Valley Record SNOQUALMIE
Wednesday, JANUARY 2, 2013 n Daily updates at www.valleyrecord.com n 75 cents Carol Ladwig/Staff Photo
Tom Kemp, right, shares a laugh and some holiday cookies with a traveling driver at North Bend’s Truck Town on Christmas Eve. Kemp works the truck stop as Transport for Christ’s local pastor.
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Index Parenting 2 4 Opinion 5 Scene 6 Obituaries On the Scanner 7 Classifieds 11-14
Vol. 99, No. 32
Neighbor douses Cascade Covenant Church candle fire
A friend at the crossroads Strangers always get a smile from North Bend’s truck stop chaplain By Carol Ladwig Staff Reporter
Tom Kemp played Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, but he used the front door, not the chimney, when he came to call.
Sporting a Santa hat with a green ball-cap brim, Kemp strode through the lines of tractor-trailers parked at North Bend’s Travel Centers of America stop, a.k.a Truck Town. These trucks are the drivers’ homes when they’re on the road, and he hoped to brighten each one with a delivery of home-made cookies. “We figure, if you’re here on the lot
Culture change Valley move gives county permit department a whole new outlook on service By Seth Truscott Editor
“It’s breathtaking,” John Starbard says of his new view. The snowy mountains that spring up outside his corner office just off the Snoqualmie Parkway are a far cry from the industrial hangars that greeted the director of King County’s Department of Permitting and Environmental Review only two months ago. See CULTURE, 3
Fast thinker saves church from blaze
today (Christmas Eve), you won’t be home to get fresh-baked cookies on Christmas,” Kemp tells the drivers. Most drivers look confused for a few seconds, then smile widely as Kemp holds up a big sack full of individually-packaged and decorated bags of holiday cookies.
Ten days away from Christmas Eve, and the church was burning. Josh Hudson barely registered these thoughts before he had a new one: I can put out this fire. He acted on that idea almost faster than he could think, but first he called 911 and reported seeing a small but growing fire at Cascade Covenant Church. “It had just started, it wasn’t really burning too big,” Hudson said of the fire, at the church directly across the street from his house.
See CROSSROAD, 10
See Church fire, 15 Seth Truscott/Staff Photo
King County engineer Ray Florent takes in the view from his office on Snoqualmie Ridge, part of the newly moved,renamedKing County Department of Permitting and Environmental Review. About 100 county employees now work in Snoqualmie.
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