Many ready to help rebuild community icon

PORT ANGELES — The amount of insurance proceeds that will be paid for Dream Playground II, which was destroyed in an early morning fire Wednesday, and how people can donate to the park’s replacement are issues that were being worked out, said Corey Delikat, Port Angeles Parks and Recreation director, on Wednesday morning.

“We are still waiting for the fire investigators, who have been out here since 9 a.m.,” he said.

“Once they are done looking at the structures, we will have our building inspector look at it and see what the next steps are.”

The city has its human resources department looking into the insurance coverage and talking with the city’s insurance company, Washington City Insurance Authority, Delikat said.

“They are going through that, so we won’t know for a while. We’re still dealing with the sadness and a little bit of anger, but we’ll start this week doing that,” he said, adding he didn’t have a timeline for any of it.

“We won’t know until after the inspections, but it probably will be a complete rebuild. Maybe the zipline and one piece of climbing equipment can be salvaged,” Delikat said.

The Dream Playground Foundation will be putting out messaging pretty soon, he said, adding it will be easier to funnel the money through the foundation rather than the city.

“The next steps are looking at fundraising and grants. We have asked for help from the team from the previous project. It’s just evaluating things and figuring out the next steps,” Delikat said.

“We need to keep our chins up and get through this. The community wants to help a lot. This was a community project. It’s their heart and soul. There’s people who played on it as a kid, and now their kids played on it,” he said.

Steve Methner, president of the Dream Playground Foundation, said Wednesday morning no fundraising events are planned yet, but the group would try keeping social media and its website up to date with the latest developments.

“Now what? We take a deep breath and work through the grief and sadness in seeing this labor of love destroyed,” Methner said. “Then we put on our hardhats and pick up our shovels and figure out how to make bigger and better than before.

“It’s too soon to have a lot of feelings about it, to be honest,” Methner added. “My first inclination was to scream and kick the fence, but we just don’t know what happened here yet.”

“We already have people here talking about how we’re going to put it back together and how important it is to kids in the community, so that’s what we’re going to do,” Methner said.

The blaze is devastating, he said, but volunteers are ready to move forward.

“The whole foundation showed up already, so we already have a great team of people who care a lot,” Methner said.

The foundation raised $675,000 for Dream Playground II, almost all of which went to construction costs, Methner said.

He didn’t know how hours were donated by up to 400 volunteers on the project, but it was many thousands, he said.

“The play surface had to be installed by a professional contractor, but the rest was done by volunteers,” Methner said. “Definitely the value of the volunteer hours is going to be a pretty staggering number.”

A volunteer hour was considered to be worth $34.87 in 2021, according to Independent Sector, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., and that is the primary source for state and national data on the value of volunteer time.

The project to replace the original Dream Playground, which was built in September 2002 but razed in March 2021 amid safety and maintenance concerns, started in July 2021 and lasted six days before a historic “heat dome” made conditions impossible for many volunteers to continue, Methner said. So it was completed in August, he said.

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Reporter Brian Gawley can be reached at brian.gawley@peninsuladailynews.com.