VANCOUVER—As communities across the country shut down businesses and tell people to stay home to prevent the spread of the pandemic coronavirus, one tiny American town is getting ready to be cut off from the rest of the country to which it belongs.

It’s just past lunchtime at the Point Roberts Community Centre and volunteer co-ordinator Madeleine Anderson is cleaning up the local lunch-by-donation ritual.

Only this time, instead of serving food to communal tables as usual, she and a team of volunteers handed out fish and potatoes through car windows to maintain the social distance required by the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.

“Seeya Roger, thanks for everything and let me know what my bill is,” Anderson is heard saying through the phone Friday afternoon, bidding goodbye to the chef.

It’s not unusual to see the 1,200-person community band together, especially in times of uncertainty and turbulence, Anderson said.

After all, Point Roberts is something of a geographic aberration. A peninsula point just south of the 49th parallel, it’s located in the United States, but only accessible by land through Canada.

That means when border restrictions between Canada and the U.S. apply Friday at midnight, Point Roberts residents will be confined in an area about the size of Vancouver’s airport, except for “essential” travel.

Groceries, prescriptions, and gas are all available in town, but getting clothes and building supplies, as well as high school education, requires the international crossing.

“We have federally controlled borders, so it’s a gated community, we like to say,” Anderson joked.

That gate, usually no more than a minor inconvenience to residents of the town, many of whom have dual citizenship between Canada and the U.S., will be a lot less porous after Friday night.

Canadian and American officials Wednesday announced a mutual deal to restrict travel across their shared border in an effort to stem the spread of COVID-19.

That means no one in, no one out of Point Roberts, except those providing goods and essential services.

“It was a little bit of an echo of 9/11; we didn’t know what was going to happen then either,” Anderson said.

The world’s longest unguarded border stayed open after that tragic event.

Not so during the COVID-19 crisis.

The restrictions will be in place indefinitely.

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For Christopher Carleton, the Whatcom County Fire Chief for Point Roberts, said the definition of what is considered “essential” is the key concern for the town.

He’s in charge of Point Roberts’ response to COVID-19 and he’s been assured by both American and Canadian border officials that certain necessities will be allowed to flow once the restrictions kick in.

Emergency vehicles will be allowed to cross the border , a necessity in a town with only one medical clinic open three days a week.

Things get murkier with other kinds of crossings. On the top of Carleton’s mind are the 28 Canadian volunteer fire fighters that form most of his emergency response team (six are locals and nine cross two borders to get to Point Roberts from other areas of Whatcom County).

“Our demographics within Point Roberts being of the sort that we don’t have a lot of young people who live there, we (rely) on the young men and women that come over from Canada,” Carleton said.

He issued a fire ban while the pandemic continues, to keep emergency responders available.

“That would be a devastating impact to, not only our agency, but also to outreach to our community members,” Carleton said.

Whatcom County executive Satpal Sidhu said he’s heartened that both Canadian and U.S. border services are coming to the table with the county with an eye to making sure Point Roberts has what it needs to weather the COVID-19 crisis.

“It has been a community cut off …for a couple of centuries,” Sidhu said.

So residents have become highly accustomed to crossing customs.

“Even if someone needs a plumber or electrician, they can’t just call someone in Delta or Tswassen, British Columbia,” he said. “During normal circumstances, it’s not that difficult, but in this kind of crisis it is a unique problem for us.”

Making sure volunteer fire fighters and emergency responders can get to Point Roberts is a priority, but Sidhu said there are likely to be other types as of yet undetermined trips that may become essential depending on how long the crisis endures.

In the meantime, the community, like so many others around the world, is making do during a tough time. Anderson, for example, had to find a step-in cook for the lunch program, because the regular chef crosses the border.

“What I’m seeing now is people extending more hands, more offers of assistance, taking note of their neighbours while maintaining their own safety,” Carleton said. “I guess people are doing even more now than they do on a regular basis.”

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