Coastal Community Action Program leadership has secured a new temporary location to house its programs and plans to be up and running Wednesday morning in the old Seafirst bank building at the intersection of Market and Broadway in Aberdeen.
“We are working real hard right now trying to get the office open by Wednesday morning, and if we can we may not be fully operational but we will be up and running to serve our most vulnerable clients,” the program’s CEO Craig Dublanko said Monday morning.
The former offices were housed in the old Aberdeen Armory building, which was destroyed by fire Saturday morning.
Coastal Community Action Program offers many services to the elderly and low income citizens. The kitchen in the Senior Center was also used to prepare food for the local Meals on Wheels program.
“The nutrition program that operates out of the senior center is one of our programs,” said Dublanko. On Monday, meals were being prepared at the Hoquiam Senior Center, and the program is looking at two additional sites to continue offering the meals.
Other services include transportation, employment and housing assistance.
In one bright spot after Saturday’s tragedy, Dublanko said firefighters worked with the program’s employees who had rallied to the scene to recover critical backup files and documents.
“A lot of paper files got destroyed, but we had three servers with a lot of data on them, and other files were stored off-site or in ‘the cloud,’” he said. “We were able to recover the three servers and they are still operational, so the data on the servers and in ‘the cloud’ are all good. All things considered we had minimal records loss.”
The City of Aberdeen owns the Armory building. Coastal Community Action Program had insurance on the contents of the offices, but Dublanko said it could take some time to discover how large a financial hit is facing the program, which relies heavily on federal, state and local funding to provide its services.
Monday morning Dublanko and other staff were already in the new location, “working on getting some of the systems up now so we can be ready to go” Wednesday morning. The program will operate primarily out of the lobby area of the old bank, but there are other portions of the building the program can use as well.
