departments grown with the rest of the population?
DL: The fire department has kept reasonably well with the population growth. They now staff, I believe, five stations full time and they have a minimum of about fifteen firefighters on duty at every moment. Police, not so much.
JO: I hear police and sheriff. What is it in Gig Harbor?
DL: Gig Harbor city has its own police department. They have increased markedly, but still they have, I would doubt that they have four officers on duty at one time. The Sheriff’s Department, if they have two or three officers on duty for both peninsulas, that would be full staffing. One of the big differences between the different departments, the fire department is a junior taxing district. They are not beholden to the city of Gig Harbor or the County for their funding. The residents of the fire districts have voted a basic rate of taxation on themselves, and that pays for the fire services. The library works the same way. They are a junior taxing district. All of the junior taxing districts have a lid which cumulatively they cannot exceed without a special election of the people. So the fire district in 1978, they voted a bond issue to build new fire stations. At that time, nine stations were constructed under that bond to give equal coverage throughout the Fire District Five area. District 16, I can’t speak to because I wasn’t a part of that district.
JO: Now we’re running low on tape, is there anything you would like to add?
DL: Yes. One of the other areas I’m involved in is Shelter Manager for the shelter at Chapel Hill Church. Chapel Hill is the largest shelter on the Gig Harbor Peninsula. Key Peninsula has Key Peninsula Lutheran Church. This is a very active and good shelter preparedness organization. We have capability and emergency power to operate twenty-four-seven at Chapel Hill for the shelter. We haven’t had to open it except for minor emergencies and I hope it stays that way.
JO: All this preparation and we’re hoping never to have to use it.
DL: Exactly.
500
JO: Just like having a little insurance policy. You hope never to have to use your insurance policies either. Well, that’s great. We’re pretty much near the end of the tape. This has been wonderful. So much information.
DL: So I talked continuously; talked your leg off.
JO: No. No. It was all valuable.
DL: Well, thank you.
JO: Thank you! All right. Closing off.
THE END