Negra and Jody are two out of our seven residents that are more relaxers and not as much rough-and-tumble players, like Foxie or Missy. So, it’s a nice treat getting to see them playing with anyone—and even more so with each other!
northwest
Slurping the Day Away
Last week, volunteer Connie was here when it was about 100 degrees and we were working on ways to keep the chimps hydrated. It was a bigger concern than normal since the fire had caused a not-pleasant burned rubber smell to the well water, making us turn the chimps’ drinking spigots off. Staff decided to fill up plastic bins with bottled water and a bit of gatorade, put them in front of the fencing and give the chimps big tubes to drink out of. This resulted in a bunch of tubes and other various things that the chimps (mostly Jamie) had put in the water. So, enter Connie’s brilliance. She made some holes in the lid for the bin that the tubes just fit through.
Behold:
The awful burned smell in the water is not present any longer, but we’re waiting to get an all clear after sending a sample to the health department, so I used Connie’s invention today to provide a little afternoon refreshment.
Here’s Missy drinking:
The photo below is Annie, Jody and Foxie (left to right)
Foxie (pictured below) REALLY slurps while she’s drinking, as you may recall from this video from a few months ago
Another Quiet Day
Today, Burrito was checking out his reflection in a plastic mirror.
Foxie enjoyed some bottled water (we’re still waiting on tests of our well water since it was contaminated during the fire).
Missy and Annie spent some time grooming. Missy likes to groom herself with a tool – in this case she ripped a splinter from a log. If you look closely you can even see some dandruff falling.
Annie likes to pick Missy’s nose. Missy tolerates it but doesn’t seem to enjoy it. I don’t blame her – Annie doesn’t bite her nails down like the other chimps do.
Fun ways to help
In addition to making direct donations to the sanctuary and sending us gift cards to Safeway, Lowes, Costco, and Home Depot, there are a few other ways that you can help the sanctuary.
1) Cruise Lake Washington, September 15 at noon. We have just a handful of spaces still available for this exclusive cruise. Spend a few hours seeing the sights and celebrity homes on Lake Washington, enjoy yummy food and drink, and meet some of the staff and board of the sanctuary. It’s a $250 donation per person, and 100% of that goes straight to the chimps because our supporter Denny Green is donating all the costs. Please contact [email protected] if you’d like to attend or need more information.
2) Buy prints of watercolors of Missy and Negra painted by Margaret Parkinson. Margaret is selling a select number of matted 8×10″prints of the two paintings below for $100 each, with ALL of the money going to the sanctuary. She is also offering the original of the Negra watercolor. It is 11×14″ on paper and is matted and framed for $400. You can email Margaret at [email protected] if you’re interested in owning one of these beautiful prints. It is Missy’s birthday today, so you can help us celebrate her day by buying a print of her!
3) Donate to the Sanctuary Century Bike Ride. The Sanctuary Century is a 100 mile (century) bike ride fundraiser in Portland, Oregon to benefit Out To Pasture Farm Sanctuary, Hope Animal Sanctuary, and us – Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest. Like the Sanctuary Century page on Facebook and donate directly on their Firstgiving page.
Thanks for all of your support!
The story of the fire, part 4
See the Story of the Fire Part 1 here
As the fire overtook the sanctuary grounds, we closed the doors and windows of the chimp house and waited. There was nothing more we could do.
Inside the building, you could hear a pin drop. Normally, when chimpanzees sense danger, they are anything but quiet. Alarm calls erupt to alert other chimpanzees of the threat. Males try to demonstrate their power in the face of danger by banging on the enclosures and pant-hooting. As the level of fear rises, the alarms calls evolve into screams. But during the fire, the Cle Elum Seven were completely silent.
We’ve noticed in the past that chimpanzees react differently to threats that they don’t quite understand. Chimps know what to do when they see a snake – either kill it or get out of its way. But how could they understand a fire like this? They acted similarly when they first arrived at the sanctuary. Chimpanzee caregivers jokingly refer to the brief period following a chimp’s arrival as the “honeymoon period.” Until they are comfortable in their new home, these normally loud and boisterous animals lay low and keep quiet. Perhaps the best thing you can do when you have no control is to try not to stand out.
The scene outside of the chimp house was surreal and most of the chimps crowded around the windows to watch. Foxie stayed near me. She didn’t look frightened, but she seemed to want a little bit of reassurance amidst the uncertainty. I was certainly frightened, but the firefighters were a reassuring presence, and not just because of their ability to protect us. From what I could see, they looked at ease in their position around the facility. I figured that if they felt safe, so should I. Familiar faces helped too – one of the firefighters was Calvin Beedle, our friend and excavator who did the digging for the chimp house and Young’s Hill.
After a couple of hours, the main fire made its way to the north and east of us and continued to burn out of control. A smaller, less intense grass fire slowly made its way around the chimp house, circling back to the driveway. By this time the sanctuary and our neighbors’ properties were a green island in the midst of thousands of acres of black. The air immediately around the chimp house had mostly cleared and it was safe to emerge and assess the damage. The rest of the staff returned to the sanctuary with water and food, and the chimps were able to have their dinner. It’s an odd feeling to serve dinner while the sanctuary is on fire.
The fires around the sanctuary burned until 2 a.m., with the occasional tree “torching” and providing a brief glimpse of the firefighters that continued to work in the dark. That night, with the sanctuary residence damaged and the threat of flare-ups all around us, Diana and I slept in the chimp house…or at least tried to. The sound of the fire engines idling just outside gave us some peace of mind.
In the morning, the chimps were intrigued by the makeshift camp set up in their kitchen, but more than anything, they seemed to wonder why we hadn’t started making their smoothies yet.
Why we stayed
Since the fire on Monday, many people have asked why we didn’t evacuate the chimpanzees. It’s a good question, and instead of answering everyone individually I thought I’d share an answer that I gave in the comments section of a previous blog post.
To preface, I should say that we certainly took this fire seriously. As the fire approached the sanctuary, firefighters parked their engines around our property and prepared to protect our buildings and those of our neighbors. At that time we were encouraged to evacuate. Diana and I packed up our dog and two cats and Diana drove them to safety. But evacuating chimpanzees is much different than evacuating dogs and cats, or even livestock. Hopefully this post will shed a little light on our decision to ride out the fire as best we could:
Let me start by saying that we are fortunate, as a relatively small sanctuary, to even be able to consider evacuating the chimps. For some of the larger sanctuaries, rapid evacuation would be out of the question for all but a handful of the residents.
Still, evacuating chimpanzees safely is something that takes time, no matter what your situation is. The chimps must first be moved to an area of the building that would allow you to connect a transfer cage or, alternatively, an area that would provide a safe environment for anesthesia. At CSNW, this area is a series of four smaller interconnected rooms that we call the Front Rooms. After the chimps are shifted, transfer cages must be moved from our storage area behind the barn to the chimp facility. The chimps that are cooperative may be loaded into transfer cages one at a time without anesthesia. Those who are not cooperative (most if not all of them) must be manually injected or darted with an anesthetic. Chemical anesthetics take up to ten minutes to take effect and the chimps must be isolated and darted individually so that one chimpanzee is not waking up while you are going in to remove another. After all the chimps are loaded into transfer cages, the cages must be loaded into a trailer and secured (if the chimps are anesthetized the cages can be loaded and secured beforehand). Typically, the transport truck would not leave until all the chimpanzees on board have recovered from anesthesia, so that a medical emergency (like respiratory depression) does not occur on the road, but in the face of a dire emergency this protocol could be ignored.
While doing all of this you would need to weigh the risk of transporting them against the risks of staying. If the fire overtook the sanctuary while the trailer was still in the driveway, the chimps would be at even greater risk. Considering that we had less than an hour’s notice before the fire overtook the property, there is no way that I would have attempted to move them.
Some emergencies cannot be avoided. In these cases, proper planning, construction, and maintenance are the only things that will help. Sanctuaries in the southeast must be prepared for hurricanes, those in the plains states must be prepared for tornadoes, and those on the west coast must be built to withstand earthquakes. For CSNW, wildfires were part of the planning process when Keith and the original Board of Directors were designing the facility. In addition, the county requires a plan for “defensible spaceâ€, which is the area around the building that slows or impedes the fire and provides a safe space for firefighters to work in.
The chimp facility is built mostly of concrete, with cementitious siding and a metal roof above the chimps. The exterior is designed to withstand brush fires and stray sparks. Inside the chimp areas there is very little in the way of combustible material. Still, nothing is 100% fire proof, so our fire plan includes a scenario where the interior of the building would be overtaken by smoke or flames. In this case, we couldn’t let the chimps run free because it would endanger the lives of the men and women working to protect the sanctuary. However, we would let them back out into the greenhouse, which would allow them some movement away from an interior fire and some chance to avoid the smoke that would accumulate inside the closed building.
This was the day that we hoped would never happen, but given where we are located, we knew it could. The chimp facility survived due to the firefighters’ efforts, smart planning, good building codes, and a little bit of good fortune. Relocating the chimps to a safe location would have been great, but it would not have been possible in such a short amount of time.
In the coming weeks we will be analyzing our response and determining what went well and what we could have done better. We will undoubtedly be exploring new protocols and equipment based on what we experienced in our real life trial by fire that could help us be even better prepared for future emergencies.
The story of the fire part 1
It’s difficult to know just what to do right now. Things still feel overwhelming, but are slowly getting back to normal. Soon we’ll be able to sit down and talk about how we can be even more prepared for future emergencies – equipment we might need, etc. In the meantime, I felt that it was important to document what happened while it was still fresh in our minds. So, here goes part one:
Monday started out like any other summer day in Cle Elum. It was hot and windy. Jackie and Elizabeth were working in the chimp house. They were planning on using an exciting new donation – a snow cone maker – to make a special treat for the chimps during the peak of the heat in the afternoon.
J.B. and I had a day off, and I slept in. We live in the caregiver house on the sanctuary grounds, and we were planning on doing an easy hike in the afternoon. I was taking my time, making us later than planned (very typical). We finally let Jackie and Elizabeth know we were leaving the property and got into the car to drive to the trail head around 1:00. We smelled smoke, as though there was a brush fire close by, and we questioned (ok, cursed) why anyone would be burning this time of year under the dry and windy conditions.
When we reached the Taylor Bridge construction area to the west of the sanctuary grounds a couple of minutes later, we saw a flame under the half-reconstructed bridge. There were no fire crews. We pulled over and got out of the car. There was a construction crew member trying to shovel dirt on the fire and other crew members running around moving things out of the way. Another car pulled over near us and someone got out and was taking photos. The fire was quickly getting out of hand. I figured there would be a fire truck any minute and it would be all over. J.B. was clearly worried.
We turned the car around, drove a little ways back towards the sanctuary property, and pulled over again. We heard sirens approaching, and saw the fire engulf a tree, spreading flames many feet into the air. We were less than a mile from the chimp house. I was starting to get worried, but still thought things could be handled quickly with a fire truck. J.B. had entered a new state of worry and began implementing our emergency protocols. He called Elizabeth at the chimp house and told her the situation. He said she needed to bring the chimps into the building, which was designed to be fire-resistant, and close all of the doors and windows to seal out smoke, then she and Jackie should both start watering the grounds outside of the building. Then he called Sarah to let her know what was happening. She was at home in Roslyn, a town about 15 miles away.
We got back in the car and headed to the property as J.B. called our neighbors on both sides to warn them about the fire that was coming our way.
When we got home a minute later, we decided I would prepare to get our dog Honey B and two cats, Peanut and Lou Lou, out of the house and J.B. would begin to water down the cedar shake roof of the house, then we’d go to the chimp house and help Jackie and Elizabeth, who had quickly gotten the chimps secured in the building and had the hoses out. I got the two cat carriers out from the garage and put them, along with Honey B’s leash, in the bathroom of the house and then went to the chimp house, where I joined in the watering of the grounds outside of the building. I reassured Elizabeth that it was all just a precaution and everything would be fine.
The smell of the smoke was getting stronger and we could see it rise above the trees. The wind was blowing northeast about 30 miles an hour. My sense of time was already becoming distorted, but it seemed like just minutes later when we saw a fire truck and a water tanker pull into our neighbor’s property to the west, about 1,000 feet away. Then we saw the ridge above his property in flames…
Above photo: the flames on the ridge above our neighbor’s property
I am going to leave things here for now, but will continue the story soon. I don’t mean to leave it at a dramatic moment – I just want to get away from the computer and go say hello to the chimps. Luckily, you know it all ends with no one getting harmed.
Everyone in the path of the fire has their own story, some are nothing less than tragic. We encourage you to not only support the sanctuary’s road to recovery, but also reach out to help with donations to others in the area. We’ll be posting soon about how to do that.
UPDATE: Read Part 2
