A community newspaper is, by its nature, a rough draft of the history of a particular place that is laid down week after week, month after month, and year after year.

But sometimes, if you’re lucky as a journalist, and you stick with a story long enough, you get to write about how the whole thing turned out.

Such was the case at The Beachcomber this week, in our “Vashon’s low COVID rate success gets noticed,” about a new peer-reviewed study that examines why Vashon achieved a COVID rate 70 percent below King County.

The study also showed that our island had far few cases and hospitalizations than south Whidbey communities — places both demographically and geographically similar to Vashon.

So where did Vashon go right?

As it turns out, we were actually prepared for the catastrophic event of COVID — not that we had planned specifically for that prolonged public health crisis.

We’d actually planned for an earthquake.

A nonprofit, FEMA-sanctioned disaster preparedness organization, VashonBePrepared, was established in 2007 — years after islanders led by retired Brigadier General Joe Ulatoski, advocated and organized for such a group to exist.

Here on our ferry-dependent island, it seems, smart and well-connected people have always been thinking about what might happen if catastrophe struck. If the catastrophe was big enough, affecting a wide region, Ulatoski and his band of early organizers knew, Vashon would be left on its own.

But even before Ulatoski marshaled the forces that would later become the coalition of organizations making up VashonBePrepared, islanders had banded together to prepare — forming citizen corps, operating ham radios, and organizing nascent CERTs (Community Emergency Response Teams) and NEROs (Neighborhood Emergency Response Organizations).

All that training and planning, and all that community-mindedness, came into play in March of 2020 when a global health crisis arrived on our doorstep.

VashonBePrepared — and its affiliated Emergency Operations Center (EOC), CERT, NERO and Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) — sprang into high gear. It wasn’t an earthquake, but our world, here on Vashon, was shaken nonetheless, and in many ways, we were very much on our own.

Vashon was beyond fortunate that all these groups were ably led in that time by, frankly, heroic figures — Rick Wallace, Vicky De Monterey Richoux, Jan Milligan, Dr. Jim Bristow, and his MRC co-leaders — a group with 100 combined years of experience in internal medicine, pediatrics, infectious disease, pediatrics, immunology and molecular diagnostics.

We were fortunate, too, that our fire chief at the time, Charles Krimmert, stood solidly behind all these groups, serving as the Incident Commander of Vashon’s Emergency Operations Committee (EOC) and supporting its work from day one.

One community, one response.

And unified response, as it unsurprisingly turned out, was the best way to battle COVID — and the peer-reviewed study that we have detailed in our article this week proves that.

Here at The Beachcomber, we are proud that we helped play a part in the response, leaning in, from the start of the crisis, to center our coverage of COVID around the efforts of VashonBePrepared.

The organization’s saturation messaging campaign told the true news of the pandemic’s impact on Vashon— detailing current local cases and hospitalizations, risks, closures, outbreaks, mandates from the county, state and federal government, and above all else, the resources available to islanders to fight back.

All of this information belonged in the local newspaper, week after week.

Seeing the measured results of VashonBePrepared’s work during the past three three years is moving, from this vantage point. It helps us remember a time of prolonged and profound crisis in our community, and how all 11,000 of us managed to meet the challenge, one day at a time.

“We sometimes say the most important word in public health is public — and that’s what happened here,” Bristow said. “…Our neighbors pulled together as a community to take steps to protect themselves and each other. That required everyone to make personal sacrifices to keep each other safe, and our community was almost uniquely willing to do that,” he said. “Even three years later, it still amazes me.”

Correction: In the print edition of the Aug. 24 Beachcomber and a previous online version of this article, Joe Ulatowski was incorrectly identified as a retired three-star general. Ulatowski is a retired Brigadier General. We strive for accuracy and regret the error.