Astoria’s Lund
moves to coaching
Scandinavian
Midsummer Festival
SPORTS • 4A
COAST WEEKEND
142nd YEAR, No. 252
THURSDAY, JUNE 18, 2015
ONE DOLLAR
Port
audit
clean,
except
for dirty
water
By EDWARD STRATTON
The Daily Astorian
Courtesy of the Cannon Beach Chamber of Commerce
Fantastical creatures, like dragon pictured here, tend to appear during Cannon Beach’s annual Sandcastle Contest. This year celebrates
the city’s 52nd consecutive Sandcastle event.
Take a foray into sand play
CB Sandcastle
Contest event
founders turned
tragedy into an
opportunity
“Bucket & Shovel” dinner with sal-
ad, spaghetti and clam chowder op-
tions on offer at the Cannon Beach
Chamber of Commerce Communi-
ty Hall from 6 to 7:30 p.m.
The Sandcastle Contest itself
begins 7:30 a.m. Saturday down
on the beach. Awards will be an-
nounced at 12:30 p.m. (Registra-
tion closes at noon Friday.)
That night, a folk music concert
featuring several local musicians
will be held at 7 p.m. at the Com-
munity Hall.
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will be held at the Tolovana Way-
side. S’mores will be served, but at-
tendees must bring their own chairs.
Finally, a 5K Fun Run takes off
from the beach at Second Street at
9 a.m. Sunday; registration begins
at 8 a.m.
For more information, visit
www.cannonbeach.org/businesses/
SandcastleContest.
By ERICK BENGEL
EO Media Group
C
ANNON BEACH — The
Cannon Beach Sandcastle
Contest, which celebrates
its 51st anniversary this year, is,
like all sandcastle events, an exer-
cise in living with impermanence,
in creating order and beauty while
preparing for its destruction, in
learning to let go.
For several sunny, enchanted
hours, thousands of visitors de-
scend on Cannon Beach’s shore-
line to watch dozens of sand
sculptors build mighty, majestic
figures: castles and dragons, sea
creatures and cartoon characters
— the inspiration seems inex-
haustible.
Just about everyone has a good
time: The sculptors — amateurs
and masters — revel in the team-
work and craftsmanship, while the
spectators stroll among the plots,
awed and entertained.
But the end is written into the
beginning. By sunset, all physical
evidence of the sculptures will be
erased, taken by the tides. And
the canvas of the coastline will be
blank once more, ready for another
troupe of imaginative beachgoers
’64 or ’65?
Courtesy of the Cannon Beach Chamber of Commerce
In honor of the first Sandcastle event, a sculpting team fashioned
this car with a commemorative license plate. The Sandcastle Con-
test was born in the aftermath of the March 27, 1964, Alaskan earth-
quake when the subsequent tsunami flooded Cannon Beach and
turned the city temporarily into a ghost town.
to momentarily shape nature to
their will.
Schedule of events
Cannon Beach’s Sandcastle
Contest — the oldest in Oregon
— falls on Saturday this year and
is the grand centerpiece of a three-
day shindig.
The festivities kick off at 5:30
p.m. Friday with the Sandcastle Pa-
rade; the lineup begins at 5 p.m. at
Spruce and Second streets.
This will be followed by a
Confusion has cropped up lately
among some locals regarding the
origins of Cannon Beach’s Sand-
castle Contest, which received the
Oregon Heritage Tradition award
from the Oregon Parks and Recre-
ation Department last year.
The 2014 Sandcastle Contest
was variously billed at the “50th
Sandcastle Contest,” the “50th an-
nual Sandcastle Contest” and the
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test doesn’t help matters (though,
to be sure, any of those distinctions
TXDOL¿HV WKH FRQWHVW IRU WKH KHUL-
tage tradition award).
See CONTEST, Page 10A
The Port of Astoria has reduced
annual operating losses over the past
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would have been brighter had the
port accounted for potential liabilities
from groundwater contamination.
Jim Lanzarotta, an accountant
with Moss Adams LLP, told the Port
Commission during a presentation of
the 2013-14 audit Tuesday night that
yearly operating losses decreased
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$105,000 in 2013-14.
The Port’s net position — assets
minus liabilities — slipped by only
$7,789 in 2013-14, bringing it to $19.5
million. That would have been a sig-
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Lanzarotta said, had the Port not been
required all along to report potential
liabilities for the cleanup of ground-
water contamination throughout the
central waterfront. The audit said ac-
counting for the liabilities decreased
the Port’s net position by $1.8 million.
The Port, which was named by the
Oregon Department of Environmen-
tal Quality as a potential responsible
party for the pollution, had not been
accounting for the potential liabilities,
which stretch back to the early 2000s.
The Port is negotiating through its
lawyers with former oil company
tenants and insurers, and expects to
UHFHLYH VLJQL¿FDQW FRPSHQVDWLRQ IRU
the cleanup. But Lanzarotta said the
Port cannot report the potential com-
pensation until it has the other parties
dead to rights on paying out.
The audit listed the omission of
liabilities as one of two of the Port’s
material weaknesses, severe enough
to cause misstatements in the Port’s
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ed, detected or corrected. The other
material weakness was a lack of seg-
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Lanzarotta said is common to gov-
ernmental entities with small staffs.
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reporting, which were less severe
than material weaknesses, and in-
cluded the corrections staff have
made to address the mistakes:
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preciable assets, resulting in a $93,087
reduction in the Port’s net position.
• Improper accounting of tenant
improvements to Port property and
rent credits that lowered the Port’s
revenue. The correction resulted in
an $18,684 decrease to the Port’s net
position.
See AUDIT, Page 10A
Ka-Boom! Fireworks create an eco-bombshell
Washington’s laws allow explosives
that damage beaches, sealife
By NATALIE ST. JOHN
EO Media Group
OCEAN PARK, Wash. —
Most of the people who par-
ticipated in last year’s annual
July 5 beach cleanup tossed
their bags of soggy Inde-
pendence Day litter into the
dumpsters. But environmental
activist Ellen Anderson took
her trash home, sorted it into
tubs and buckets, and ana-
lyzed the contents.
Anderson is concerned
about an issue that has spe-
cial significance on the Pen-
insula, where thousands of
visitors come to take part in
the annual no-holds-barred
Fourth of July celebration:
The environmental damage
caused by certain types of
fireworks. She says one pop-
ular type of device, Saturn
Missile Batteries, creates
more plastic garbage than
all the others put together —
garbage that can pollute wa-
ter and soil and harm aquatic
animals.
For the last several years,
she and the other members
of her group, Environmental-
ly Friendly Fireworks, have
been trying to get policymak-
ers and citizens to understand
that this plastic litter can con-
NATALIE ST. JOHN — EO Media Group
Ellen Anderson displays some of the trash she has collect-
ed after Independence Day celebrations on local beaches.
tinue hurting the planet long
after the party is over.
Patriotic pollution
On June 11, Anderson
of rope. Other tubs contained
bulky plastic and cardboard
bases in a variety of shapes.
Several others contained col-
orful collections of plastic
propellers, tubes, wings, spin-
ners, and caps.
“I’m sure I’m the only one
who collects this,” Anderson
laughed.
There’s one collection
WKDW$QGHUVRQ ¿QGV HVSHFLDO-
ly troublesome: The shoe-
box-sized container that holds
more than 1,500 bits of plas-
tic shrapnel collected from a
roughly one-mile stretch of
beach in a single day last year.
These bits are the byprod-
uct of Saturn Missile Batter-
ies, a common type of aerial
laid a collection of tubs and
buckets out in the garage of
her beach-front Ocean Park
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ZLWKÀDVK\SDFNDJLQJDQGELWV See FIREWORKS, Page 10A