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Grocery clerk from 100 Mile House given national award for efforts during last summer’s wildfires

‘I just think that she really cares about the community and it really showed.’
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Grocery clerk Jen Barrett with her Value Champion award in front of the 100 Mile House Safeway on Tuesday, July 17. Beth Audet photo.

A grocery clerk from the 100 Mile House Safeway has won a national award for her work during last summer’s wildfires.

Jen Barrett, who recently received her 25-year pin at the store, is one of Sobeys’ Value Champions. The grocery giant awards 25 workers across Canada every year.

“It’s kind of humbling but it’s also a little scary, because I’ve never won anything before ever and to win something to this magnitude is pretty cool,” she said.

Barrett, who lives up Horse Lake Road, was not in an evacuation area but chose to bring her family to Kamloops once 100 Mile was evacuated last summer.

She spent five days e-mailing and calling her co-workers and being the go-between for the union, making sure everyone was accounted for and knew where to get help.

After a friend who works in the 100 Mile district, Shannon Sund, called to ask how she could get into the store, Barrett said she decided to bring her family back into town to help.

“It’s just something that a person does, I believe. You know you just want to make sure that everybody’s fed,” she said.

It wasn’t until her family of four were driving back up Highway 97, as cars packed the opposite lane to evacuate, that the enormity of the situation hit her.

“You’re coming back and watching all these families leaving. They’re passing you and you’re bringing your family back into it and there’s ashes falling everywhere,” she said, eyes watering with memories.

“I think that was the first time I broke down.”

She said returning to an evacuated town was “so eerie” and compared it to an episode of M*A*S*H with helicopters and smoke.

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Barrett quickly got to work co-ordinating passes through the roadblocks so she could get in the store and start cleaning, checking temperatures and rotating inventory.

Store manager Jon Graham, who hadn’t been evacuated, joined Barrett in-store to prepare for the heavy demand of food and supplies.

“She just knew that there was people that needed the resources that we could offer and she felt that the only way that could happen was by her doing her fair share,” said Graham. “She did that plus more.”

The two of them cycled between cleaning and helping chefs or people from the district to fill shopping carts to bring to emergency responders or residents in areas cut off because of roadblocks.

“It was kind of interesting to drive through a roadblock every day to come to work,” he said.

Gradually, he said Barrett coordinated permits for more workers to enter the store and help with the efforts.

Graham said he nominated 22 of his employees for the Value Champion award for going “above and beyond” during the evacuation, emergency relief and re-opening process.

He said Barrett especially deserved the award because, “she did a lot.”

“I just think that she really cares about the community and it really showed.”

Barrett said the long hours and business actually helped her get through the stress of the wildfires.

“I had a purpose. I had something to do, whereas a lot of people sat at home and worried,” she said.

She was at the store every day for a week-and-a-half and would run in to open the store if someone called her needing more supplies.

She said the store donated roughly $60,000 during that time.

Hatty Thompson, the second assistant store manager at the Williams Lake Safeway, is also being honoured for her help during last summer’s wildfires.

Thompson won the Value Champion award for her relief efforts in Williams Lake.

Marnie Millership, her store manager, said Thompson was at the store during the evacuation to help get food out to the community and played a huge role in re-opening the store.

Millership called Thompson “emergetic, upbeat and motivating for the staff” and said she was “ecstatic” when she found out about the award.

Barrett, Thompson and the other winners around Canada are being flown to Halifax in November to be honoured at the Sobeys National Gala.


beth.audet@100milefreepress.net

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