Playground Bouncing Back After Fire! Community, City, Volunteers in Action

Many of you were moved by the article on the Bear Creek playground fire in Medford Oregon, tragically on Valentine’s Day. We’d like to report a very positive update. It goes back to what we said in the aftermath about the fire: Rather than think about the willful disaster, city officials and community members agreed that instead they would focus on the energy that went into construction of the city’s largest play space and how to put back what was lost.

So far the process has gone swimmingly. I went down to drop off some donations for volunteers and was shocked to see how much work is already done. Perhaps the most emotional part of visiting was seeing children able to play on the usable side of the playground because the other side has already been cleared of toxic chemicals. That is wonderful to behold. To see wild kids running and swinging and cavorting next to a decimated plot is a weird juxtaposition but the kids don’t mind. And the actual rebuild will no doubt start soon.

This is real progress, at Warp speed. It’s both fortunate and unfortunate that we are getting better at disaster recovery…in this case, the fortunate effect is the speed and communication; the unfortunate part is, of course, that this un-needed destruction happened in the first place. But the important lesson is how communities can focus on going forward after disasters like this one by looking ahead, not behind. There’s plenty of time for that later.