143rd YEAR, No. 40
TUESDAY, AUGUST 25, 2015
ONE DOLLAR
OFF
THE
MAP
County agencies
work to challenge
FEMA À ood maps
By ERICK BENGEL
The Daily Astorian
Joshua Bessex/The Daily Astorian
Tiffany Boothe, the administrative assistant at the Seaside Aquarium, left, and research assistant Dalin D’Alessandro, right, perform a
necropsy on a sea lion corpse that washed ashore on a Seaside beach in August .
SEAL.S.I.
MARINE SCENE
INVESTIGATION
Strandings bring
out experts,
volunteers
See MAPS, Page 10A
GMO
debate a
‘wicked’
problem
By McKINLEY SMITH
The Daily Astorian
W
hen they received the call
for a sea lion trapped in a
net, Keith Chandler and
Tiffany Boothe scrambled to brain-
storm how to safely free a trapped
animal weighing upward of a hundred
pounds. During the car ride to the
scene, they strategized.
“We geared up everything we could
think of to help us corral this thing,”
Chandler said.
But their patient wasn’t at all what they expect-
ed. The animal at the beach was a fur seal, not a sea
lion, and it was no colossus — it was a baby. They
cut away the netting and the fur seal swam away.
“We get up there, it’s about the size of a dachs-
hund, maybe a little bigger — it’s just a little guy!
So it was really easy to deal with it,” Chandler said.
“That was gratifying to know that, right then, he
wouldn’t have lived if we hadn’t have done that.”
Between 2001 and 2009, the National Ocean-
ic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries re-
corded 588 cetacean strandings in the Northwest.
Cetaceans are whales, dolphins and porpoises. In
that region during the same period, 5,193 pinni-
peds — seals, sea lions and walruses — were also
stranded.
Chandler, manager of the Seaside Aquarium, is
the eyes and ears of the Oregon Marine Mammal
Stranding Network on the N orth C oast. He works in
conjunction with Deborah Duf¿ eld, a professor of
biology at Portland State University who heads up
the network in their territory, which stretches from
WARRENTON — Five Clatsop
County agencies looking to chal-
lenge the Federal Emergency Man-
agement Agency’s preliminary À ood
maps of the Columbia River believe
that more work is needed to correct
FEMA’s data and draw more accu-
rate maps.
As part of an intergovernmental
agreement, the cities of Warrenton
and Astoria, Clatsop County, the
Port of Astoria and Diking District
No. 9 have agreed to share the costs
of an in-depth analysis and technical
review of FEMA’s draft À ood maps
for the North Coast.
The ¿ ve parties are acting with
some urgency: If FEMA’s prelimi-
nary À ood maps are allowed to stand
and become the of¿ cial À ood maps
of the North Coast, riverfront prop-
erty owners may be forced to pay
thousands of dollars in À ood insur-
ance that they do not need and, his-
torically, have not needed — all be-
cause FEMA miscalculated the À ood
risk along the river.
By ERIC MORTENSON
EO Media Group
Julia Parish, executive
director of the University
of Washington’s Coastal
Observation and Seabird
Survey Team, said reports
of dead common murres
spiked about a month ago.
ST. LOUIS — The national debate
over labeling food that contains geneti-
cally modi¿ ed organisms is a “wicked”
problem that cannot be solved or arbi-
trated by science, an Iowa State Univer-
sity sociology professor said.
Carmen Bain, speaking in July to 20
journalists attending the National Press
Foundation’s “Food, From Farm to Ta-
ble” fellowship in St. Louis, said GMO
labeling is inherently a political and so-
cial issue. Science is either ignored or
embraced in the debate, depending on
which side it appears to substantiate.
Bain has an unusual vantage point
in the argument. Although not a crop
scientist or biologist, she is part of an
interdisciplinary team at Iowa State that
is developing new transgenic soybean
cultivars. Her role is to study the issues
surrounding consumer, business and
social acceptance of GMOs.
The work has led her to conclude
GMOs and GMO labeling are “proxy”
issues for broader political, economic
and ethical concerns such as pesticides,
sustainability and corporate control of
agriculture. And for some GMO oppo-
nents, labeling is a matter of political
opportunism, she said.
“Many of them had other issues, but
GMOs resonates with a broader public,
and they want to take advantage of it,”
Bain said.
Anti-GMO activists frame the is-
sue in “rights-based language” such as
choice and transparency, which “reso-
nates with key American values, cultur-
al norms and trends,” Bain said.
They are having some success be-
cause consumers want their purchases
to align with their values, she said, and
consumption becomes political practice
as a result.
Bain’s remarks came as the U.S.
House of Representatives passed a bill
that prohibits state and local govern-
ments from enacting their own man-
datory GMO labeling laws but allows
creation of a USDA-certi¿ ed voluntary
national standard. The bill, H.R. 1599,
passed with bi-partisan support, 275-
150, but faces an uncertain reception in
the Senate.
See BIRDS, Page 7A
See GMO, Page 7A
Joshua Bessex/The Daily Astorian
Portland State University research assistant Dalin D’Alessandro packs up samples after
perfor ing a necropsy on a s ea l ion corpse.
Tillamook to the L ong B each, Wash., P eninsula and
along the Columbia River to just upriver from Port-
land . Boothe, administrative assistant at the Seaside
Aquarium, volunteers for the network as well. Most
often, they deal with pinnipeds.
A collaboration
The stranding network is a collaboration be-
tween volunteers who study marine mammal
stranding events, report relevant ¿ ndings to a
national database, protect stranded marine mam-
mals from harassment, assist live animals caught
in debris or ¿ shing gear and conduct educational
outreach about marine mammals.
Marine mammals are federally protected un-
der the Marine Mammal Protection Act, so indi-
viduals must be certi¿ ed to handle live or dead
animals.
Most of the time, they aren’t directly involved
in rescues like the young fur seal’s liberation. The
bread and butter of their work involves necrop-
sies to gather data and public outreach to protect
stranded animals.
One of the smelliest jobs Chandler has come
up against was a dead ¿ n whale that wound up
in Portland.
“Dr. Duffield called me and asked me how
I got things done because no one up there was
cooperating, so I foolishly told her that if it
was here, I could deal with it because I know
all these people here that can help me,” Chan-
dler said. “She got an ocean-going tugboat
and towed it down here. Then I had to deal
with it.”
How does a 0-foot ¿ n whale wind up so far
upriver?
“It had been caught on the bow of a car haul-
er,” Chandler said. “The ship hit this whale out in
the ocean — and the whale had been dead a long
time before that, it just got wedged under there
— so it went all the way up the Columbia, push-
ing this whale, and as soon as the ship stopped
the forward momentum stopped and the whale
popped up.”
See INVESTIGATION, Page 10A
Why are North Coast beach birds dying?
Warmer waters,
toxic algae may
be among factors
Grucella,
Santarsiere
and fellow beachgoers
came to the aid of the dying
bird, constructing a plat-
form made of tennis shoes
and plastic dog waste bags
for the injured animal. A
lifeguard provided a blan-
ket and box for transport
before Cannon Beach po-
lice delivered the bird to
wildlife rehabilitators for
care.
By DANI PALMER
EO Media Group
CANNON
BEACH
— Judi Grucella and her
friend Jane Santarsiere visit
Cannon Beach every year.
Dead birds spread out on the
beach were an unexpected
sight.
Wendy McLaughlin of
Astoria also “noticed there
were a lot of dead birds,”
at least 20 around Haystack
Rock, as she and her hus-
band, Tracy, walked along
the beach. “I thought it was
weird,” she said.
Wendy McLaughlin/Submitted Photo
Cannon Beach visitors Judy Grucella, Jane Santarsiere
and Linda Petchell worked together to save a seabird by
making a platform out of tennis shoes and dog waste
bags to carry it to a lifeguard station on Thursday .
Grucella, a Bend resi-
dent, noted they saw ¿ ve
dead birds in their short
walk Thursday and encoun-
tered one so weak it could
barely lift its head. “We
went to the lifeguard sta-
tion and said, ‘Hey, there’s
a bird alive and still strug-
gling.’”
Not the norm