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PHOTO BY STEVE DUNKELBERGER
79(*;0*, Fire and police agencies from around the South Sound
conducted a drill that involved boats surrounding a ferry with containment booms and the evacuation of ferry “passengers,� who were volunteers from local community and technical colleges.
W Rescue From page A2
“Instead of a tiering it up, we will be tiering it down, which will make it a lot faster,� West Pierce Fire and Rescue observer Rick Jankowiak said. An emergency in Gig Harbor, for example, could mean a Tacoma fireboat arrives first on the scene because of its speed and location. Tacoma’s new fireboat, the Destiny, is jet-powered, after all. Pierce County-based emergency watercrafts have regularly responded to calls for service as far away as Des Moines and Olympia, but only after responding to calls for assistance by the local responders. The new agreement “swarms� an incident first and sorts the details out later, so that time isn’t wasted with calls for backup. It’s already coming. “It’s kind of an ‘all-hands race,� Tacoma Fire Department Lt. Wohlf Eil said, “because you never really know what you are going to get out there.� A test of the multi-agency concept took to the water last week when 21 police, fire and environmental agencies conducted a mock rescue of a ferry in distress after being hit by another boat. The fictional scenario was that a boat hit the Steilacoom II ferry, which was
W Gateways From page A1
the train ride. They’ve made the trip through abuse, neglect and, often, the juvenile justice system. Their life skills, and their prospects for a productive future, are low. They need a safe place to live, and job training to make their own living. Gateways plans to provide that, much as the founders did over a century ago. In 1908, the Lend a Hand League changed its name to Children’s Industrial Home of Tacoma. In 1926, Jessie Dyslin gave them her property at 3501 104th St. East in Summit. “It was the place where the boys who weren’t adopted went to learn the skills to be successful members of the community,� Woolbright said of Jessie Dyslin Boys Ranch. It was also the place where a runaway, semi-delinquent kid named William Lyle Richardson pulled his life together. He attended Puyallup High School and acted in a school play, where a teacher declared him “a natural.� He was. He made his acting career, which included starring in “The Night Stalker� and “A Christmas Story,� as Darren McGavin. He remained a supporter of Jesse Dyslin Boys Ranch. “Sometime in the 1970s, it became a state juvenile rehabilitation center,� Woolbright said of the ranch. “The kids were coming out of Naselle, Green Hill and Echo Glenn,� Koeller said. “They were finishing out
taking on water and spilling oil into Puget Sound. Passengers, volunteers from the college ranks of Bates, Tacoma Community College, Pierce College and Key Peninsula Fire and Rescue, had to be “rescued� and the ferry had to be surrounded with hundreds of yards of containment booms strung together in an effort to contain leaking fuel – well, if there was leaking fuel since this was all for pretend. The goal of the exercise was to evaluate both how individual agencies managed the emergency as well as their abilities to effectively communicate and work together. Multiagency drills have become more routine with the push by Homeland Security to foster inter-agency cooperation and information sharing. Detailed debriefings after such drills continue to fill in the learning gap between agencies. Participating agencies include: Anderson Island Fire Department, Browns Point/Dash Point Fire Department, Central Pierce Fire & Rescue, East Pierce Fire & Rescue, Gig Harbor Fire & Medic One, Gig Harbor Police Department, Graham Fire & Rescue, Key Peninsula Fire Department, Lakewood Police Department, Orting Valley Fire & Rescue, Pierce County Emergency Management, Pierce County Incident Management Team, Pierce County Regional Air Support, Pierce County Sheriff ’s Depart-
ment, Port of Tacoma, South King Fire & Rescue, Steilacoom Police Department, Tacoma Fire Department, Tacoma Police Department, United States Coast Guard, West Pierce Fire & Rescue and HMS Global Maritime, which operates the Steilacoom II ferry as a reserve craft for the main vessel, the Christine Anderson. While last week’s activities were just a drill to test first responders, an evacuation of a ferry while it is still on the water is extremely unlikely, HMS Marine Superintendent Paul Crow said while captaining the Steilacoom II. Modern ferries have two separate engines, two separate rudders and a series of water-tight compartments. If one engine goes out, a captain could just jump to the other side of the vessel and drive the ferry to a dock. The SteilacoomAnderson island run is only about a mile, so the ferry is never more than a few hundred yards off shore. Modern ferries are also engineered to be bottom heavy so their passenger compartments remain above water even if their hulls somehow became completely flooded. But oil spills caused by an accident on a ferry could be catastrophic, since ferries routinely carry tens of thousands of gallons of fuel. “This is great training for us too,� Crow said. “A spill like that on the Sound would be an international incident.�
their sentences. They could be anything from a petty thief to a murderer. They had to be doing something to move forward – school or work. Our boys were not allowed to run amok.� In 1995, the ranch changed its name to Gateways for Youth and Families. Peterson added the Dan Quinn Project to the curriculum, inviting mentors to teach boys carpentry, farming and marketing skills. “In our heyday, we had 16 boys here in the main house and eight in the houses in back,� she said. “It slowly got smaller, and we didn’t use the back any more. Then the state said, ‘Your contract’s up. We’ll be pulling the boys out.’� Turbulence hit hard in 2004, when director Claude Carlson left. Political consultant Jamie Beletz and his wife, lawyer Mel Curtiss, had joined the board and involved Gateways in an attempt to take over Tacoma’s Fourth of July waterfront fair and using gambling to raise funds. Beletz became interim director until Curtiss got the permanent position. Peterson remembers it as a time of musical chairs leadership, when solid board members and staff were pushed out and the agency strayed from its mission. The News Tribune’s Jason Hagey investigated, and, after the story was published in 2006, Beletz resigned. Gateways struggled after that, experimenting with a farmer’s market, running a day care, renting parts of the facility to other non-profits. Woolbright, who had left, returned as president in August, 2012 and assessed what to keep, what to ditch and what
to add. Koeller came back to run a visitation program for foster children and their families. Education Visitation and Safe Exchange (EVASE), adoption home studies, classes on the impact of divorce on children, and domestic violence victim impact panels make up Gateways’ core services. Now they intend to add sustainability – both for young people and the property – to the menu. TRAYN aims to give a home and teach life and work skills to young people from 16 to 24 who have aged out of foster care or become homeless. It will offer therapy, techniques to deal with stress. It will teach young people how to balance a checking account, grow a garden, succeed at a job, get along with people and cook dinner. It will use those 32 acres to teach its residents organic farming – a good job market thanks to the growing popularity of fresh, local food. It is recruiting community partners, including John Valentine of the Farmer Frog non-profit. He and the staff organic farmer, Rachael Dye, are building hoop houses that extend the growing season. They are rescuing a blueberry patch and planning to redevelop a scrub wetland into a permaculture food forest. Gateways is extending an invitation to community members to come and tend their own gardens on the property. The agency is returning to their original mission, and growing it. After years of straying and struggling, that’s a happy reunion.
PHOTOS BY KATHLEEN MERRYMAN
65, 7,9:65Âť: ;9(:/ (Top) It is an old desk.
Growing in it are carrots, beets and squash in Tacoma Weekly’s Workplace Garden. (Bottom) We are growing our garden in dressers, desks and free-range bookcases – and TAGRO. By Kathleen Merryman kathleen@tacomaweekly.com
Time was, if you needed a broken-down bookcase, dresser or desk, plus a roll of used carpet padding and maybe an ammo box or two, all you had to do was drive around Tacoma. You could harvest what you needed from alleys and the occasional sidewalk pile in an hour, two, tops. That is how we planned to build Tacoma Weekly’s Workplace Garden. We went with our own blight first, making raised beds out of two ratty (we are being literal here) wooden boxes, a discarded wall cupboard, and two plastic paper boxes from extinct publications. They barely dented our minimum delivery of three cubic yards of TAGRO potting soil. We needed more beds. No problem, I thought. I will just cruise around and upload dead furniture into the old minivan. I had not reckoned on the superpowers of Tacoma’s Community Based Services. Sure, over the past few years I have been writing about their ongoing war on blight and crime. We have even given them mascots, the Outta Here Elephants, as a way to visualize the tonnage of old mattresses, stray tires and dead barbecues they have gotten out of yards and alleys. But I had no idea we were facing a shortage of freerange furniture until I went hunting for it. On May 17 I cruised parts of the East Side, South Tacoma and the South End. Zilch. No big piles of junk. There was one dresser, but it had all its drawers, which means it still had a use in the indoor world. Ditto a pretty matching sofa and chair that were gone a few hours later. This does not mean we have de-junked the burg. There is stuff out there still, but it is not ubiquitous. It is not something that persuades out-of-town guests that, yeah, Tacoma is kind of a dump. That is great news for our civic image, but fatal for my plan to get rid of the pile of TAGRO. In desperation, I turned out for the combined First Creek and Dometop Neighborhood Cleanup at the Tacoma Dome parking lot on May 18. The city provided dumpsters for metal, tires, lawn mowers and general trash. Members of Jehovah Jireh Worship Center brought the muscle to toss stuff from pickups and trailers into the city’s dumpsters. Volunteers with pickup trucks spread into the neighborhoods to pick up the stuff that residents did not bring in. Larry and Chase Scheidt, Marty and Sandy Campbell and Tony McBeath hauled in sofas, recliners and dozens of bags of trash and clippings. Just when they thought they were done, word came that an elderly hoarder wanted a yard full of stuff hauled away. Out they went again, trying to beat the dumpsters’ haul-away deadline. Last year, the city hosted 18 cleanups and hauled away 472 tons of blight. Imagine 157 elephants parading out of town, and you have an idea of the bulk. Not that the city is selfish with its tonnage. It recycles all the metal, and Goodwill brings a collection truck for items that can be salvaged and re-used as-is. It also tolerates scavengers, the likes of Green Thumb Garden’s Tony Miller, McKinley Park volunteers Larry and Lynnette Scheidt and their always-volunteering kids and grandkids, and me. We were scanning pickup beds for items too rough for Goodwill, but ripe for re-purposing. Miller had the skills to fix an ornate metalwork-andslats garden bench. That delighted the man whose wife demanded that he get rid of it. It was too good for the landfill, too good to melt, he said. The man who cleaned out his mother’s garage was pleased as iced tea punch to give a picnic table and matching stacking chairs to the Scheidts for McKinley Park, and a small wheelbarrow to our brave little garden. Oh, there was more. Between us, carpenters’ benches, soaker hoses, a doll house, carpet padding made of recycled fabric, a desk, tool boxes, rakes, a pitchfork, planter boxes, patio furniture, hose reels and Cadillac Jack’s ammunition boxes averted the landfill. All together, they amounted to a baby elephant’s worth of garden-repurposed goods, and proof that if you need it, Tacoma will provide.