GREAT COASTAL GALE OF 2007
ChinookObserver.com
December 2017 // Page 7
CUT OFF: ‘There was nothing on
the shelves except for kitty litter.’
Continued from Page 1
Weathering the storm
The December 2007 storm is a local
legend. It cut off Clatsop County and
Pacific County in Washington state from
the rest of the world for nearly a week.
Thousands of customers were with-
out power for days. Different parts of the
coast — different neighborhoods, even
— experienced the storm differently. The
wind blasted some areas, and left others
more or less unscathed. For some peo-
ple it was an adventure. For others it was
horrific. Nearly everyone was inspired by
the way their communities rallied to help
each other.
Neighbors shared space in front of their
wood stoves and fireplaces. They held
community potlucks, feasting on all the
food that was about to go bad — steaks,
chicken breasts, halibut. They traded for
propane. They built outdoor showers and
toilets. Together, they listened to the eerie
snap and thuds of hundreds of trees being
torn up by the wind.
In the days after the storm, there were
reports of people who narrowly missed
being squashed by falling trees and fam-
ilies who were trapped in their houses
until neighbors arrived with chainsaws.
There were a handful of carbon monox-
ide poisoning cases, all related to people
using barbecue grills inside. An elderly
woman was found dead in her home after
she apparently fell and struck her head
while checking on a window that had
shattered in the winds. A man suffered a
heart attack while helping family mem-
bers clear brush.
The wind knocked down bald eagle
nests. It tore apart the Klootchy Creek
Giant Sitka Spruce near Seaside, consid-
ered to be the oldest tree in Oregon and
one of the oldest living things in the state.
Creeks jumped their banks. Seafood pro-
cessors were either lucky or unlucky,
depending on where they were in their
work when the power went out and the
roads closed down. Several boats in dry
dock keeled over on their sides at the
Astoria boat basin. Mail piled up at the
Astoria post office. Safeway employees
threw away spoiled food by the cartful.
‘Fists of rain’
The storm came in two pulses, a sort
of one-two punch. During a brief lull,
Curtis Roegner, a fisheries research biol-
ogist with the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration based in
Astoria, drove to Fred Meyer to stock up
on supplies.
“There was nothing on the shelves
except for kitty litter,” he said. He went
looking for tarps; they were sold out.
The Columbia River was a bizarre
blue and green color, pocked by white-
caps. The whole sky was churning, gear-
ing up for the second blast. Wind whipped
across the water. It looked like a fish going
upriver, Roegner said. He watched “fists
of rain” pummel the red Net Loft build-
ing built out over the water between Safe-
way and the Columbia River Maritime
Museum. Huge chunks of roof flew away.
One Washington state woman drove
150 miles to check on her 85-year-old
mother in Ilwaco. She drove through a
dark Aberdeen, then a dark Raymond and
a dark South Bend, but as she climbed the
steps to her mother’s apartment, the power
came back and lights flickered back on.
Her mother had weathered the storm eat-
ing cold canned food — unaware of the
soup kitchen set up across the street.
In Toledo, Washington, Kathie Oman
Gomez remembers how the winds tore a
THE DAILY ASTORIAN
Spray from wind-driven waves whips beneath the Old Youngs Bay Bridge at the Astoria Yacht Club on Dec. 3, 2007.
metal carport from its concrete foundation
and tossed it into a pasture. Her husband,
a police officer in Centralia, was called
into work to go door to door in a boat and
get people out of flooded homes.
In Astoria, Roegner and his neighbors
responded to a small landslide together.
In retrospect, it seems “perfectly nat-
ural” that the community would come
together, Roegner said. “But at the time I
remember thinking how great it was to be
in a place where people really were help-
ing each other.”
Still, as the days piled up and the
county remained without electricity, roads
closed in places, Roegner wondered if
cracks would start to show. He thought
about his trip to Fred Meyer.
“I kept thinking about those empty
shelves.”
Work, work, work
For most people, the storm meant
work. Lots of work.
Impromptu shelters opened in
churches and community centers. Camp
Rilea in Warrenton housed storm refu-
gees and served meals. Between Dec. 3
and Dec. 8, Seaside’s community center
operated for 122 continuous hours, serv-
ing breakfast, lunch and dinner. Restau-
rants and neighbors brought food they
knew would go bad soon. People show-
ered at the swimming pool.
For David Robinson, pastor of the
Cannon Beach Community Church,
which acted as a shelter, the first question
when the power went out was, “Who do
we need to care for?”
At the Seaside Aquarium, staff manned
a gas-powered pump, 24 hours a day, for
five days to keep the animals alive. It was
hard to get gas to run the pump because
power was out at the gas stations. Then, a
former aquarium employee who owned a
landscaping company brought over extra
gas cans. He wasn’t going to be mowing
any lawns that week.
“We used that, then we siphoned gas
out of our trucks,” said Keith Chandler,
the aquarium’s general manager.
Ashley Lertora, a stewardship for-
ester with the Oregon Department of For-
estry based outside of Astoria, worked
throughout the storm, pausing only for
a day to take care of damage at her own
home.
Lertora works with small, private
landowners as well as industrial tim-
ber owners to set up logging plans and
make sure forestry rules are followed.
After the storms hit, she met people who
told her they’d just bought their prop-
erty. There were trees down everywhere.
What should they do? What was the tim-
ber worth? For some people, the wind
uprooted their retirement plan.
Lertora’s boss said, “Take a drive and
see how far you can get.”
She made it as far as what was then the
Weyerhaeuser office in Seaside, land now
managed by GreenWood Resources. She
asked the people there, “How bad is it out
on the forestlands?” They told her they
didn’t know. They couldn’t get a quarter
mile from the office to see.
Logging operations to clear out
downed wood occupied the local state
Department of Forestry into the next win-
ter. There’s still some timber out there,
stuck in places too difficult to reach.
As the storm died down, Bob Bing-
ham, Warrenton’s water treatment plant
superintendent, was trying to cut his way
through to reach the plant off Lewis and
Clark Road in Seaside. He had lost com-
munication with the facility about a day
and half into the storm. He wasn’t sure
if the backup generator was still keeping
the machinery running, or if pipes had
been damaged.
A crew of contractors with chainsaws
and logging equipment worked their way
slowly up the Lewis and Clark Road in
Seaside toward the logging road that led
to Warrenton’s plant. The trees fallen
across the road were big and laced with
downed power lines. Hours later, when
Bingham reached his destination, the
plant wasn’t running. The generator’s
400-gallon diesel gas tank was empty.
“We hadn’t had a real test on how long
it would run but I know now,” Bingham
said. “It’s two and quarter days.”
Scars
The way the community came together,
and the way government employees and
civilian volunteers mobilized, was inspir-
ing, said Johnson, Astoria’s city planner.
Since the storm, Clatsop and Pacific coun-
ties, and the cities up and down the North
Coast, have put even more resources and
plans in place.
“In the end, the storm had so many
positive things to really reinforce (to) the
people how strong we are together,” said
Mary Blake, former director for the Sun-
set Empire Park and Recreation District.
The storm helped many commu-
nities see the gaps in their emergency
preparations.
In Manzanita, just across the Clatsop
County line and where residents strug-
gled more with power loss than wind-re-
lated damage, the 2007 storm has some
competition. There was the Tillamook
County flood in 1996 when President Bill
Clinton declared a state of emergency. In
2016, a tornado cut through the middle of
Manzanita.
“In any year, Tillamook County can
have any manner of
emergencies or disas-
STORM FACTS:
ters,” said David
$1.18 billion in
Dillon, board secre-
regional property
tary for the Emer-
damage
gency Volunteer
Corps of Nehalem
Bay.
What the 2007 storm did, however,
was sharpen locals’ awareness of their
isolation, he said. The storm was the cat-
alyst that focused community emergency
preparedness efforts and ultimately led to
the formation of groups like the Volunteer
Corps.
“Our emergency response had been
geared for a Cascadia earthquake and tsu-
nami, with the idea that if we prepared for
that we would cover the other hazards,”
said Jay Raskin, an architect and, in 2007,
the mayor of Cannon Beach. “The storm
taught us that different hazards require
different responses.”
But, Johnson said, “We’re human. The
longer it is away from an event, the more
it gets forgotten and takes a back seat.”
At the eastern edge of Astoria, there is
a reminder — in case anyone forgets —
of what swept through here a decade ago.
In the woods around the Emerald Heights
apartment complexes stand the trunks of
trees whose tops were snapped off by the
wind.
“It’s a scar,” Johnson said, “that is still
very visible.”
Reporter Brenna Visser, Seaside Sig-
nal and Cannon Beach Gazette Editor
R.J. Marx and Chinook Observer Editor
Matt Winters contributed to this story.
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and after the Storm of 2007 ?
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