By Pepper Fisher
OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK – Sula Jacobs, Superintendent of Olympic National Park, is the first to admit that there are very few answers to the questions everyone is asking 3 days after the beloved Hurricane Ridge Day Lodge burned to the ground on Sunday.
Jacobs, guest speaker at the Port Angeles Chamber of Commerce monthly luncheon Wednesday, opened her talk by describing the incident as an emotional one for park staff as well as visitors.
She said the scene is, and will remain, “a very active situation” as federal investigators continue combing through the rubble to determine what caused the fire. That process has no deadline, but must be completed before cleanup can begin and the site can be made safe for visitors.
Jacobs acknowledged that everyone wants some sense of a timeline for getting the road open again and getting a new lodge built, but said it’s far too early to know.
“It is not safe to be up there right now. It’s going to take us a while to make it safe. We’ve got to clean up. A lot of our systems actually flowed, literally, through that building. Right? So, radios, all of our power, all of our waste water, all of our water systems. We have a lot of systems that are down, and we can’t even start to even think through how we’re going to fix those systems, because we can’t go to the site until it’s been cleared by the investigators.”
Public Information Officer Lee Snook took a question about the exhibits that were in the building, saying everything had been removed from the building before the renovations had begun. She said the large, iconic topographical map of the Olympic Mountains is planned to be moved to the Hoh River Visitor Center.
Jacobs said she has received an outpouring of support and sympathy from the Governor and other state and federal officials, and from the public.