Volunteers collect more than 150 tons over the weekend
Food continues to bolster the 25th annual Walk & Knock effort and the largess should top 150 tons, Joe Pauletto said Sunday.
Pauletto, a retired construction engineer, surveyed 8,900 boxes of food in a giant warehouse and said, “I’m really proud of our community in this exceptional time of need.”
Hundreds of volunteers walked the streets and roads of Clark County on Saturday to pick up bags of food left at doorsteps.
And while the winners are the hungry, Pauletto, president of Walk & Knock and a Battle Ground Lions Club member, said he could provide numbers to show the most generous areas of the county.
There are 10 spots where semi-trailers take food to the warehouse.
The area with the biggest haul was the east Vancouver parking lot at 136th Avenue and Mill Plain Boulevard with 18.7 tons. Second place was Camas-Washougal with 16.4 tons and third place was the Salmon Creek hub at 134th Avenue and Highway 99 with 16 tons.
Pauletto said this year’s total should show a 12 percent gain from last year’s effort.
The record for food collected by Inter-Service Walk & Knock was set at 155 tons in 2002.
At 3:30 Sunday afternoon, Mike Nelsen and Jeff Fish of the Hazel Dell Lions Club brought in an SUV stuffed with food left at McDonald’s restaurants and from the greater Salmon Creek area.
Fish said his late father, Bill Fish of Hazel Dell, was one of the Lions who helped start Walk & Knock a quarter century ago. He said that makes the first Saturday in December all the more meaningful.
Nelsen said clear weather this weekend was appreciated because, “Two years ago, it snowed on us.”
You learn a little bit about human nature in Walk & Knock, said Susie Rawson, vice president of the event.
“Some of the needy are the most generous,” she said.
The food is stored at a warehouse provided by the Port of Vancouver and will be distributed this week to 15 members of the Clark County Food Bank Coalition. Officials say the number of households receiving food boxes has gone from 91,354 in fiscal 2007, to 94,599 in 2008, to 108,806 in 2009.
“We’re now feeding 30,000 people a month,” Pauletto said.
But the need goes on as Pauletto said the Walk & Knock food might last little more than a month.
