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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, JANUARY 29, 2018
editor@dailyastorian.com
KARI BORGEN
Publisher
Founded in 1873
JIM VAN NOSTRAND
Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN
Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM
Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN
Production Manager
CARL EARL
Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
Astoria Warehousing loss will be deeply felt
T
he large metal buildings at 70
West Marine Drive have roots
that reach into the heyday of
Astoria’s salmon packing industry, start-
ing with the Elmore Cannery in 1881. In
the postwar years, American Can’s name
identified later structures as a vital cog
in a waterfront that still buzzed with fish
processing and canning.
Today the name is Astoria
Warehousing and the facility is used to
receive, store and label Alaska salmon
— up to 72 million cans at any one time.
Recently we learned that this company’s
corporate parent will shortly lay off 25
workers and close the facility.
The logical, expected transition is that
this link to the fishing-based economy
will morph into the tourism industry, as a
hotel property.
At the top of the corporate chain that
owns Astoria Warehousing is Cooke
Aquaculture, a Canadian-based corpo-
ration recently in the news when a net
pen broke and released tens of thousands
of non-native Atlantic salmon in Puget
Sound.
When this newspaper asked Cooke
to say something about its decision to
close Astoria Warehousing, the com-
pany declined. In 2018, that is surpris-
ing corporate behavior. Crisis manage-
ment experts are a staple in the corporate
world. They fashion responses to dif-
ficult situations such as this. By say-
ing nothing, Cooke insults Astorians
and its own hardworking employees.
Moreover, it seems to imply corporate
embarrassment.
Considering recent trends on the
waterfront, it’s easy to imagine that
Astoria Warehousing’s extremely sce-
nic site will one day be converted to a
tourism-sector use. It is lamentable to
lose blue-collar jobs. There will be a gap
before any hospitality employment is
developed — if that is indeed Cooke’s
endgame — and the wages may or may
not be comparable. Plus, warehousing/
fish-processing skills are perhaps not a
natural fit for the positions likely to be
created.
Astoria has long expressed a com-
mitment to maintaining whatever it can
from the city’s industrial heritage. Even
though its facilities are not an architec-
tural gem, Astoria Warehousing has been
a valued contributor to our economic
mix, with genuine ties to the once-flour-
ishing activities that brought families
here in the first place. It will be sad to
see it go. Its employees are a tight-knit
family of their own, by all accounts —
longtime workers, many of whom have
dedicated decades to making the enter-
prise work. The loss of those jobs will
have a ripple effect throughout our
community.
Until recently, Astoria Warehousing’s
parent companies were Bellevue,
Washington-based Peter Pan Seafoods
and Seattle-based Icicle Seafoods. Their
acquisition by Cooke is part of a trend
toward consolidation in the fish indus-
try. This pattern has been going on a long
time — most notably here in 1964 when
Bumble Bee Seafoods was absorbed by
a multinational corporation that moved
Bumble Bee’s headquarters to California
in 1975. As with Oregon-based
Willamette Industries’ 2002 hostile buy-
out by Weyerhaeuser, the loss of Bumble
Bee’s once-strong connections to Oregon
was a hard economic blow that also sig-
naled the shredding of a generous cor-
porate culture that gave to local charities
and robustly participated in civic life.
The most commonly held attitude
toward the absence of local loyalty by
multinational companies is that they are
beyond influence — that trying to make
a positive difference in bucking these
trends is like spitting into one of our
sou’wester storms. There is much evi-
dence that suggests the American people
are tiring of such powerlessness.
SOUTHERN EXPOSURE
The schoolchildren who died in Japan’s tsunami
W
hen schools or public insti-
tutions put together a safety
manual, most of the time —
usually all the time — they remain on the
shelf. That’s fine, as long as the shelf is
still standing when the Big One hits.
When an earthquake struck Japan on
March 11, 2011, the staff and students
of Okawa Elementary School should
have been prepared. The school, on the
Japanese Pacific Coast about 200 miles
north of Tokyo, followed a manual that
should have told students and staff what
to do. The plan should have told them to
evacuate to neighboring high ground, not
to a field standing at sea
level.
The event was one
of many catastrophic
moments in a day that
saw homes and cities
destroyed, cars swept
into the sea and the
R.J. MARX catastrophic failure of
the nuclear power plant
in Fukushima. Roughly 18,500 people
perished in the tsunami.
“Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and
Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone,” focuses
on the lives of those who survived and
those who did not.
Author Richard Lloyd Parry traces
the path of parents as they painstaking
dig through remains, day after day
for months and sometimes even years
searching for any remnant of their child.
The author follows a long and tangled
web of bureaucracy designed to deflect
public responsibility. And it considers
the human toll in a deeply spiritual land
where ghosts inhabit the landscape as
surely as the living.
‘O-tsunami’
The shaking began at 2:46 p.m.
In Tokyo, where the author lived, the
vibrations lasted for six minutes. “The
chinking of the blinds, the buzzing of
the glass, and the deep rocking motion
generated an atmosphere of dreamlike
unreality,” Parry writes.
In Okawa, the “shaking was so strong
I couldn’t stand up,” one mother recalled.
“Even outside, crouching down, we were
almost all falling over.”
Electric lines swayed — “It was as if
the whole world was collapsing.”
Then came the tsunami warnings.
While power was out, trucks drove
throughout the region blasting tsunami
alerts. An “O-tsunami,” translated as
“super tsunami,” was headed toward
‘Ghosts of the Tsunami’
Richard Lloyd Parry
‘Ghosts of the Tsunami:
Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone,’
focuses on the lives of those who
survived and those who did not.
But when tsunami warnings blared, “the
teachers could have foreseen the coming
of a huge tsunami to Okawa Elementary
School,” the court wrote.
During the subsequent trial, inadequa-
cies in the school’s evacuation plan were
uncovered.
The place of evacuation chosen
was inappropriate and administrators
unprepared. Despite the screams of older
children who knew the risks of the tsu-
nami, teachers kept children on flat land
rather than releasing them to a nearby
unobstructed hill. Only those few chil-
dren who fled to higher ground survived.
Those who didn’t were slaughtered in the
wave.
“Teachers at the school were psy-
chologically unable to accept that they
were facing imminent danger,” the court
found.
It concluded that the deaths arose
because the evacuation of the playground
was delayed. Children and teachers
eventually fled toward the tsunami, not
away from it.
The Okawa parents won a $13.4
million settlement. It was a gratifying
moment for the families but a hollow
victory.
“All their children were still dead,”
writes Parry.
Facing disaster
Onagawa, a fishing port to the south.
The concrete elementary school was
immediately in front of a 700-foot hill.
Two hundred people, locals and children,
sheltered in the school, cut off and await-
ing rescue.
For most, rescue never came.
Two days later, the school was
“cocooned in a spiky, angular mesh of
interlocking fragments, large and small”
— tree trunks, the joists of houses, boats,
beds, bicycles, sheds and refrigerators.
Buildings nearby “had ceased to
exist.”
“Everything had disappeared,”
recalled a survivor. “It was as if an
atomic bomb had fallen.”
At the school, it was a scene of
tragedy. The road and the houses were
“washed from the earth.”
“What stays in my memory,” a local
resident told Parry, “is pine trees and the
legs and arms of children sticking out
from under the mud and the rubbish.”
Of the elementary school’s 108 chil-
dren, 78 were there at the moment of the
tsunami. Seventy-four of those died; 10
of 11 teachers perished.
“Ghosts of the Tsunami” traces the
devastation inflicted by the tsunami — its
human toll foremost — the search for
survivors and painstaking and thankless
task of identifying victims.
“No one was just looking for his
own friends or grandchildren,” wrote
a survivor. “We were pulling everyone
out, whoever they were. Every man was
weeping as he worked.”
Survivors wondered: What had been
going on at the school in the period
between the earthquake and the wave?
Why didn’t students and staff run to the
hill nearby? Why did they have to die?
Court case
In a country where such lawsuits
are uncommon, 19 families brought
their case to the Sendai District Court.
In an 87-page final judgment, the court
surveyed in detail the actions taken by
the teachers and found no fault in their
behavior immediately after the quake.
If Japan is “the safest place you could
hope to be” after an earthquake, accord-
ing to Parry, what could happen here?
Fifty-four percent of those who per-
ished as a result of the Japanese tsunami
of 2011 were age 65 and older, “and the
older you were, the worse your chances,”
Parry writes.
How can we take safety measures
that address the needs of children in
classrooms, but the elderly, the physically
challenged and the thousands of coastal
visitors?
“Ghosts of the Tsunami” is an import-
ant read for those of us considering not
only the need for tsunami protections, but
to meet the human — psychic and spiri-
tual — needs in a disaster’s aftermath.
“Over the months, I’d become
accustomed to hearing the stories of
survivors,” relates Taio Kaneta, a
Buddhist priest, in the book’s concluding
pages. “But all of a sudden, I found
myself listening to the voices of the
dead.”
R.J. Marx is The Daily Astorian’s South
County reporter and editor of the Seaside
Signal and Cannon Beach Gazette.
Wikimedia Commons
Okawa Elementary School, one year after the tsunami. Officials preserved the shell of the school in 2017 as a reminder of the 2011 tsunami.