VASHON ISLAND — Jan Staehli didn’t sign up to deliver mail. She stays busy enough managing the Vashon Country Store and Farm.
But the U.S. Postal Service has been so understaffed and overwhelmed on the island recently that Staehli can’t count on regular deliveries for the route that includes her store, which manages mailboxes for about 150 residents. During the holiday season, she said, unsorted piles of packages were stuck behind Vashon’s post office, sitting on pallets in the rain.
So Staehli and her employees now make daily car trips down a stretch of highway to the post office, where they knock on the back door and load up their trunks. They bring the mail back to the store to sort themselves.
“We’ve become the de facto post office,” the store manager said with a sigh last month. “We’re not set up for this.”
The Postal Service’s staffing challenges are particularly acute on Vashon, which is hard to commute to and where housing is scarce. “USPS brings in off-island workers to help deliver mail” read a November headline in the Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber, which has covered the situation extensively. Even the Vashon Island School District has had trouble getting its mail.
But similar problems are affecting communities across the Puget Sound region, from Wallingford in Seattle to Maple Valley in the suburbs, with the Postal Service hoping to fill as many as 1,000 jobs in Washington in the coming months. The crunch is forcing exhausted mail carriers to work deep into...
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