REVIEW BAINBRIDGE ISLAND
Friday, December 4, 2015 | Vol. 90, No. 49 | WWW.BAINBRIDGEREVIEW.COM | 75¢ A MOST FESTIVE FRENZY
Working through the holiday rush at the Bainbridge Island Post Office
INSIDE: A song to share, A7
STORM WALLOPS ISLAND: THOUSANDS LEFT POWERLESS
BY LUCIANO MARANO Bainbridge Island Review
The signs are all around us. Cars roll along the highway carrying home trees tied to their roofs, like seasonal trophies from some holiday hunting trip. Festive lights begin to sprout on houses around the island, decorations and festive figurines gather in yards or wave from warmly lighted windows. The days are chilly and the nights are downright frosty, and somewhere on your radio is at least one station that’s already playing nothing but holiday tunes 24/7. Everywhere you look, it really is, as they say, beginning to look a lot like Christmas. And even as holiday haters again bemoan the seemingly endless expansion of the Yuletide season (we have, after all, been seeing decorations in stores since Halloween) the madcap Christmas rush started even earlier this year at the Bainbridge Island Post Office. It always does. “The holiday mailing actually began weeks ago with a huge increase in the catalog and circular mailings,” Bainbridge Island Station Manager Larry Dekker said earlier this week. “The parcels have steadily increased over the last four weeks and are expected to greatly increase immediately after Thanksgiving and continue through to Christmas.” Everyone knows if you want your gift to get to Grandma on time, you need to mail it early. And holiday shipping deadlines are posted readily around the post office, and have been for weeks, as a friendly reminder. But few people really understand the true extent that the Christmas season has on the actual volume of mail in transit,
Postal workers Arnold Klysiak-Black and Stacey Atkins sort parcels at the the Bainbridge Island Post Office last week. At the height of the Christmas rush, Station Manager Larry Dekker said, the postal workers will sort and delivery some 3,000 packages a day. Luciano Marano | Bainbridge Island Review
Brian Kelly | Bainbridge Island Review
Firefighters from the Bainbridge Island Fire Department close down Madison Avenue NE after a fir tree fell into the power lines Tuesday.
City officials vow to open Emergency Operations Center next time around BY BRIAN KELLY
Bainbridge Island Review
Luciano Marano | Bainbridge Island Review
Postal worker Brittney Petito sorts mail at the Bainbridge Island Post Office last week. and on the people who sort, handle and deliver it as well. “I know that when I came to work for the USPS back in 1997 as a city carrier, I was amazed at what went
into getting the mail to the customer,” Dekker said. “We have 18 full-time regulars, 10 part-time carriers and TURN TO RUSH | A21
Turkey and stuffing. Mashed potatoes and gravy. Thanksgiving and power outages. Many islanders were giving thanks, no doubt, that the last of those traditional pairings didn’t come to pass late last week after an islandwide outage left Bainbridge Island without electricity two days before Thanksgiving. A powerful, but largely rainless, windstorm swept through Puget Sound on Tuesday, Nov. 24 — sucker-punching Kitsap County two days before the year’s biggest time for holiday travel. Many islanders lost power that afternoon, and with tens of thousands of Puget Sound Energy customers without electricity in its service territory, most of them in Kitsap County, PSE opened its Kitsap storm base for coordinating response efforts and warned islanders and others that they should start making alternate plans for the holiday.
Crews worked overnight to restore power to more than 75,000 customers, and by early Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, roughly 15,000 homes and businesses were still without power and crews were still handling about 180 individual outages throughout the region. The windstorm/power outage was only the latest in a string of falling tree-blackouts this year on Bainbridge, though this one also led to a one-day school closure and an epic island-wide traffic jam on Highway 305 that will go down as one of the worst in recent memory; one driver reported a tortuous twohour slog on Highway 305 between High School and Day roads Tuesday afternoon, a distance of about 4 miles. Bainbridge city officials said this week they were rethinking their decision not to open the city’s emergency operations center after the storm hit, and noted the number of downed power lines created clear priorities. TURN TO POWERLESS | A20