welcome
may21
2015
Vernonia’s Determined Recovery Winds Down
By Scott Laird

Any Vernonia resident who was
here on December 3, 2007 and experi-
enced the flood will most likely never
forget that day, although many of us
would like to.

Several recent events, one at a
Vernonia City Council meeting, one at
the Vernonia Schools campus, and one
all the way in Klamath Falls, were a re-
minder of just how far this community
has come since that bleak December
day over seven years ago. These events
were an indicator that the community
may finally be ready to put the flood and
the recovery behind us and move ahead.

I remember in the early weeks
of the recovery effort, Jim Tierney of
Community Action Team, a key orga-
nizer of not just the initial recovery ac-
tivities but the entire long term effort,
telling me that the recovery of the com-
munity would not be complete for sev-
eral years, maybe as many as five years.
I couldn’t believe it... that our communi-
ty would still be struggling several years
later through the turmoil and strife we
were experiencing right then.

But here we are, almost eight
years later and the recovery effort is fi-
nally winding down. We just saw the
final building of the FEMA buyouts, the
Vernonia Senior Center, demolished.

Tierney attended the Vernonia
City Council meeting on April 20 to
provide a report on the over-all flood re-
covery effort in Vernonia and Columbia
County. Tierney gave a breakdown of
the over $47 million dollars in funding
and services that was funneled into the
community.

Included in that sum was over
$37 million in FEMA and other govern-
ment funds that went towards assisting
109 homes and several other essential
service projects, including $16 million
for the school buyout. Homes and busi-
nesses were either raised, floodproofed,
or purchased and demolished, perma-
nently protecting or moving them above
or out of the flood zone. That $47 mil-
lion sum also included almost $6.5 mil-
lion in loans, $2.5 million in faith based
group labor that assisted with renova-
tions and repairs, as well as $1 million
in flood insurance payments, donations
from foundations and corporations, and
volunteer labor.

As Tierney pointed out in his re-
port to City Council, that in addition to
the funding, loans and volunteer labor,
a key component of the recovery effort
was the volunteers who immediately
stepped up the day follwoing the flood
to begin gathering data and information
from property owners who had been ef-
fected.

After the flood in 1996 only a
handful of homes received assistance
and were raised or bought out. In
2007, organizers were determined to as-
sist more members of the community.
By immediately gathering informa-
tion from effected families, flood relief
workers were able to stay in contact and
assist community members throughout
the process of applying for and receiv-
ing funds to make repairs, raise their
homes or move. They used the data to
put pressure on government agencies, to
show the need for relief funding, and
rally political champions to the cause of
rebuilding Vernonia.

And it worked. Vernonia be-
came a cause and received the ongoing
attention and assistance of governors,
state agencies, local legislators, business
leaders and regular citizens, leading to
a recovery effort that is now used as an
example by FEMA and others around
the world.

One of the largest projects to
come out of the flood recovery effort
was obviously the construction of the
new school campus. On May 9 the Ver-
nonia School District celebrated a land-
mark and the attainment of a long time
goal, when they unveiled two plaques
designating the school campus facility
as LEED Platinum and Green Globe
certified.

The Vernonia Schools campus
is the first and only K-12 school in the
nation to receive LEED Platinum status.
The LEED green building rating system
is the recognized standard for measuring
building sustainability around the world
and was a goal of the school construc-
tion project from the very beginning.
The Green Globe designation was icing
on the cake for a project that was deter-
mined to set itself apart and be an indi-
cator of a paradigm shift in the Vernonia
community.

The new school campus, a
model for rural sustainability, as well
as the school’s commitment to a natu-
ral resource based education, is another
indicator that the community is moving
forward. The Vernonia School Board
committed to that vision of rural sus-
tainability when they embraced the plan
to construct a LEED Platinum worthy
facility, and remained determined to
see that vision through to the end of the
project. The ceremony on May 9 was
an indicator that the community had
achieved another goal on its way to re-
covery.

To complete this recovery tale,
Vernonia even has a piece of orchestral
music composed in its honor. Nate
McCroskey-Izzett, began composing a
piece of music three years ago while still
a student in Vernonia. McCroskey-Izzett
is now a senior at Mazama High School,
and has completed Vernonia Overture
for his senior project. The instrumental
piece is dedicated to the Vernonia com-
munity and McCroskey-Izzett’s fellow
Vernonia classmates, and expresses the
beauty of the region, the devastation
and grief experienced by the residents
from the flood, and the resiliency of the
community as they rebuilt the town and
constructed the new school building.

McCroskey-Izzett is the son of
former Vernonia band instructor Rob
Izzett, and conducted the Klamath Falls
Community Band as they performed
his piece for the first time ever in early
April.

I’d like to think that having a
piece of music composed and performed
about this flood event might be one of
the final pieces to our recovery effort.

This community has shown re-
siliency and determination at every turn
as they fought to save the town, rebuild
the school, and continue to move for-
ward. There have been many heroic ef-
forts both large and small along the way.

The City traded their sports
fields to the School District for construc-
tion of the new campus and then had to
wait several years for the demolition of
the old school and construction of the
new fields. Citizens took it upon them-
selves to construct new baseball fields
just south of town on a weed strewn
patch of property so local kids would
have a place to play.

The Vernonia Health Center
took the funds from their FEMA buyout
and used it to jump start a million dollar
private fundraising campaign to build a
new health care facility out of the flood
zone.

When the Senior Center facility
was torn down last month, one of the fi-
nal pieces in the recovery effort, the se-
niors were resourceful and found ways
to continue providing services to their
client base.

The list goes on and on.

While the new Senior Center fa-
cility still needs to be built, it would be
hard to bet against that eventuality in
this town so full of determined and reso-
lute citizens.
3
Publisher and Managing Editor
Scott Laird
503-367-0098
scott@vernoniasvoice.com
Contributors
Chip Bubl
Tobie Finzel
Karen Kain
Dr. Carol McIntyre
Aaron Miller
Shannon Romtvedt
Grant Williams
Melissa Zavales
Photography
Scott Laird
Karen Kain
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