March 2015
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On a pump and a prayer, page 9
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Point Roberts, WA 98281 Postal Patron Local
Every seat is a window seat... Fire board OKs emergency funding of radio By Meg Olson Fire district commissioners have voted unanimously to approve an emergency procurement to upgrade communications. Chief Christopher Carleton has the goahead to spend up to $50,000 of the district’s capital fund to install equipment on the Whidbey Telecom tower on Johnson Road, which he expects will dramatically improve communication with dispatch services in the county. “It’s not just an emergency now, it has been for years,” Carleton said at the February 11 commission meeting, but a combination of dead ends, changing regulations and heightened community concern has increased the urgency. When someone calls 911 from Point Roberts they are connected to the WhatComm dispatch center operated by the city of Bellingham. If the call is fire or medical it is immediately transfered to the Prospect Fire Dispatch Center, which will send a radio signal to pagers of fire department members so they can respond to the emergency. In one call in November, some got a page, while others able to respond did not. One emergency medical technician (EMT) responded to the home of Scott and Jody Hackleman where Jody was in medical distress, but could not transport her to the hospital alone. Despite repeated pages, he remained alone on the scene for 20 minutes until Carleton, in Bellingham, contacted another EMT by cell phone and Jody was transported to the hospital. She later died. “I don’t know if it would have made a difference in saving her life; we’ll never know,” Scott said. “All we know is, the fact it didn’t proceed as it should have could not have had a positive effect.” Carleton confirmed that assistant chief John Shields was able to respond, but despite three signals being sent by dispatchers, his pager never went off. “It wasn’t a failure of this organization. It was a failure of the way we are paged,” Carleton said. Dispatchers send signals from a number of antennas in the county but because of distance and terrain, signal reception can be poor in Point Roberts. Whatcom County undersheriff Jeff Parks said their deputies in Point Roberts also suffer from occasional communications problems. “Terrain has always been the big issue, countywide,” he said. “Our system is pretty old and we’re always working on it. Federal regulations in 2013 requiring ‘narrowbanding’ to make more channels available for wireless communication degraded the signal in some locations. We did lose signal quality and acquire some dead (See Fire, page 3)
s A San Juan Airline flight lands in Point Roberts at 10:20 a.m. on February 20 to drop off and pick up passengers. It was already the second flight of the day into Point Roberts. Photo by Pat Grubb
San Juan Airlines inaugurates regular flights By Meg Olson With increasing numbers of commercial flights in and out of Point Roberts’ small airport, local pilots are struggling with the impacts. “We’re essentially running a commercial operation,” said Bob Granley, a Point Roberts resident who has kept his airplanes at the airport for 20 years and, with the half dozen other local pilots based at the airport, maintains it. “It takes a lot of effort to keep an airport
running and safe,” Granley said. Private owners have primarily used the private airstrip but in 2009 Northwest Sky Ferry began regular service to Point Roberts. “Over the last several years, our clientele started to grow,” said Katie Jansen with San Juan Airlines, which merged with Northwest Sky Ferry last year. Jansen said since February the company has been offering twice daily scheduled service to Point Roberts, but only flying when their two-seat minimum was met (unless the client chose to charter the
County juggles competing priorities By Meg Olson While pursuing run-of-the-mill code violations may not be a high priority in the eyes of Whatcom County, it certainly appears so for members of the Point Roberts community. For the most part, county enforcement staff go after violators based upon a system that assigns priorities based on the level of impact: high for a significant impact on safety, property and the environment;
moderate for a probable though not imminent impact; and low for an impact that is neither probable nor imminent. In response to demands from Point Roberts that the county address code violations, county planner and code compliance officer Garrett Faddis met February 17 with two dozen community members to talk about how the county intends to prioritize code enforcement on the Point. (See Violations, page 6)
plane). The flight leaves from Bellingham airport and costs $109 one-way. Passengers using the service include people doing business on the Point, such as contractors, architects, engineers or doctors, as well as tourists and local residents who cannot transit through Canada. San Juan Airlines also flies to destinations in the San Juan Islands and Victoria, B.C. While the charter doesn’t fly every (See Airport, page 2)
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Church ............................................. 13 Classifieds ......................................... 17 Coming Up ....................................... 14 Crossings .......................................... 12 Obituary ........................................... 18 Opinion ............................................... 4 Seniors ............................................. 16 Tides ................................................. 12