Threatened by changing times and rising tides, two rural communities find common cause in retooling natural-resource-based economies.
By Ted Katauskas
January 3, 2022, was supposed to be an auspicious day for Dee Roberts, and it was, in more ways than one. That first Monday of the year marked the first day of her first term as the mayor of Raymond, an economically challenged historic timber town of 3,000 on the banks of the Willapa River near the mouth of Willapa Bay. It also marked the onset of one of the most significant flooding events that north Pacific County—no stranger to wild weather—has ever experienced.
“It has been an interesting day in Pacific County,” the Pacific County Emergency Management Agency (PCEMA) posted on its Facebook page that afternoon. “At 9:25 a.m., the Pacific County Emergency Management Agency was alerted by the [National Weather Service] that the tidal anomaly for today was going to be much greater than originally expected ... Raymond and South Bend are the cities most vulnerable to tidal overflow flooding. … Sand and sandbags were made available in both cities. Schools, transportation, and public safety agencies were consulted, and contingency plans were put in motion.”
The unusual ocean upswell, following an overnight downpour, submerged a stretch of Highway 101, closing the main artery that links both communities. In South Bend, a sister city of 1,600 six miles downriver from Raymond, Roberts was still five months away from retiring as that city’s clerk/treasurer (a post she held for 24 years). While her mayor’s office in Raymond sat empty, she stoically helmed the clerk’s desk at South Bend’s city hall, artfully multitasking the needs of both communities. She checked in with her staff in Raymond between answering phone calls from concerned South Benders and posted urgent public service announcements on the city’s Facebook page: “There is water over the road at Highway 101. PLEASE be careful! There are logs in that water and people are driving through the water and hitting the logs. JUST STAY HOME UNTIL THE WATER RECEDES!”
By evening, the tide went out, taking the floodwaters with it, and life returned to normal in Raymond and South Bend. For exactly three days.
On January 6, unseasonably warm temperatures sent a torrent of snowmelt thundering down hillsides and into the Willapa tidal basin. While a downpour of biblical proportions soaked the valley for 12 hours, westerly winds gusting up to 70 mph kept the high tide from retreating. In both communities, businesses and schools closed while residents sheltered in place behind sandbagged doors. South Bend, closer to the bay and lower on the floodplain, bore the brunt of the storm—transforming the city’s primary north-south thoroughfare, Central Avenue, into a river.
At city hall, one block east of Central Avenue, Roberts moved the city’s computer servers and boxes of paper files off the floor, made arrangements to sandbag the building, and updated South Bend’s Facebook page, advising residents to evacuate, where to shelter pets, and where to get bottled water. Then she drove to Raymond to take stock of the situation there (flooding was minimal) and returned to South Bend to meet with that city’s mayor and Pacific County’s emergency manager. Again, she drove back to Raymond, and back to South Bend, and back and forth until the day was done.
“At one point, I just sat in my car because I was like, ‘I don’t even really know where I’m supposed to be right now,’” recalls Roberts, who retired from her clerk/treasurer post in South Bend in May and now works full time as Raymond’s mayor. “I was just overwhelmed. I was beside myself.”
South Bend police officers, wading through waist-deep water in the streets, went door-to-door to check on residents while the city’s public works crew made a valiant stand with the custodial staff at the local high school, where pumps ran nonstop for 36 hours behind a berm of sandbags to shunt water away from the school’s pinewood gym floor, which had been replaced at great cost after being destroyed by a similar flood in 2015. “We managed to keep enough water at bay to save that floor, and we did what we could to make sure everybody was warm and safe and dry,” says South Bend Mayor Julie Struck. “Nobody was in danger of losing their life, but property damage for a few folks was significant.”
In all, eight families were displaced, and 98 properties were flooded, with damage estimates approaching $1 million. “That’s not insignificant in a small community, especially in an economically challenged community,” notes PCEMA Director Scott McDougall, a former EMT/firefighter from Raymond. In South Bend, the median household income ($44,000) is 55 percent of the state median, and 23 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.
Then barely a week after the flood, on January 15, 2022, a volcanic eruption 6,500 miles across the Pacific in Tonga triggered a tsunami warning, which ended up only producing a ripple locally but rattled an already shaken community.
“Things were finally settling down and then the tsunami warning comes and I’m thinking ‘Oh my God, what else is going to happen?’” Roberts recalls. “Nothing happened, thankfully. I guess the last thing I can expect in my term may be an earthquake.”
That's actually a worry that keeps Scott McDougall up at night.
“The vulnerability for the community could be significant if there ever was a large event,” he says, evoking the Good Friday Earthquake of 1964, which produced a 12-foot wave that inundated Pacific County’s Seaview community 40 miles south on the Long Beach Peninsula. “The biggest threat we face from a tsunami would be from a Cascadia Subduction Zone event, which would happen right off our coast. And that would have a devastating impact up and down the length of the Long Beach Peninsula.”
In preparation for such an event, and for the increased severity and frequency of flooding accelerated by sea level rise and climate change, the City of South Bend already has identified two sites in the hills, within walking distance of downtown, where it plans to install shipping containers cached with emergency rations, water, tents, cots, and other supplies to sustain the city’s displaced population. The school district has likewise developed a contingency plan with 14 homeowners who live up in the hills, each designated as a safe haven for a particular classroom should a major flood happen during school hours. Modeling self-sufficiency during and after a calamity is a page from the PCEMA’s playbook.
“One thing we need to do as local leaders is redoubling our ability to reach out and educate the community so that they are prepared to be resilient, rather than expecting somebody to come and just remove the problem,” stresses McDougall.
“There’s not much we can do to control mother nature. We are not naïve. Should a major catastrophic event happen, it will probably not be localized, and we will not be the first to receive help. We’re anticipating a week or two weeks before we get help into the area if it’s a widespread tsunami event.”
– Julie Struck, South Bend Mayor
Natural disaster mitigation
Practically speaking, Struck and Roberts don’t have many options when it comes to fortifying their cities from future flooding, other than developing contingency plans and preaching a mantra of self-sufficiency in preparing for the worst.
“There’s not much we can do to control Mother Nature,” concludes Mayor Struck, who notes that South Bend has experienced two major flooding events since she became mayor in 2014 and recalls only one major flood prior to that since she was a child. “We are not naïve. Should a major catastrophic event happen, it will probably not be localized, and we will not be the first to receive help. We’re anticipating a week to two weeks before we get help into the area if it’s a widespread tsunami event. … Our focus must be on making sure the infrastructure, the leadership, and supplies are here to help people through those difficult days immediately following an event. Saving life and limb is most important. And we’ll deal with the houses afterward.”
As for potential infrastructure solutions to mitigate the impact of future floods, Struck says the only remedy she can imagine would be converting all of Central Avenue into a dedicated concrete stormwater channel.
“Something like that would cost mega-millions, and there’s no way we can fund it,” she says, noting that South Bend residents are already hamstrung with one of the state’s highest utility rates, shouldering a third of the $30 million cost of building an Ecology-mandated state-of-the-art shared wastewater treatment plant. (The city of Raymond is paying for the other two-thirds.) Another option would be to elevate the most flood-prone homes, but the only assistance Struck could find was a federal program for extremely low-income homeowners that would provide up to $35,000 per project, a fraction of the total required.
“So where does the rest of the money come from?” she asks. “The suggestion [of the funding agency] was that these folks take out loans, but they’re living month-to-month and that’s just not doable. A lot of them don’t even have flood insurance because they can’t afford it. So, it’s a tough situation.”
Looking back, looking ahead
In Raymond and South Bend, the ebb and flow of tides (and economic prosperity) has been a way of life since the communities were founded in the late 19th century as commercial hubs dedicated to the harvest and processing of what seemed to be a limitless bounty of old-growth timber from the Willapa Hills and fish and shellfish from Willapa Bay.
In its earliest days, Raymond, famously, was built on stilts— seemingly hovering five feet above the tidelands with pedestrians navigating a 2,900-foot-long labyrinthine network of elevated wooden sidewalks and bridges as they went about their business. For more than a century, Raymond boomed with sawmills humming 24 hours a day and filling Willapa River steamships and Northern Pacific Railway locomotives with lumber to fuel the growth of San Francisco and cities on the East Coast, as well as in South America and Hawaii.
South Bend shares a similar backstory; its early fortunes were tied to timber, but also revolved around canneries packing oysters, salmon, and crab. The boom times ended abruptly for both cities in the 1980s and ’90s, as overharvesting and environmental regulations drastically curbed logging and shuttered Raymond’s sawmills, with the last, the Pacific Hardwoods sawmill at the Port of Willapa Harbor, idling in 2017. Additionally, ocean acidification and the 2015 ban on a pesticide once used to control a species of oyster-killing shrimp have upended the fragile ecosystem of Willapa Bay, which produces 25 percent of the nation’s oysters, threatening the viability of an industry that is Pacific County’s largest employer, as well as South Bend’s identity and status as the “Oyster Capital of the World.” Just as acute has been an erosion of the local workforce in both communities as an exodus of graduates from South Bend High School who—unable to imagine a future for themselves in the Willapa—leave the area and never return.
But times are changing.
“When I went to school, everybody was taught to leave, and if you didn’t leave and you stayed here, you were considered a failure,” says Kathleen Nisbet Moncy, who graduated from South Bend High in 2003, and after earning a marine biology degree from the University of Hawaii at Hilo, returned to work at her family’s oyster farm near South Bend, where she’s now COO. “It’s all about teaching kids how to thrive in their hometowns.”
To that end, the Nisbet family’s Goose Point Oysters, which employs 90, welcomes fourth graders from the local elementary school for a daylong field trip where they work every station at the processing plant, and in the summer the company recruits and hires students from South Bend High School to harvest and process oysters. “Connecting with our schools and making sure we are building good people and giving kids the resources to be successful here I think will move us forward,” says Nisbet Moncy. “That and bringing in new technologies and equipment to further evolve the workforce locally.”
An example of just that can be found at the Port of Willapa Harbor, which soon expects to create Washington’s first Energy Innovation District on the site of the shuttered Pacific Hardwoods mill, a 40-acre parcel of port-owned land on the outskirts of Raymond.
“Sustainability is about bringing the consequences of your actions, and solutions, home to where you live. It forces you to think about everything you do to better the environment for your friends, family, and community.”
– Jim Sayce, Port Manager
Funded in part by $1.5 million the state Legislature earmarked in 2018, the pilot project will demonstrate the principles of industrial symbiosis—using waste generated by one industrial process to fuel another adjacent operation.
Initially, the Port envisioned a plant that would convert sawdust into pellets as fuel for pellet stoves, with an adjoining greenhouse that would capture excess heat from massive rotary driers to cultivate mushrooms. As the price of the imported liquefied natural gas that would fuel such a facility skyrocketed, another solution emerged. A Hoquiam-based specialty woods manufacturer proposed retooling the plant’s kilns to run on cheaper, more reliable electricity to dry high-quality alder prized by guitar makers and other artisans, and practice “total wood utilization”—packaging shavings from the milling process as bedding for animals and turning compressed dried sawdust into bio-block logs as sustainable alternatives to firewood.
“We have a site, we have buildings to rebuild and upgrade, and we’ll be turning and burning in a few months,” says Port Manager Jim Sayce, who adds that the first phase of the project expects to create 35 new local jobs, paying $20 per hour.
For Sayce, who commutes 90 miles a day to and from work and recently traded in his gas-guzzling truck for a Mustang Mach-E electric car, the plant’s conversion, coupled with his personal choice to switch from gas to electricity, was something of an epiphany.
“I’ve tied my transportation to where I live in a remarkable way, going from gas produced in Saudi Arabia or the North Slope of Alaska, to electricity generated by the Columbia River. Sustainability is about bringing the consequences of your actions, and solutions, home to where you live. It forces you to think about everything you do to better the environment for your friends, family, and community.”
Adds South Bend’s Julie Struck, “Sustainability is all about carrying on into the future. You’re going to have to deal with crises from time to time. But how you deal with them during and after they occur will make the difference between your community going forward or your community collapsing.”
Innovation and reinvention
Around the time Dee Roberts was elected as Raymond’s mayor late last year, Sayce hired the Center for Sustainable Infrastructure (CSI), an Olympia-based infrastructure innovation think tank guiding the Port’s Energy Innovation District project, to draft a blueprint for a sustainability-driven rebirth of north Pacific County’s economy. In December 2021, a steering group of 33 local leaders (including Roberts, Struck, and Nisbet Moncy) representing 24 local, regional, and state organizations, businesses, and agencies began meeting regularly to brainstorm about what a sustainability-driven reinvention of the local economy might look like. CSI released its final report, Reimagining the Willapa, in late July.
A summary of CSI’s recommendations that accompanies the report addresses an elephant in the room by redefining a loaded term: “The Willapa region has had its fair share of tensions between natural resource industries and environmental protections. As ‘sustainability’ is often used to mean environmental sustainability, local skepticism around the term is understandable. But true sustainability requires that its three components are each sustainable: economy, environment, and community. … By embracing full triple-bottom-line sustainability as beneficial, the community can leave behind outdated tensions between industry and environment, both in reality and outside perception.”
Likewise, Reimagining the Willapa contains three sustainability-driven economic development initiatives, dubbed pillars, each with prioritized action items. Action items in the first pillar—dedicated to growing long-term and sustainable natural resources jobs—include fostering innovation in the local shellfish industry and supporting the evolution of the Port of Willapa Harbor’s Energy Innovation District.
In the second pillar—supporting resilient infrastructure development—action items include meeting critical housing needs by renovating Raymond’s historic American Legion Building with 12 apartments and assistance services for veterans (an $8.5 million project with $3.5 million in funding commitments) and supporting the work of a Raymond-based nonprofit targeting vacant lots and abandoned homes for affordable housing redevelopment.
The third pillar—promoting recreation and locally made food and products—recommends fostering the 2024 completion of the 56-mile Willapa Hills State Park Trail by developing a campground at the trail’s terminus in South Bend and establishing a Willapa Creative District, including an idled processing plant that would be converted into an artisan market akin to Raymond’s Alder + Co., an always-humming shopping destination with 74 stalls showcasing the bounty of Pacific County makers and food purveyors.
In South Bend, where the rallying cry of “trail ready in 2024” has galvanized a community still recovering from the January floods, the natural-resource-focused sustainable economic development strategy outlined in Reimagining the Willapa promises to be nothing less than transformational.
“We have not made a presentation to the funding agencies at this point, but if this goes through, it could be a game changer for us,” says Mayor Struck.
Just up the river, Raymond already seems to be on the cusp of a renaissance thanks to an influx of newcomers who began arriving, and staying, even before pandemic-freed office workers from Portland and Seattle began seeking out and relocating to bucolic places like the Willapa.
“There’s an influx of young energetic people who love this community and want it to thrive and be sustainable,” notes Mayor Roberts. “They’re more interested in seeing it become an entity unto itself rather than looking for that big ticket business to come in and make us whole. We are trying to capitalize on what we already have, and not create something different that would take us away from our roots.”
For Roberts, the most critical action item in Reimagining the Willapa isn’t the trail completion, but a push to create more housing and also to install charging stations for electric vehicles. After that comes a new city hall and firehouse. Such are the ambitions of a first-term mayor. But the Raymond community believes in her (“Dee gets stuff done,” says Jeff Karnatz, a lavender farmer and 2017 transplant from Arizona who runs Alder + Co. “She has the foresight, and she knows how to move with the times.”)
How does Roberts think about her mayoral legacy? “If nothing else I’d like to see Raymond better off than it was when I stepped in.” That was the day Raymond and South Bend confronted calamity, and together persevered.