7A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, JANUARY 9, 2017
Seaside hospital welcomes its
first baby: Estella Ann Gauthier
Warrenton pair
has the first
South County
baby of 2017
By R.J. MARX
The Daily Astorian
R.J. Marx Photo/The Daily Astorian
Jessica Sawtell, Estella Ann Gauthier and Jacob Gauthier at Providence Seaside Hospital.
SEASIDE — Two babies
came into the world at Prov-
idence Seaside Hospital on
New Year’s Eve before the
clock struck midnight ushering
in the new year.
Then there was a lull, and
for those awaiting the first
birth of 2017, Jan. 1 and Jan. 2
went by without a newborn at
the hospital.
That changed at 8:30 a.m.
Tuesday when Jessica Saw-
tell gave birth to a 9-pound,
10-ounce baby girl, Estella Ann
Gauthier, via C-section. Drs.
Michael Adler and Dominique
Greco delivered the baby.
“Everything was great, no
problems at all,” Adler said
with a smile.
Sawtell and dad Jacob
Gauthier are both Warren-
ton residents. Estella Ann is
their second child. Sawtell
works in Dr. Aaron Sasaki’s
office in Astoria and Gauthier
is employed at the Warrenton
Sawmill.
The new mom was up and
moving the same day and by
Wednesday was receiving
visitors.
“We didn’t think we’d be
the first,” Gauthier said at the
hospital.
“The staff here has been
amazing,” Sawtell said. “I’m
feeling great, I’m already up
and walking.”
“Every time we ask for
help, they’re always right
there,” Gauthier said of hospi-
tal staff.
“We didn’t expect the bas-
ket,” he added, accepting the
hospital’s basket of blankets,
towels, gift cards and baby
essentials.
Meanwhile, Estella was up
and alert, ready to greet the
new year ahead.
Timber: DEQ acknowledged
report had appearance of bias
Continued from Page 1A
It also focused on the
potential impacts from indus-
trial logging operations, which
own the majority of land sur-
rounding many drinking water
sources. That report prompted
fears within the timber indus-
try of a coordinated effort
between coastal residents and
environmental regulators to
limit or prohibit logging along
the coast.
They heaped piles of crit-
icism on the Department of
Environmental Quality, and
prompted input from coastal
legislators and others. Indus-
try groups held a symposium
on forest water quality, taking
aim at the same issues raised in
DEQ’s work.
Ultimately, the Depart-
ment of Environmental Qual-
ity shelved the report. Eighteen
months later, the department
still hasn’t finished it and
doesn’t plan to publish.
Influential industry
The fate of that report offers
a glimpse at what can happen
when a state environmental
agency’s work runs afoul of
a politically influential indus-
try. It also shows how, on cer-
tain forestry issues, the agenda
of state regulators aligns
more closely with the timber
industry than with concerned
citizens.
“It’s unfortunately part of
a pattern in which the Depart-
ment of Forestry has bul-
lied DEQ,” said Nina Bell,
of Northwest Environmental
Advocates.
Bell has been filing law-
suits over coastal water quality
for years.
“That’s not a surprise,”
Bell said. “That doesn’t make
it right. In fact it’s just flat-
out wrong for the Department
of Forestry to be only advo-
cating for landowners who
stand to gain money by cut-
ting down trees and not being
there to help protect the public
resources, like drinking water.”
The Department of Envi-
ronmental Quality considers
coastal water systems espe-
cially vulnerable. Many are
small, and with watersheds
facing the ocean, they feel the
brunt of coastal wind and rain,
which can dump debris into
drinking water sources.
“They are all facing very
similar issues,” Sheree Stew-
art, the department’s drinking
water protection coordinator,
said. “A lot of those water-
sheds have forest industrial
private land, and so the report
needed to focus on what those
land uses were.”
Rockaway Beach
Consider last year, when a
rainstorm dumped 18 inches in
Tillamook County. That storm
caused flooding and landslides.
It destroyed culverts and left
small streams looking like
chocolate milk.
In Rockaway Beach, the
water plant operator needed an
excavator to clear the rock and
sediment that had poured into
Jetty Creek, the town’s main
water source.
Water-quality experts pre-
dict coastal storms to inten-
sify because of climate change.
They also say forest loss
can exacerbate the effects of
coastal storms.
Erick Bengel/The Daily Astorian
Brinley Elizabeth Anderson, the first baby born in Astoria
in 2017, arrived at 6:58 a.m. Jan. 2 at Columbia Memorial
Hospital. She was 8 pounds and 20 inches long.
Tony Schick/Oregon Public Broadcasting
Behind a fence, a recently cleared pile of rock, dirt and twigs sits on the banks of Jetty
Creek near the surface water intake for the drinking water plant in Rockaway Beach.
Coastal storms dumped much of this into the creek. Water quality experts say such
storms make coastal communities vulnerable to source water contamination, which
they expect to worsen because of climate change.
“So what we’ve seen is an
increase in a lot of turbidity
and sediments,” Stewart said.
Turbidity is the techni-
cal term for the sediment and
debris in water. Too much
of it interferes with the chlo-
rine used for disinfection. The
result can mean chemicals in
drinking water that are bad for
people’s health.
Rockaway Beach has strug-
gled with turbidity for years.
Residents there have got-
ten several alerts about harm-
ful chemicals in their drinking
water, byproducts from the dis-
infection process.
Jetty Creek
There’s another factor
in Rockaway Beach: clear-
cut logging. Jetty Creek flows
through private industrial for-
est, and 80 percent of this
watershed has been logged in
recent years.
Swaths of forests have been
replaced by bald slopes.
Studies have shown for-
est loss can lead to greater
water-quality problems, includ-
ing higher treatment costs. The
Department of Environmen-
tal Quality’s draft report stated
that “clearcut timber harvest-
ing is known to increase land-
slide rates on steep slopes and
increase streamflows and ero-
sion.” It also said narrow strips
of trees left near streams are
often thrown by the wind, and
that timber harvesting can con-
tribute sediment into streams
through roads and slash
techniques.
Industrial forest companies
are by far the single largest
owner of land in coastal drink-
ing watersheds, owning 100
percent of some source water
areas.
In fact, water for 40 percent
of the drinking water systems
on the coast flows through for-
est owned by private compa-
nies that log extensively. And
64 percent of all coastal water
systems have had two or more
alerts, warning customers of
problems with disinfecting
water so it is safe enough to
drink.
A draft of DEQ’s unpub-
lished report included these
statistics. The timber indus-
try didn’t like that. Neither
did the Department of For-
estry, which regulates the tim-
ber industry. They deny any
link between forest loss and
increased turbidity, let alone
problems with harmful disin-
fection byproducts.
Bull Run watershed
Timber industry groups
caught wind of the agency’s
work at a Board of Forestry
meeting, where resident Meg
Thompson laid out her con-
cerns, and said she and others
were seeking full Bull Run-
like protections.
The Bull Run watershed,
which supplies drinking water
for Portland, has been off lim-
its to loggers since the 1990s.
“We’re hoping that eventu-
ally using the technical support
of DEQ and our source water
risk assessments that we can
develop full protective plans,”
Thompson said.
This testimony proved to
be a significant concern of the
industry.
Public records obtained by
OPB show the groups told the
Department of Environmen-
tal Quality’s director the report
encourages the reader to iden-
tify ‘threats’ with little data.
They also said DEQ should
not help local activists in their
push for tougher clean-water
standards.
“While fringe elements
have, over the years, occa-
sionally called publicly for
broad prohibitions on log-
ging in coastal drinking water-
sheds, the thought that DEQ
and Regional Solutions may
be facilitating that outcome
is alarming,” the comments
stated.
Officials with two indus-
try groups, Oregonians for
Food and Shelter, and the Ore-
gon Forest Industries Council,
declined to be interviewed for
this story.
Public records also show
Peter Daugherty, now the state
forester, sent four pages of
comments to the Department
of Environmental Quality after
the agency solicited his feed-
back. In them, he questioned
both the science and the pur-
pose of the report.
Daugherty, who was the
department’s head of pri-
vate forests at the time, said
“the document seems to be
responding to citizen group
concerns about forest man-
agement, rather than doing an
unbiased analysis of threats to
drinking water.”
Forestry officials sug-
gested DEQ remove language
about the connection between
timber harvests and landslides
or sediment in streams. They
said the report needed to be
reworded so that it didn’t sug-
gest the state’s forestry laws
were too weak to protect clean
water.
Critical review
In an interview, Daugherty
said the two agency’s often
work closely.
“Partners do do critical,
and I mean critical, review of
each other’s work,” Daugh-
erty said. “We see that as a
way to improve our partner-
ship and come to a common
understanding about the sci-
ence on forest land and forest
management.”
He praised the quality of
water that flows through Ore-
gon’s forests and questioned
the premise coastal communi-
ties’ water quality woes could
be blamed on forest manage-
ment — logging, construction
and maintenance of roads and
culverts, and pesticide spray-
ing to kill plants that compete
with newly planted trees after
a clearcut.
“I don’t believe that there’s
any scientific evidence that
forest practices are directly
related to some indications of
potential increased turbidity
in those systems,” Daugherty
said.
Department of Environ-
mental Quality said they stood
by the science in their report,
but did acknowledge the report
had the appearance of bias
because it focused so much
on private forests. The reason,
they said, is the substantial
amount of land owned by pri-
vate forests.
The department has since
shifted focus. It produced indi-
vidual documents for each
water system, instead of going
ahead with its bigger-picture
report that connects the dots on
what water-quality experts and
environmentalists fear is a sys-
temic risk for communities all
along the coast.
The agency now plans to
conduct a statewide water
assessment in the future, which
won’t single out logging or any
other industry for degrading
drinking water.
The Department of Forestry
and timber industry groups
both supported that shift.
Baby: ‘It’s been such
a blessing to have her’
Continued from Page 1A
DeWitt Construction, a com-
pany based in Vancouver,
Washington. Wesley is also a
member of the U.S. National
Guard, based in Warrenton.
Brinley is the Anderson’s
third child after William War-
ren Anderson, 9, and Brielle
Jane Anderson, 5. She’s the
16th grandchild for Wesley’s
parents.
Brinley’s older siblings are
“just in love with her,” Mari-
jane said.
“They fight over who gets
to hold the baby, so we’ve
been using that to our advan-
tage,” she said with a laugh.
“‘Go make your bed and you
get to hold your sister.’ ‘Pick
up your dirty laundry, you get
to hold your sister.’”
With Brinley’s arrival, the
Andersons said their family is
complete.
“It’s been such a blessing
to have her … All the nurses
were just super awesome and
amazing to us,” Marijane
said.
The Andersons didn’t
learn until Brinley arrived
that she was Astoria’s New
Year’s baby, or that the dis-
tinction comes with perks:
Columbia Memorial’s auxil-
iary volunteers raise money
every year for the hospi-
tal to purchase presents
for its Christmas and New
Year’s babies. The Ander-
sons received baby toys, baby
clothes, baby soaps and other
newborn essentials.
It will make an interesting
story to tell Brinley someday,
Marijane said. “She’s special
anyways, but it just makes it
even more special.”
Asked what he’s looking
forward to most as a father of
three, Wesley said, “Watching
them grow together.”
— Erick Bengel
Strike: Deal was
reached in Oregon
Continued from Page 1A
crabs with major buyer Pacific
Choice Seafood.
The processors had ini-
tially agreed to $3 a pound in
early December, then backed
off to $2.75, which led to the
strike. The agreed-upon price
is exactly halfway between
those figures.
The association says the
deal was reached in Oregon,
which sets the price for the
entire coast.
Bernie Lindley, a crab fish-
erman in Brookings, Oregon,
said he has mixed feelings
about the price.
“Happy? I don’t know,”
Lindley told the Curry Coastal
Pilot. “In a successful nego-
tiation, nobody’s happy and
nobody’s pissed. For me, per-
sonally, I wish it would’ve
been resolved more fairly for
the fishermen, but we’re back
to work, and so be it.”
The strike left crab pots
empty in places such as Fisher-
man’s Wharf in San Francisco
during what would normally
be among the busiest times for
the craved crustaceans.
The
season’s
begin-
ning was also slowed by
the presence of domoic
acid in some parts of the
three states, which can make
the crabs unsafe to eat. And
even now it could be fur-
ther slowed by a big weekend
storm approaching the West-
ern U.S.
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