Three Creeks Post Acute: Food Safety Immediate Jeopardy - WA
The outage started at 5:10 AM and lasted until 3:30 PM. For more than ten hours, the facility's refrigerators and freezer ran on nothing. Staff were told to keep the appliance doors closed. Nobody took a single food temperature the entire time.
The dietary manager didn't arrive until 2:00 PM, about ninety minutes before power was restored. They did not check temperatures when they got there. They did not check when the power came back on. What they knew, they knew from a text: Staff D had messaged them that one refrigerator had reached 50 degrees Fahrenheit and that there was milk inside.
The dietary manager served the milk for dinner that night. They served it again for breakfast the next morning.
When inspectors arrived on December 18, they found containers of milk in that refrigerator with dates written on them showing the milk had been there since before December 16. The temperature log for December 17 had been lined through in red marker. Under the section asking what had been done about an out-of-range temperature, someone had written "OO service." The same red line ran through the December 17 entry on the second refrigerator's log, with the same notation. The freezer log showed a temperature of negative 10 degrees Fahrenheit for that morning, also lined out in red, also marked "OO service."
No food was thrown away after the outage. The dietary manager told inspectors they believed the second refrigerator was fine because its door had stayed closed, and that the freezer items appeared frozen solid. They said they knew what was in the refrigerators because they had dated everything when it came in.
The administrator in training, interviewed that same morning, told inspectors the generator was old and had never been capable of powering the kitchen or providing heat. They said a new generator had been on the facility's purchase list since a change in ownership in June 2025. Six months later, it still hadn't been bought.
At 1:00 PM on December 18, the administrator told inspectors they had not known, until that conversation, that the refrigerator temperature had exceeded 45 degrees on December 17, or that no food had been discarded afterward.
The Director of Nursing said staff would monitor residents for signs of foodborne illness. When inspectors returned on December 22, the Director of Nursing reported that all residents present on December 17 had been monitored and no concerns had been found.
CMS rated the violation as immediate jeopardy, the most serious level of harm in the federal inspection system, affecting many residents.
The inspection report does not say how many residents ate dinner on December 17 or breakfast on December 18. It does not name anyone who became sick. What it records is a dietary manager who received a text message saying a refrigerator holding milk had reached 50 degrees, drove to work, finished their shift, and sent that milk to the dining room twice before a single inspector asked a single question about it.
The generator that might have prevented all of it was still on a list somewhere.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Three Creeks Post Acute from 2025-12-22 including all violations, facility responses, and corrective action plans.
Download the official CMS inspection PDF from Medicare.gov
Additional Resources
Data source: This article is based on inspection data downloaded directly from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) via Medicare.gov. CMS releases inspection reports in bulk; we publish the findings as documented by state surveyors in the official Form CMS-2567 Statement of Deficiencies.
Plan of correction: The CMS report we receive does not include the facility's plan of correction. Facilities submit plans of correction separately to state survey agencies and those responses may not be reflected in CMS data at the time of publication. The absence of a plan of correction in our data does not mean one was not filed. Readers who want information about corrective steps taken are encouraged to contact the facility directly or their state survey agency.
Corrections may have occurred: Inspection reports reflect conditions observed on the date of the survey. Facilities may have implemented corrections, staffing changes, additional training, or other remediation since the report was issued. We report what CMS provides and encourage readers to seek current information from the facility.
Editorial process: Inspection findings are extracted from CMS source documents and synthesized using AI, reviewed for factual accuracy against the original report by our editorial team.
Professional review: All content reviewed by Christopher F. Nesbitt, Sr., NH EMT & BU-trained Paralegal.
Last verified: September 21, 2026 · Our methodology
Three Creeks Post Acute in PULLMAN, WA was cited for immediate jeopardy violations during a health inspection on December 22, 2025.
The outage started at 5:10 AM and lasted until 3:30 PM.
Health inspections identify deficiencies that facilities must correct. Violations range from minor documentation issues to serious safety concerns. Review the full report below for specific details and facility response.