MEDICAL LAKE, Wash. —When the dust settled after the Oregon Road and Elk Fires, residents of Medical Lake and Elk were questioning what to do next.
“Who do we talk to for this, who do we talk to for that? There’s no central committee that we can go to with all of our questions,” Medical Lake resident Kaye Peterson said. “The community sense was like a sense of hopelessness and desertion.”
Peterson works for a Silver Lake Camp, which helped stage recovery efforts after the fire. Seeing the lack of coordination first-hand, she joined Medical Lake’s Mayor Terri Cooper in Olympia this weekend to support House Bill 1952, which would create a statewide recovery framework for disaster relief to help streamline the recovery process.
“We send a team that stays for a couple months and we don’t leave until they have their 501(c)(3) and their bank account and all of their community leaders,” Mayor Cooper said. “Who are your non-profits doing the good work here and how do we get the right people in those seats? So at the end of a couple of months when the Red Cross leaves, when the Salvation Army leaves, when everybody leaves, your community is ready to recover.”
The bill – which has nine co-sponsors including Spokane County Representatives Mike Volz, Leonard Christian, Suzanne Schmidt, Jenny Graham, Joe Schmick – passed through a House committee on Friday and appears to have support.
“I was impressed,” Mayor Cooper said about her time in Olympia. “I felt like everyone listened, they heard, they made time for us.”
