PORT ANGELES – Clallam County Emergency Management has been wanting a new home for their Emergency Operations Center for years, and they may have finally found it at the airport.
The county is in the final stages of negotiations to occupy 15,000 sq. ft. of the building previously occupied by the Westport Yachts cabinetry facility in the Port of Port Angeles industrial park at Fairchild Airport.
Sheriff Bill Benedict met with County Commissioners Monday morning to request funding to hire local architect Bill Lindberg to draw up the plans to convert the building and provide a cost estimate. According to Benedict, this will be more than just an Emergency Operations Center.
“So we’ve got some grant requests and we’ve got some capital funding from the legislature, and this afternoon, I’m meeting with the Commissioners again on Capital facilities. So it’s going to be a joint venture with us and the city of Port Angeles. And even it looks like the Elwha Tribe wants to be involved at least in having the EOC, being a partner in that.”
The City of Port Angeles’ possible interest in the new venture would be setting up a new home for the county’s 911 emergency dispatch, or PenCom, which is managed by and housed in the police department.
Moving into an existing building will be much less expensive to taxpayers than building a new structure, and officials have been saying for some time that being near the airport could be the ideal location.
“For most of our seismic or earthquake related incidents, the airport is on solid ground, number one. Number two is, if we do have a lot of devastation, that’s where the rebuilding is going to begin. So you want your EOC there.”
The entire facility is around 100,000 sq. ft., but the county is only interested in a 15,000 sq. ft. portion, which was Westport’s administrative offices. It’s a steel building, already inherently earthquake resistant, with an open floor plan and room to expand in the future, which checks a lot of boxes for the county.
Benedict speculates the cost of converting the building and adding the necessary infrastructure for communications and computer services might be somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million, but it’s still early in the process. As far as a timeline, he hopes a lease can be in place to begin work as early as October, and possibly be operational early next year.
There’s long been a conversation about the idea of combining PenCom and Jefferson County’s 911 dispatch center, JeffCom, into one facility. We asked Benedict about that.
“First of all, PenCom is going to have to move, and I suspect that the plan is there’s enough space that we could accommodate JeffCom, but we’re going to build it, you know, big enough for them to move but they’re not involved in the discussions right now. We figure that will be a choice for them to make at some point down the line.”
Photo: Circled area is proposed site of new EOC.