OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2016
SOUTHERN EXPOSURE
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager
Water
under
the bridge
Compiled by Bob Duke
From the pages of Astoria’s daily newspapers
10 years ago this week — 2006
Tom Wilson of Astoria helped represent the western end of the Lewis
and Clark Trail at last month’s ceremony in St. Louis commemorating the
oficial end of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial.
Wilson, a fourth-grade teacher at Lewis and Clark elementary School
and history re-enactor, was joined by two other western delegates to the
Sept. 23 event, which honored the 200th anniversary of the Corps of Dis-
covery’s return from its historic trek and brought the 3 1/2 year nation-
wide Bicentennial to a close.
The federal government can put a liqueied natural gas facil-
ity wherever it wants one, the director of the Oregon Depart-
ment of Environmental Quality told a group gathered in Asto-
ria Thursday.
Considering there are four proposed LNG projects on the
Columbia River, as well as several plans for natural gas and
coal-ired power plants, a member of the Oregon Environmen-
tal Quality Commission suggested DEQ look into the collective
impact of industrial activity in the region.
A unit of four emergency care teams on the North Coast received a
state Emergency Medical Service Unit Citation for a cliff-side rescue near
Cannon Beach in April.
Medix Paramedic Don Thomas was named the state EMS Paramedic
of the Year for his role in the incident, as well as his 20 years of patient
care.
What a whale!
A 54-foot-long humpback whale washed ashore on the Long
Beach Peninsula about a half-mile south of Klipsan Beach
Wednesday afternoon. Onlookers crowded the site Thursday
evening.
50 years ago — 1966
The new 17th Street dock was more than 90 percent complete this
week, city officials said. It is to be ready for berthing the Coast
Guard cutter Yocona by Nov. 1. Still to be completed are a build-
ing on the dock, a railway crossing, street light and water line.
Council faces problem of finding funds to complete the $60,000
project, officials said. Available money has been exhausted.
WASHINGTON – The House today approved a Senate passed bill to
extend from 3 to 12 miles the offshore ishing limits off the U. S. coasts.
The Angora Hiking club, which for years has explored
on foot the woods and mountains of the Sunset Empire, is
fully aware of the importance of knowing where one is in the
outdoors.
So it is appropriate that this organization has given a bronze
relief map to the city government, placed it in front of the Asto-
ria Column where visitors use it to orient themselves with
regard to the large masses of surrounding terrain visible from
the column.
By coincidence, the House of Representatives passed a bill for a
12-mile coastal isheries protective zone just when a Japanese trawler
showed up off our coast, apparently trying to snap up the bottom ish the
Russians left.
The appearance of this sole Japanese craft is ominous. No doubt it
is engaged in research to determine productivity of the ishing banks
along the coast, and once ish are found to be there, other Japanese
craft will descend like locusts in future years, just as the Russians did
this year.
75 years ago — 1941
Construction of 100 homes for defense workers and enlisted
personnel on the Tongue Point naval reservation south of the
lower Columbia highway in that area has been approved by
President Roosevelt upon recommendation of the Defense
Housing Coordinator Charles F. Palmer, it was learned today
from United Press dispatches.
Clatsop County schools near national defense projects are crowded,
particularly in the lower grades, it was disclosed today by Ann Lewis,
county school superintendent.
With an increase in grade enrollment of 42, the Warrenton primary
school is in need of more space. There are 28 more pupils in the Lewis
and Clark Consolidated school, which has also caused overcrowding.
These school buildings were erected to take care of the normal population
of their communities.
After 15 years of tuna ishing, Capt. William Magellan of
San Diego today sailed into the Columbia River as master of his
own boat, the new 114-foot tuna clipper Anna M., named after
his daughter. The $180,000 vessel was launched at Tacoma two
weeks ago and is now on her maiden trip. She will ish for alba-
core off the mouth of the Columbia.
R.J. Marx/The Daily Astorian
Seaside student leaders Kara Ipson, Lizzy Barnes and Emma Dutcher hope to raise awareness of the
tsunami threat.
Seaside campus bond
slims down in 2016
I
By R.J. MARX
The Daily Astorian
t used to be called the barbershop
circuit. When guys hung around
in vinyl-covered metal chairs
reading Field & Stream. You could
be sure that whatever news — and
whatever opinions
around it — would
be fully explored
in their entirety,
although not
always without
embellishment.
Something went very wrong
for Seaside School District bond
supporters in 2013. That was the
irst go-around in the drive to move
three schools — Seaside High
School, Broadway Middle School
and Gearhart Elementary School
—from the tsunami inundation
zone to safety. Proposed only six
days after the closure of Cannon
Beach Elementary School, the bond
measure would have created a new
50-acre campus at a location to be
determined after the vote.
With a substantial turnout in an
off-year election, of the 11 voting
precincts in the school district,
only one, Precinct 40, passed the
measure, and it did so by a mere 12
votes;
Here’s what I heard in the bar-
bershop about that bond:
• The proposal was oversized,
indulgent and ill-timed.
• The school district couldn’t be
trusted to stick to a budget.
• High property taxes would
force residents from their homes.
• And don’t they always over-
state the risk?
Add to that a few more ill-tem-
pered comments, personal or
otherwise, and you might be plenty
lathered up.
Dire need
The barber shop topic this year
— heard from Gearhart to Cannon
Beach — is the $99.7 million bond
to move Seaside schools out of the
tsunami zone.
The three schoools were built
with an expected lifespan of 45
to 50 years, according to district
Superintendent-emeritus Doug
Dougherty. Each school building
has been used beyond that span —
they’re unsafe, deteriorating and
ineficient.
At Broadway Middle School,
students sit in classroom structures
with aging utilities, cinder-block
construction and walls torn by hori-
zontal shearing.
Gearhart Elementary school’s
gym is riddled with dry rot and
“would collapse in an earthquake,”
said Dougherty, who has vol-
unteered his time to supporting
passage of the bond. Leaks are so
bad in the 68-year-old school, “It’s
pretty much like playing whack-a-
mole, where you are pretty sure the
leak is not coming directly from
the spot it’s leaking from. Often it’s
many feet away and trying to track
it down is very, very dificult.”
At Seaside High School,
classrooms are water-damaged and
pipes covered with asbestos. Mold
ills storage areas. An oil boiler is
ineficient and must be “patched
together” to remain functional. On
rainy days, leaks quickly ill large
garbage cans — “everything from
slow drips to streams of water.”
R.J. Marx/The Daily Astorian
Members of the Seaside School District board considered the word-
ing of the bond at their first meeting in September.
R.J. Marx/The Daily Astorian
Doug Dougherty speaks with
supporters of the school bond at
the Seaside Coffee House.
It’s one thing
to make a
decision by
choice to enter
a burning
building. It’s
another to be
under 18 and
told you have
no alternative.
Then and now
In 2013 local residents were
unprepared — or unimpressed — by
the Cascadia subduction zone threat.
In 2013, supporters said the
proposed campus would “capture
an aesthetic that relects the com-
munities within the Seaside School
District.” Today there is no talk of
aesthetics. No Cadillac plan or gold-
plated doorknobs. Proponents are
focused on the dire risk and the state
of crumbling schools — along with
coastal risk, each of the three schools
in Seaside’s tsunami zone face criti-
cal needs for infrastructure repairs.
Barbershop conversation is less
about denying the potential tsunami
risk, but how to prepare for it.
We’ve had a few more years to
contemplate the tsunami threat, and
as geologist Tom Horning says, “Get
our heads out of the sand.” Science
is catching up with fears, and it is
apparent that our risk for tsunami on
the coast is not if, but when.
Bonnie Henderson’s book “The Next
Tsunami” traced the history of our
ecosystem and outlined the severity
of our risk. Last year Kathryn Schulz
magniied those concerns in a New
Yorker magazine piece that won the
Pulitzer Prize for noniction writing.
New numbers from Oregon State
University researchers show that
tsunami interval frequency is even
greater than previously thought.
Property owners would pay $1.35
per $1,000 of assessed property
value, as opposed to $1.86 in 2013.
Low interest rates work in the dis-
trict’s favor.
Because of the luck of the draw,
Seaside could see further cost reduc-
tions. The district is irst in line for
an additional $4 million in state-aid
lottery funds and considered likely to
win them.
Instead of a vague, unknown
location in the hills, this time the
district has a speciic location on
80 acres south of Seaside Heights
Elementary School. Better yet, resi-
dents don’t have to pay for it — it’s a
gift from timber giant Weyerhaeuser
Co. The new K-12 campus site
plan is modest: showing a new high
school, middle school, gymnasium
and cafeteria. Main entryways for
the middle and high schools are
demarcated, as well as roadways, bus
drop-off areas, parking and athletic
ields.
No helipad. No theater. No gold-
plated doorknobs.
The catch: The funds are contin-
gent on the district passing the bond.
The next generation
Even if lifelong residents can’t
be persuaded, a new generation
can. They’re taking the lead. In
2015 Seaside High School students
founded the “Don’t Catch This
Wave” campaign.
They shared their compelling per-
sonal statements on the web, social
media, to students, faculty, legislators
in the state and beyond.
This year the torch is carried by
a new class of motivated students,
among them, Seaside City Council
student representative Lizzy Barnes
and Associated Student Body
co-presidents Emma Dutcher and
Kara Ipson.
The school bond is foremost on
their minds.
“Think about the children,”
Barnes said.
“Think about the future and
beyond yourselves,” Dutcher added.
“It might not affect us graduating,
but it will affect those coming up.”
My barbershop comment: It’s one
thing to make a decision by choice to
enter a burning building. It’s another
to be under 18 and told you have no
alternative.
R.J. Marx is The Daily Astori-
an’s South County reporter and edi-
tor of the Seaside Signal and Cannon
Beach Gazette.