This week some of our staff were able to visit the Woolman property and see what’s left of our office building. While much of Woolman campus was spared heavy damage, the area around our building was completely burned. Beneath the twisted metal of what was our roof, we were able to recognize a few parts of our old building; a mangled oven, the chair that sat on one of our porches, a twisted filing cabinet.
The loss of our building and everything in it has been a lot to process. However, we are beginning to recognize the opportunities for growth and change at SSI that will arise from this event. After all, the most important part of our organization, the people, are still here, and have many ideas for our recovery. There are so many scientific questions related to forest health and fire that we can now investigate by conducting studies around Woolman. We also have a chance to create a more efficient water quality monitoring program once we are able to replace the equipment we lost. These are just a few of the thoughts our staff and board have discussed over the past few days as we consider how to rebuild our organization.
All of this work will, of course, require resources and staff time to plan effectively. We have already had so many offers from our wonderful community to help us recover from this event. For this reason we launched a Go Fund Me campaign to raise funds for replacing our monitoring equipment and pay for staff time while we create a recovery plan. We are feeling so much love from our community and we could not be more grateful for the offers of support that have come in over the past few days.