6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2017
Neighbor: Carreras has
fallen in love with Astoria
Continued from Page 1A
something. You are making
something and you’re respon-
sible for that and it’s going out
and people are trying it. People
are liking it. … You’re there to
see them experience it. It’s sort
of like theater. It’s live.”
Carreras should know.
She majored in foreign lan-
guages, but she minored in
theater. Even though she was
an introverted kid, she always
loved live theater. In college,
she was drawn to characters
with intense emotions, strong
women who didn’t take any-
thing away from those around
them but who also didn’t let
others take them. She learned
from the characters.
“For me, (theater) is ther-
apy,” Carreras said, “It’s a
reflection of reality. You get
to see all these characters on
stage and you may find your-
self in one of them and you
may be going through some-
thing similar. You basically see
all the options presented.”
Carreras fell in love with
the idea of learning other lan-
guages during a trip to Italy
and Spain in high school. She
is now fluent in four languages
and is interested in tackling
French, Greek and Latin.
“(Learning
languages),
your voice changes,” she said.
“There are studies that say even
your personality changes a lit-
tle bit. … There’s always this
debate about what came first:
language or thought. You talk to
yourself, you think to yourself.
It’s very interesting how once
you learn different languages,
and you know a couple, you
really get to understand how it
really does build the psyche.”
She cannot remember a time
when she did not speak English,
even though her parents don’t
speak the language. She thinks
she became so inadvertently pro-
ficient because of cartoons and
story books, but she honestly
isn’t sure. Until English-speak-
ing tourists asked if English was
her first language, she didn’t
realized she spoke it so well.
Communication
threads
many of her interests together,
that desire to connect and
understand and express. She’s
figuring out what that means in
a small city where she feels vis-
ible in a new way. She doesn’t
consider the move permanent,
but she has fallen in love with
Astoria. One day she was walk-
ing along the Riverwalk, look-
ing out at the water. She felt
fully at peace. Her mind was
quiet for the first time in a long
time, she said. She felt like time
froze.
Lockett: Said he was not aware
student was living alone with teacher
Continued from Page 1A
Lockett’s decision not
to take action, the commis-
sion found, “demonstrates an
extreme lack of professional
judgment and leadership and
shows serious and material inat-
tention to his responsibilities as
principal of Astoria H.S.”
But the appeals court ruled
that the commission did not
detail why Lockett’s inaction
was a lapse in judgment or
what Lockett should have done
given the circumstances.
The appeals court found that
the commission did not explain
the professional expectations
they used to measure Lock-
ett’s conduct. “For an order to
be supported by substantial rea-
son, the agency’s opinion must
demonstrate the reasoning that
leads the agency from the facts
to the conclusion,” the court
opinion held. “Here, that path is
missing a link.”
Lockett told The Orego-
nian Thursday that he was
not aware the student was liv-
ing alone with the teacher and
would have taken action had he
known. “That’s a no brainer,”
he told the newspaper. “Any
administrator in any school
district, when exposed to that
information, would immedi-
ately come forward and do
something.”
Firefighters: Bond formed was invaluable
Continued from Page 1A
Fire Chief Ron Tyson of
the Olney Walluski Fire &
Rescue District, Amy Lenz,
Dallas Ritchie and Justin
Perdew of the Knappa Fire
District, Brandin Smith and
Flint Helligso of the Lewis
& Clark Fire Department,
Tanner Rich and Angels
Perez of the Gearhart Vol-
unteer Fire Department,
Chris Dugan, Lt. Genesee
Dennis and firefighter Katie
Bulletset of the Seaside
Fire Department, and Can-
non Beach Fire Chief Matt
Benedict all returned home
safely Dec. 20 in time for
Christmas.
This is the third time
Clatsop County firefight-
ers have been sent this
year to combat blazes out-
side of their jurisdiction —
an anomaly for the region.
The next most active sum-
mer was in 2015. Personnel
were sent out only sparingly
before then.
“If we’re getting called
out all the way out here, I
thought, how bad is it down
there?” Rich said. “But
I was excited to have an
opportunity to help.”
‘We were all one’
While on the scene,
Clatsop County firefighters
were tasked with protect-
ing homes, putting out hot
spots and building fire lines
to prevent the inferno from
swallowing some of the
ritziest neighborhoods near
Los Angeles. Crew mem-
bers trimmed back foliage
and set sprinklers around
houses to beat back grow-
ing flames.
Olney Fire Chief Tyson
has been in the business of
battling blazes in Oregon
since 1986, and has seen
a number of wildland fire
deployments. But firefight-
ing in Southern Califor-
nia, where rain hasn’t fallen
since last February, brought
unique challenges.
“When we went to Sis-
ters, you could tell they
built homes with fire safety
in mind. They had backup
energy in case the power
went out to run the sprin-
AP Photo/Noah Berger
A motorist on Highway 101 watches flames from the Thomas fire leap above the roadway
north of Ventura, Calif., on Dec. 6.
Feeling the gratitude
klers, they didn’t have stuff
growing up by the house,”
Tyson said. “But (in Califor-
nia), the yards are full of dry
brush litter for mulch, and
plants were growing right up
by the house. It made our jobs
harder, for sure.”
What also made this
deployment special was the
camaraderie of the group,
Tyson said. The crew worked
24-hour shifts, judiciously
monitoring perimeters and
putting out hot spots before
they evolved into flames. The
days were long and tiring, with
members taking turns napping
in the fire engines. The news
of a California firefighter los-
ing his life in the same fire they
were fighting dampened every-
one’s spirit.
But the bond they formed
was invaluable to get through.
“If you are going to get
deployed with anyone, this is
the group to get. We had so
much fun, but we took it real
serious, too,” he said.
Gearhart volunteer Garcia
said the bond crews build is
one of her favorite aspects of
being deployed on larger fires.
“People were encourag-
ing each other, taking care of
each other. What I love is that
we were all one — not just fire-
fighters from Gearhart, Sea-
side, Lewis and Clark, et cet-
era. Those hardworking days
and nights, because of the atti-
tude, didn’t seem as hard.”
Garcia started firefight-
ing five years ago at Colum-
bia River Fire Department, and
just this year served on three
task forces to different Oregon
and California fires.
“I just wanted to be apart
of something and make a dif-
ference. That’s how I started,”
Garcia said.
But what has kept her going
five years later — even with the
long, cold nights of patrol and
the feeling of missing her four
children back at home — is the
feeling the gratitude of the peo-
ple she protects, she said.
“It’s hard to put it into
words. It’s different than on
TV,” Garcia said. “You feel the
heat of the flames, you feel the
worry of these people, but you
also feel the gratitude.”
Signs championing fire-
fighters and encouraging mes-
sages from locals and family
were some ways they felt that
gratitude, said Dugan, Sea-
side’s fire division chief.
But one homeowner, still
diligently moving his sprin-
kler around his property day in
and day out after everyone had
evacuated, stood out.
“He said he was a blue-col-
lar guy, not like the rest of the
multimillion-dollar homes that
were around him. He was an
electrician with a small avo-
cado grove behind their house,
and we were assigned to pro-
tecting his home,” Dugan said.
“He told us this is all he had
— he spent his whole life get-
ting it. He was so grateful when
we told him we were going to
give him a break from protect-
ing it.”
Piece of the puzzle
In the abstract, knowing he
was fighting a fire that easily
could be the equivalent of the
distance to Astoria from Sea-
side was daunting, Dugan said.
But in the day-to-day tedium
of tasks, sometimes that awe is
lost in translation.
“I was talking to someone
on the crew who felt like in the
middle of it we weren’t doing
a whole lot. We weren’t on the
front lines,” Dugan said. “But
the Thomas fire is a 10,000-
piece puzzle. Maybe we were
just one piece, a blue sky piece,
but without it the whole puz-
zle doesn’t work. That’s what
we did.”
There’s a lot to learn from
this year’s deployments,
both Dugan and Tyson said.
While local departments hold
semi-regular wildland fire
trainings, experiences like this
can only prepare local forces
better for events in their own
backyard.
“Most of these areas hadn’t
seen fires for 80, 100 years,”
Tyson said. “The lesson is
don’t get complacent just
because we haven’t had a fire
like this. Because they hadn’t
either.”
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