After an event like the Independence Day celebration at Fort Vancouver there’s lots of cleaning up to do, and volunteers started doing just that at 7 a.m. Wednesday.
Overall, the place was pretty clean right after the event, said Toni Wise, marketing and communications manager for the Fort Vancouver National Trust. Still, because it’s a national park, crews were out there working to make it look as good as it did July 3.
“We want to leave no trace … we want it to look like nothing happened there,” Wise said.
About 50 people were on site between 7 a.m. and noon cleaning up. A group of 25 students were on hand from the Woodland School District athletics program. They get a stipend from the Trust for doing the work. The Fort Vancouver Composite Squadron Civil Air Patrol also helped clean. Additionally the providers of the portable toilets, lights, and other infrastructure were on hand dismantling and removing their equipment.
This year the celebration got back to the basics of listening to music and watching fireworks and removed some of the fringe events and features of years past. If anecdotes on attendance and behavior are any matrices, the changes didn’t seem to really matter.
Wise said on Wednesday afternoon that staff was still tabulating the number of attendees at this year’s event, but attendance seemed to be up.
“It felt like there were more people this year than last year, but that’s completely anecdotal,” she said.
Volunteers counted people throughout the day, but she said there was a “major surge” at the gates just before the fireworks went off. One of her co-workers who was counting joked that he nearly wore his thumb out trying to count everyone that lined up at the gates.
“If you looked at the crowd around 7 p.m. it looked like there was plenty of space,” she said. “But by the time of the fireworks it was packed.”
In a typical year, the event attracts about 35,000 people, but the Trust expected about 10,000 additional visitors because this year admission was free and the city’s ban on personal fireworks went into effect.
More than 300 people volunteered and 35 vendors sold food and tchotchkes and four bands performed at this year’s Independence Day at Fort Vancouver.
The festivities also included more than 10,000 fireworks. Wise said the Trust will know in the next few days exactly how many people attended, and also how many donations came in to support the fireworks displays.
The Trust, which puts on the show, used to fund it in part with revenue from fireworks stands within the city of Vancouver, but that stopped this year due to the city’s ban on personal fireworks. The Trust is now reliant on fireworks stands in unincorporated Clark County, where sales are legal, and donations from visitors.
Notably, this year’s event didn’t include kids’ activities or a beer garden. If either of those things bothered people, Wise said no one brought it up to volunteers.
“We just had a vast debrief … and nobody felt like there was a thread of negativity,” she said.
Wise also said that although lots of people turned out, the crowds were mostly well-behaved, and only one person required medical attention.
Kim Kapp, public information officer for the Vancouver Police Department, agreed. She said a few intoxicated people were removed from the park and some lost kids had to be reunited with their families, but overall, the night went smoothly.
“It was pretty mellow,” she said.
