PORT ANGELES – Clallam County’s health officer will recommend Tuesday the opening of overnight camping for the county.
Dr. Allison Berry Unthank will make that recommendation to the county Board of Health as a modification to the county’s current Phase 2 in the states “Safe Start” program.
Overnight camping would normally be allowed under Phase 2. But Clallam County opted to not allow camping when it entered Phase 2 at the beginning of June. Officials wanted to wait until most of the rest of the state opened up for camping.
Unthank says that’s pretty much happened, and she’s not as worried about preventing a crush of campers from outside the area coming here.
“We recommended holding off overnight camping until the rest of the state went to phase two mainly because we didn’t want to become a big draw for folks to come out here. Now, we don’t know when the whole state is going to go to phase 2, and so now that all of the I-5 Corridor is allowing camping. So King, Pierce and Snohomish, are. I think it would be reasonable for us to allow camping as well.”
Unthank says she hopes to recommend Clallam County move to Phase Three later this month. The soonest that could happen is next week.
“So the earliest we could go to Phase 3 would be the 22nd, and so it will really take the data from that last week before then for us to know. And really, the biggest thing that would motivate that decision is keeping those case numbers low. So keeping it at a couple cases a day. We can do that a case or two would keep us in that range. But if we saw a dramatic rise in cases, five or ten a day things like that, and we couldn’t move forward until those went back down.”
Jefferson County is expected to move into Phase 3 this week.