4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, JANUARY 26, 2018
editor@dailyastorian.com
KARI BORGEN
Publisher
JIM VAN NOSTRAND
Editor
Founded in 1873
JEREMY FELDMAN
Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM
Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN
Production Manager
CARL EARL
Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
Crabbers deserve support, encouragement
A
look back at several years
of news about the Columbia
River Dungeness crab industry
highlights trends and problems that need
a better-coordinated response.
The past several crab seasons can’t
be described as all bad. For exam-
ple, as recently as 2014-15, ex-vessel
prices reached $4.50 a pound to fish-
ermen in December, spiking to $9 just
before Asian new year celebrations.
Levels of the marine toxin domoic
acid, which have occasionally been
elevated, have not appeared to shake
consumer confidence in crab. They
remain a coveted culinary treat on both
sides of the Pacific Ocean. Crabbers in
Washington and Oregon totaled $52.4
million in sales last year; crab remain a
bright spot for the commercial fishing
industry.
Poke into this rosy picture a little,
however, and serious concerns emerge.
This season is the second in a row
in which independent crab boat owners
and operators have attempted, unsuc-
cessfully, to exercise cooperative lever-
age to win better prices from processors.
In both years, weeks of unrelated delays
beyond the traditional Dec. 1 start left
most crabbers in a weakened posi-
tion. Plenty of family budgets are built
around the assumption that some of the
year’s biggest paydays will start refilling
bank accounts from December through
about February.
There are pragmatic limits to how
much financial pain crabbing families
can bear. This year, crabbers in Newport
earned a black eye among their peers for
buckling at $2.75 a pound at the start of
this week and taking to sea. But a great
many crabbers elsewhere on the coast
were also at their breaking point. Early
Luke Whittaker/Chinook Observer
Skipper Florian Mumford, above, and deckhand Andrew Glenn waited for weather and
bar conditions before heading out earlier this week from the Port of Ilwaco. ‘We’re play-
ing it safe,’ Mumford said. ‘The weather has been kind of marginal.’
indications are that even $2.75 isn’t a
sure-thing price this week.
Continuing consolidation on the
processing side puts a lot of power
in few hands. Capitalism works best
when there is near-parity in bargain-
ing strength among all the players in a
product supply chain. There clearly is an
imbalance now when it comes to crab.
Antitrust allegations notwithstanding,
the overall trend in West Coast seafood
has for years been heading toward fewer
and larger firms. This was true even in
the 19th century, when overcapacity led
to bankruptcy for many salmon can-
ners and the merger of others into the
Columbia River Packers Association,
which became Bumble Bee.
To the extent enough Americans care
to buck this sort of trend, legal action
is a possibility, as it was in President
Theodore Roosevelt’s time. A private
economic response also is possible —
for example, by forming fishermen’s
cooperative associations and by con-
sumers supporting surviving communi-
ty-based processing operations.
Environmental factors — warm-
ing water, changing ocean chemis-
try, invasive species and harmful algal
blooms that generate marine toxins —
all make crab seasons less certain than
they once were. This season, weeks
of delay resulted from too many male
crabs developing meat too slowly. More
scientific research and monitoring are
warranted, and deserve both private
and public funding. We need to better
understand what is happening, in order
to develop ways to mitigate the dam-
age. More regulatory flexibility may be
part of the answer, in the sense that sea-
son timing and geographical placement
could benefit from faster adjustments.
The aging of the fleet — prob-
lems with generational transfers of
equipment, permits and expertise —
demands smart and immediate response.
Legislative fixes will be required in
some cases, along with more creative
financing options, to facilitate bank
financing of transfers.
Crabbers resent and distrust outside
efforts to intervene in how the fishery
is conducted. Deference is warranted
in such a specialized field. However,
it must be wondered whether there are
ways to improve crabbing’s cost/benefit
ratio. It is inherently hazardous to make
a mad dash out into the wild Pacific
over one of the world’s most notorious
river bars in the middle of storm season.
Safety remains a key consideration in
this highly dangerous fishery. We want
our crabbers to come home to their fam-
ilies. Regulators and the industry must
continue seeking ways to minimize risks
and maximize local economic benefits.
The West Coast’s Tristate manage-
ment regime still needs work to ensure
fair shares of the resource between dif-
ferent sizes of vessels and different
zones of the coast. Here in the prime
crabbing grounds at the mouth of the
Columbia, we have a legitimate inter-
est in ensuring that locally based boats
get a fair crack at local crab. Tribal fish-
ing areas, marine preserves and pos-
sible changes associated with marine
spatial planning all force Columbia
crabbers into a relatively small area.
Management decisions must not be per-
mitted to make life even more difficult
than it is already is.
This list could go on. For now, suf-
fice it to say that the smart, courageous,
hardworking crabbers working out of
Clatsop and Pacific county ports deserve
support and encouragement from all of
us.
GUEST COLUMN
Next monster earthquake is long overdue
T
oday marks the 318th anniversary of
the most recent monster earthquake on
the Cascadia Subduction Zone. In the
past 6,000 years or so, these quakes of mag-
nitude 8 or 9 have occurred every 202 years,
on average. Only once in that period of time
has the interval between quakes exceeded 250
years, so the pressure in the fault has been
growing for a very long time.
In a way, we’ve been lucky to have
avoided this devastating quake and its accom-
panying tsunami for so long. We’ve had the
opportunity to strengthen our
lifelines — roads, bridges,
electrical grids, water and
wastewater systems, fuel
storage depots — against the
damage the quake can cause.
But in another way, we’ve
been
unlucky. We didn’t
STEVE
ROBINSON realize until about 30 years
ago that the subduction zone
was even an active fault,
let alone one capable
of producing the worst
natural disaster to hit North
America in modern times.
As a result, our building
standards were not strong
enough to withstand it.
That means we expect
that roads will be blocked
by thousands of bridge
failures and landslides.
Many critical public
buildings, businesses,
houses, and the other
lifeline systems will likely
fail. Especially vulnera-
ble are the hundreds of
unreinforced masonry
buildings that contain both
businesses and multifamily
apartments.
We can hope it’s not too late to avoid the
worst of this impending catastrophe. But
survival as a society and prosperous econ-
omy will require rapid expansion of effort
from residents, businesses and government
agencies. That’s why we formed Cascadia
Prepared as a nonprofit, tax-exempt organi-
zation about a year ago as a private-sector
force to encourage and assist effective
resilience-building efforts from all corners
throughout our region — from British
Columbia all the way to Northern California.
We’re working with the Seattle-Based
Cascadia Region Earthquake Workgroup, the
Oregon Emergency Management Association,
and many others to develop resilience pro-
grams and increase public awareness of this
existential threat.
Please don’t assume that first responders
have the situation under control. In 2016,
the “Cascadia Rising” exercise, designed to
simulate and test regional response to a 9.0
earthquake, showed that the federal, state and
local agencies we trust to handle emergencies
will be overwhelmed by the huge number
of people who are injured or stranded by the
subduction zone event.
What can you do? It’s critically important
that all organizations and private homes have
survival plans that include enough emergency
food and water to keep everyone on site alive
for 14 days. We should all have “go bags”
in our vehicles and homes containing other
emergency gear. Cascadia
Prepared’s website (bit.ly/
cascadiagobag) will give
you many ideas about how
to get ready, including
what kinds of items to put
into your go bags.
We should also all live
and work in buildings that
won’t fall down when the
quake hits. If your building
was constructed before
2000 and you’re not posi-
tive it is seismically sound,
it may be worth having an
inspection to determine
whether retrofitting is
needed to ensure your very
survival.
We can do this! The
steps we need to take indi-
vidually and collectively are well-documented
and easy to understand. It will just take a bit
of planning, a modest investment of time
and money, and a willingness to prepare for
uncertain threats. Join friends and neighbors
in asking a bit more of ourselves, our employ-
ers, and our public agencies as we get ready to
preserve our way of life.
Steve Robinson is president of Cascadia
Prepared, an organization helping our region
get ready for the next big earthquake. He can
be reached at steve@cprep.org.
Join friends and
neighbors in
asking a bit more
of ourselves,
our employers,
and our public
agencies as we get
ready to preserve
our way of life.
AP Photo/Gillian Flaccus
Portland Fire Department training recruits use a forklift in 2016 to hoist dummies to the
top of a six-story tower for a simulated rescue for Cascadia Rising, a multiday and mul-
tiagency tsunami and earthquake drill in Oregon and Washington state.
AP Photo/Ted S. Warren
The Washington Army National Guard demonstrates a decontamination station for peo-
ple and vehicles during the 2016 Cascadia Rising exercise.