9A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2016
Pep rally: ‘These kids need something better, something safe’
Continued from Page 1A
The measure to relocate
Gearhart Elementary School,
Broadway Middle School and
Seaside High School to a new
campus on high ground in the
east hills adjacent to Seaside
Heights Elementary School
goes before voters Tuesday.
Seaside High School’s Lucy
Bodner said students turned out
to spread awareness for the vote
to get the schools out of the tsu-
nami-inundation zone. “There
are so many kids that are in
danger all the time,” Bodner
said.
Crawford agreed. Along
with support for the bond, he
called for a districtwide emer-
gency plan.
“I don’t think tsunami
awareness is enough,” Craw-
ford said. “Other schools have
action plans for other natural
disasters, like earthquakes or
hurricanes, but nobody talks
about the tsunami. Every day
we could easily be wiped out.”
Associated Student Body
co-President Emma Dutcher
said the rally’s goal was to get
the word out about the bond.
“We’re hoping that by walk-
ing downtown, it will get a lot
of businesses aware and get the
community together,” Dutcher
said.
This year’s campaign was
going “really well,” she said.
“Four years ago, when I was
a freshman, it wasn’t so popu-
lar,” Dutcher said. “This year
I’m seeing a lot of ‘Vote Yes for
Local Schools’ on lawns signs.
It looks like it will go in our
favor this year.”
Students from throughout
the North Coast joined the rally
in a show of solidarity.
Danny Miller/The Daily Astorian
Students, community members and voters in support of
the Seaside schools bond measure march around down-
town reminding voters to turn in their ballots.
Danny Miller/The Daily Astorian
Seaside School District Superintendent-emeritus Doug Dougherty, left, and Seaside High
School sophomore Mason Crawford, right, march with other students, community mem-
bers and voters in support of the Seaside schools bond measure around downtown.
Payton Wolf, Associated
Student Body president of Ver-
nonia High School, said stu-
dents outside of the Seaside
School District were respond-
ing to the plight of their
neighbors.
“Recently we had to go
through the same thing in pass-
ing a bond for our own schools
when we got flooded twice,”
Wolf said. “We just had to
gather together with our town
and do pretty much the same
thing. We feel we can give back
to them.”
Student involvement makes
a “100 percent” difference, she
added. “Older people can sit
here and try to pound some-
thing into you, but when it
comes from the students, it
makes a lot more of an impact.”
High-schooler Dakota Wil-
lard was also part of the Verno-
nia contingent. “I was in fourth
grade when they decided they
needed to move our school, so
I got to go to fifth grade in the
new school,” Willard said. “It
was really nice. We should help
them get a new school.”
“This is our best chance to
get our schools out of the tsu-
nami inundation zone and build
these schools that have gone
15-20 years past their useful
life,” Seaside School District
board member Patrick Nofield
said as the group walked dou-
ble file along the sidewalk up
First Avenue to Highway 101.
“This is our future. We need to
create environments for kids
like this and future generations
with opportunities to learn and
give back to our communities.”
Gearhart City Councilor
Sue Lorain, who is running
unopposed for re-election,
showed her support. “When I
see the appalling condition of
the schools, on a daily basis
these kids need something bet-
ter, something safe,” Lorain, a
retired schoolteacher said. “Not
to mention the endgame, which
is a catastrophic event.”
Scanning the crowd, she
added: “This reaffirms if you
can get your kids involved, you
can do just about anything.”
The whoops and cries of
Danny Miller/The Daily Astorian
Karin Webb, center, and other supporters of the Seaside
Schools bond measure, prepare to march around down-
town Sunday in Seaside.
students rang out as the group
looped west down Broadway
toward the Prom. The chants
reverberated to the Turn-
around, inspiring a cacophony
of car horns and cheers from
onlookers.
Is the public listening?
“I think we’ll find out on
Tuesday,” sophomore flag-
bearer Crawford said. “They
really need to. I don’t think
they understand the gravity of
the situation.”
Schools: Seaside School District serves some 1,500 students
Continued from Page 1A
But everything is at the cen-
ter of something. Last year, I
wrote an article in The New
Yorker about the Cascadia sub-
duction zone, a little-known
fault line that cyclically pro-
duces the largest earthquakes
and tsunamis in North America
— shaking of magnitude 9.0 or
higher, waves of a scale and
destructive force analogous to
the 2011 disaster in Japan. The
subduction zone runs for 700
miles along the western coast
of our continent. At its south
end is Cape Mendocino, Cali-
fornia. At its north end is Van-
couver Island, Canada. In the
middle is Seaside.
That centrality is not just
geographic. With one possi-
ble exception — the similarly
unlucky town of Long Beach,
Washington — no other place
on the West Coast is as imper-
iled by the Cascadia subduc-
tion zone as Seaside. When
the earthquake hits, the con-
tinent will jolt westward into
the Pacific, displacing an enor-
mous amount of ocean. All of
that seawater will be forced
upward into a massive liquid
mountain, which will promptly
collapse and rush back toward
the shore. That’s the tsunami,
which will flood the coastal
region up to a mile and a half
inland and to a depth of20, 40,
even 100 feet, depending on
your precise location. The area
that will be swamped is called
the inundation zone; within it,
tsunamis are essentially unsur-
vivable. Eighty-three percent
of Seaside’s population and
89 percent of its workforce are
located inside that zone. So is
its energy infrastructure, water
supply, wastewater-treatment
plant, hospital, police depart-
ment and fire stations. And
so, during the school year, are
nearly all of its children.
The Seaside School District
serves some 1,500 students,
spread out across four differ-
ent buildings. One of those,
Seaside Heights Elementary,
is, as its name suggests, on
high-enough ground to be rel-
atively safe. The other three —
an elementary school, a mid-
dle school and a high school
— are between five and 15 feet
above sea level. Seismologists
expect that in a full-scale Cas-
cadia earthquake, the tsunami
in Seaside will be between 45
and 50 feet high. It will make
landfall roughly 15 minutes
after the earthquake begins,
which means that, to have any
chance of getting to safety, stu-
dents and staff will need to
start evacuating as soon as the
shaking stops.
Unfortunately, even their
very first step will be, at best,
extremely difficult, because
none of the schools in Sea-
side’s inundation zone have
been seismically retrofit-
ted. According to the Oregon
Department of Geology and
Mineral Industries, in a major
earthquake, all three are likely
to suffer catastrophic collapse.
Those who manage to escape
from whatever is left of the
middle school will have to
walk uphill for eight-tenths of
a mile, through rubble, fires,
and flooding, over a bridge
that might not remain stand-
ing. Those who escape the
high school will need to walk
a mile in that landscape, like-
wise over a possibly nonexis-
tent bridge.
As for those at the grade
school: they have no viable
evacuation option at all. Gear-
hart Elementary School is
sandwiched between the ocean
and a wetland, through which
no roads exist and none can
be built, because the ground
there will liquefy in an earth-
quake. At present, students
at the school, together with
everyone else in the epony-
mous Gearhart neighborhood,
are instructed to walk to a near-
by40-foot ridge. Seismologists
expect the tsunami there to
be 5 feet higher than that, but
even if it were 5 inches higher,
that would be enough — or
rather, too much. At the speed
a tsunami travels, 3 inches of
water suffices to knock over a
grown man, to say nothing of a
third-grader.
For the past 19 years, all of
this has been the chief head-
ache and potential heartache
of a man named Doug Dough-
erty, the longtime superinten-
dent of the Seaside School
District. Dougherty began
his career in Seaside as a
teacher at — and later prin-
cipal of — the now-defunct
Cannon Beach Elementary
School. That school was situ-
ated so close to its namesake
that, if you opened the win-
dows, you could listen to the
surf all day long. In 1995, as
seismologists began to sound
the alarm about seismic risk in
the region, Dougherty became
the first principal in the United
States to institute tsunami
evacuation drills. That seemed
like a life-saving innovation
(it attracted national atten-
tion, and national praise), until
engineers examined the bridge
along the evacuation route and
determined that it would col-
lapse in an earthquake. The
only other route to high ground
was almost a mile and a half
long. To get to safety, everyone
at the school — faculty mem-
bers, 5-year-olds, kids who
were on crutches after break-
ing a leg on the playground —
would need to be able to cover
that distance in not much more
than 10 minutes. “It was really
clear,” Dougherty said, “that
we wouldn’t be able to have
even a small chance of getting
everyone out.”
In 1998, Dougherty became
superintendent; 15 years later,
in 2013, he finally succeeded
in closing Cannon Beach Ele-
mentary School. That same
year, he came up with a plan to
protect the district’s other stu-
dents as well, by buying land
outside the inundation zone
and building a new K-12 cam-
pus there, which would dou-
ble as a much-needed evac-
uation site for the entire city.
The projected cost was $128
million dollars. No national
funds were available, because
of a ban on federal earmarks.
No state funds were available,
because, although Oregon pro-
vides money to seismically ret-
rofit schools, those inside the
tsunami inundation zone aren’t
eligible to apply — a strangely
cruel provision that leaves the
lowest and soon-to-be-wettest
schools high and dry. That left
the city to foot the bill on its
own, which it proposed doing
via a tax increase of $2.16 per
thousand dollars of property
value — less than the price of
a latte. The bond measure went
up for a vote in 2014. So rea-
sonable was the ask, and so
dire the issue, that Dougherty,
together with almost everyone
involved, felt confident that
it would pass. It failed, by a
wide margin: 62 percent to 38
percent.
This week, another, more
modest version of that bond
measure will be back on the
ballot. This time, the Weyer-
haeuser timber company has
agreed to donate 80 acres of
land outside the tsunami inun-
dation zone, leaving the town
to cover only the cost of con-
struction and relocation. The
price of the bond has dropped
to $1.35 per thousand dollars
of property value.
That isn’t much, but, as
Dougherty knows by now, it
isn’t nothing, either. Many of
Seaside’s residents are service
employees, working in restau-
rants or cleaning hotels; more
than half of them live below
the poverty line. As devas-
tating as the coming natu-
ral disaster will be, it is diffi-
cult to convince people to put
money toward the future when
the demands of the present are
so pressing. But, of course, the
future has a way of becom-
ing the present — sometimes
much sooner than we expect.
According to seismologists,
the odds that a major Cascadia
earthquake and tsunami will
strike within the next 50 years
are 1-in-3.
As for the odds that the
bond measure will pass: this
time, Dougherty is declin-
ing to speculate. Instead, hav-
ing stepped down as superin-
tendent, in June, he is using
his putative retirement to fight
for the measure’s passage. He
has also chosen to stay in his
current house, although it is in
Gearhart, the area of Seaside
from which it is essentially
impossible to evacuate. He
understands the risk involved
in living there, but, he told
me, he can’t bring himself to
leave as long as others have no
choice but to work and study
there. “My wife and I have a
plan that if we need to climb
trees, we will climb trees,” he
said. Their home sits atop the
neighborhood’s40-foot ridge;
the trees buy them another 60
feet. It is true that trees fare bet-
ter in earthquakes than homes
and hotels and brick elemen-
tary schools. Still, as he spoke,
I pictured the tsunami — not
just coming in but receding,
with the terrifying detritus of
an entire city smashing around
inside it.
To be precariously bal-
anced just above that kind of
disaster: that is where Seaside
finds itself right now, as it pre-
pares to vote on its bond mea-
sure this Tuesday. Either the
city will choose to knock down
its schools and rebuild them
somewhere safer — or, sooner
or later, other forces will knock
them over instead. For those
who live there, for those with
loved ones there, for anyone
with a school-aged child and
an imagination, the issue is as
stark as the one at the top of the
ballot: a vote for reason or for
madness, for relative safety or
looming catastrophe.
This article originally
appeared in The New Yorker.
Kathryn Schulz joined The
New Yorker as a staff writer
in 2015. In 2016, she won
the Pulitzer Prize for Feature
Writing and a National Maga-
zine Award for “The Really Big
One,” her story on the seismic
risk in the Pacific Northwest.
What the heck
just happened?!
An Analysis of the 2016 Election
NOVEMBER 27
John Horvick
TO ATTEND:
John Horvick, Political Director
at DHM Research, will review
the 2016 election in Oregon
and nationally. He’ll share his
thoughts about what the
election outcomes say about
our state and country. Horvick
has conducted hundreds of
surveys and focus groups with
Oregonians across the state,
and he’ll discuss some of the
research fi ndings that help
explain why we voted the way
we did, including the values
and issues that were most
infl uential this election.
For Members: Dinner & Lecture:$25 each; Lecture only: no charge
For Non-Members: Dinner & Lecture: $35 each; Lecture only: $15 ea.
Appetizers will be available at 6 p.m. • Dinner will be served at 6:30 p.m.
The speaker will begin after the dinner service is complete and non-dinner
members and guests of the audience take their seats.
Forum to be held at the CMH Community Center at 2021 Exchange St., Astoria.
ColumbiaForum
FOR RESERVATIONS OR TO JOIN COLUMBIA FORUM CONTACT:
Holly Larkins at 503.325.3211 ext. 227 or forum@dailyastorian.com by Nov. 11, 2016
Columbia Forum is sponsored by:
The Daily Astorian • Craft3 • OSU Seafood Laboratory • KMUN-FM
Cannery Pier Hotel & Spa