City’s 6th emergency water station gets a grand opening

The YMCA, EWEB, and Eugene Parks officially open the city’s newest emergency water station. At the ribbon-cutting Sept. 28:

Jenny Demaris (EWEB): Thank you so much for joining us today at our grand opening for the Amazon Park Emergency Water Station. I am very pleased to be here today. I’m Jenny Demaris, part of the Resilience and Emergency Management team of EWEB, and I have the pleasure of introducing our two speakers today, our commissioner of EWEB, John Barofsky, and Brian Steffen from YMCA.

John Barofsky (EWEB commissioner): Thank you. As she said, my name is John Barofsky. I am the EWEB commissioner for Ward 2 and 3, which is the South Eugene area here. And I’d like to thank Brian for hosting us here and his beautiful new facilities.

[00:00:51] I’m thrilled to be here to celebrate the inauguration of EWEB’s sixth emergency water station here at Amazon Park. We’re fortunate here in Eugene to have access to some of the highest quality and most abundant water resources in the world, but our access to those resources could be cut off by a natural disaster like an earthquake that could damage the pipelines that deliver it to the the homes.

[00:01:16] These emergency water stations will serve as a temporary safety net for the community to come and get water after an emergency while regular service is being restored.

[00:01:28] I want to give a hearty thanks to our partners at the YMCA and the city of Eugene for making the station possible. By building the station on a city park and tying into the YMCA’s power resources, we were able to reduce the project costs significantly for the ratepayers. It is this kind of teamwork that exemplifies Eugene’s collaborative spirit and makes me so proud to be part of this community.

[00:01:57] These practice events are critical to us getting prepared to spring into in case of an emergency. You can also get prepared at home by making a plan and building an emergency supply kit.

[00:02:10] Scan the QR code that is provided here with the jugs and everything and that will give you more. Again, thanks for coming out and helping us support resiliency in our community and now I will hand it off.

[00:02:27] Brian Steffen (YMCA): Thank you, welcome! We’re so happy that you’re here at the YMCA and at the EWEB emergency water station this morning. We have a busy morning here at the park.

[00:02:38] And so everybody, thank you for walking or biking or coming here and however you got here to the Y this morning. At the Y, one of the things that we’re very focused on is what we call social responsibility.

[00:02:52] And we believe that a socially responsible organization supports projects just like this. It supports emergency preparedness, supports community collaboration and partnership.

[00:03:05] We’re so grateful to be working with EWEB and the partnership that they’ve provided has just been remarkable. Their communication, their thoughtfulness, the way that they’ve helped this become a reality.

[00:03:18] One of the things that we have focused on with the new YMCA is the lessons we learned during the COVID pandemic. And during that pandemic, we saw the community reaching out to the Y asking us to help in a variety of ways. And we took that learning and paused the design of the new Y and we reflected on what did we learn that we should prepare for over the next 100 years.

[00:03:46] And of course we thought about significant events like earthquakes. And so the new Y is built to the highest seismic standards. That means it’s designed like a hospital. So it’s immediately usable after a significant earthquake. And we thought that that might be theoretical, that we would maybe they use its generators and emergency power.

[00:04:11] And then right after it opened, we had the ice storm and people lost power. And we had people showering at the Y, charging phones, having a cup of coffee. And so that Y is designed to be a shelter and a triage in an emergency with commercial kitchens and lots of showers and the ability to house people if there’s a true emergency.

[00:04:33] Of course, water is critical and so we were thrilled when EWEB approached us about building the emergency water station right next to our property so that we could connect the two buildings and truly collaborate in a way that would help the community in a time of need.

[00:04:52] We’ve also trained up Y leaders to be prepared to use this water station. I think we have them here. So we have Holly Kris-Anderson, she’s our VP of operational excellence, and Kim Miller is our health and wellness director and somewhere around here is Victor, I don’t see Victor Tilghman, he’s our associate aquatics director.

[00:05:14] So we’re training our staff up, we’re preparing our facility. In addition, we’re also communicating to our members the Y’s commitment in alignment with EWEB’s Pledge to Prepare and that’s a tool that EWEB provides where they’ll send emails out to individuals who sign up for that communication and each month EWEB will share ideas around how individuals slowly and methodically can prepare their home and their household to navigate after an emergency.

[00:05:46] These types of facilities are critical, but we know that the most important preparation is what we do individually within our own homes. We saw that during the pandemic, didn’t we, where you would think that something as easy as toilet paper would be readily available, and we quickly learned that we all wished we had a stockpile of that.

[00:06:09] And so you can imagine food and medicine and water in an emergency, and how helpful it would be to have, you know, multiple weeks of preparedness right at home, and that’s what EWEB helps you do through their ‘Pledge to Prepare’ program. So we’re grateful to have you here today and to cut the ribbon and welcome you into EWEB’s new emergency water station. Thank you.

[00:06:36] Jenny Demaris: Great. Thank you both very much. And now we will have the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

[00:06:50] John Barofsky (EWEB commissioner): Let’s count it down. Three, two, one.

[00:07:00] John Q: A partnership helps make the community more resilient, with a demonstration of the new emergency water station behind the YMCA in Amazon Park.

Image: Jenny Demaris, John Barofsky, and Brian Steffen team up on the ribbon-cutting during the grand opening of the Amazon Park emergency water station Sept. 28.