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Three Sheets Northwest
by Deborah Bach
BOATERS TO THE RESCUE:
HOW THE BAINBRIDGE ISLAND EMERGENCY FLOTILLA WAS BORN Living aboard in California during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, Tami Allen began to see her boat, and vessels generally, in a different light. In the days following the 6.9-magnitude quake, which killed 63 people and injured thousands more, Allen served as an interpreter helping Spanish-speaking people in Red Cross shelters find housing. At night she went home to her boat, where she could cook, access fresh water and sleep through the aftershocks that sent people scurrying from their homes to muster areas. “It was so different for the people who were trying to deal with living on land than what I was going through,” says Allen, the harbormaster for Bainbridge Island. “The people who were on boats fared so much better. That’s when I started thinking about a vessel as being an emergency response solution.” That thought morphed into a plan after Allen talked with a firefighter who helped with the Hurricane Katrina response in 2005 and told her about private boat owners rescuing people from rooftops and streets in flooded New Orleans and surrounding areas. Those efforts evolved into the New Orleans48º NORTH
based nonprofit organization Cajun Navy Relief, which also helped rescue people after Hurricane Harvey in 2018. Allen started thinking about launching a similar initiative in the Northwest. She eventually created the Bainbridge Island Emergency Flotilla, believed to be the region’s first of its type. The effort involves a group of local boat owners who have volunteered to help if the Seattle area gets hit with the major earthquake it’s overdue for, or another disaster. That could be anything from transporting people after a landslide to helping deploy containment booms following an oil spill on the water. The flotilla so far includes 29 credentialed boat owners who have taken a couple of required incident command classes, passed background checks and, in a few cases, obtained ham radio licenses. More than 50 boaters have offered to volunteer, Allen says, and she hopes to expand the roster of credentialed boaters to 100. The effort is part of Bainbridge Island’s broader emergency preparedness plan, which involves hubs organized by neighborhood, emergency centers across the island and citizenled teams of volunteers. The flotilla’s primary role in a disaster
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MARCH 2021
