WARRENTON FIRE DEPARTMENT
PERFORMS A CONTROLLED BURN
PHOTO FEATURE | PAGE 4A
DailyAstorian.com // FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 2018
145TH YEAR, NO. 194
TOURISM | EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS
‘Hit and
miss’
Photos by Colin Murphey/The Daily Astorian
A sign posted on the seawall at The Waves hotel in Cannon Beach lets guests and others know where to go in case of
a tsunami.
ONE DOLLAR
Bonamici
tackles guns,
safety, more
at town hall
Congresswoman
speaks at Astoria High
By EDWARD STRATTON
The Daily Astorian
Guns and safety headlined a town hall
Thursday with U.S. Rep Suzanne Bonamici
at Astoria High School.
A small crowd turned out for the discus-
sion, the congresswoman’s sixth this month
during a spring tour of her district in North-
west Oregon. She started out thanking Asto-
ria sophomores Isabel Tal-
ley and Kegan Rascoe, who
handed her a stack of 78
signed form letters from
students and staff calling
for more federal funding to
improve school safety.
The letters specifically
Suzanne
called for federal money
Bonamici
to provide better cameras,
automatically locking doors and bulletproof
glass for inner school doors.
On her congressional website, Bonamici
mentions her support for reinstating the fed-
eral ban on military-style assault weapons
that was in place from 1994 to 2004, point-
ing out their use in recent mass shootings.
Beginning a back-and-forth with Bonamici,
Ken Ellsworth of Warrenton asked how she
defines assault weapons.
“I’m not myself defining assault weap-
ons,” the Oregon Democrat said. “What
I think we should do is look at the assault
weapons ban that was in effect for 10 years
and … figure out if that’s something that’s
going to keep our community safe.”
See BONAMICI, Page 8A
Local hospitality leaders tackle
emergency preparedness
Odd Fellows
Building now
off the market
By BRENNA VISSER
The Daily Astorian
A
fter the devastating earthquake in Japan in
2011 that spurred tsunami fears across the
Pacific, Linda Beck-Sweeney remembers
driving through Cannon Beach and knocking
on the doors of her dozens of rental properties to make
sure guests knew about the evacuation.
Her urgency was an example of the often unique and
challenging relationship between the hospitality indus-
try and emergency preparedness.
In the past few years, the topic has evolved from
taboo into must-do as communities on the North Coast
wrestle with the growth in tourism and greater tsunami
awareness.
But emergency planning is a balancing act, with
obstacles for commerce at many turns. How do you
educate people about the risks of a disaster without
scaring travelers away?
“(The threat of a tsunami) is something we’ve been
aware of for a long time,” said Beck-Sweeney, of Can-
non Beach Vacation Rentals. “We want to give them
the best information we have. Because informed is bet-
ter than fearful.”
See HOSPITALITY, Page 8A
By KATIE FRANKOWICZ
The Daily Astorian
An employee at The Waves hotel in Cannon Beach holds up an
example of the tsunami evacuation information in guest rooms.
“We can tell hotels they should have resources, but then
those supplies need to be maintained and purchased —
another cost in an already difficult industry.”
Althea Rizzo | Oregon Office of Emergency Management
The Odd Fellows Building in downtown
Astoria is in local hands.
Jessamyn West, executive director of
the Astoria Arts and Movement Center,
which uses the historic building’s ballroom
for exercise and dance classes and commu-
nity events, and Andrea Mazzarella, a real
estate agent and the center’s board president,
closed the sale Thursday.
Together with Mazzarella’s mother, Nancy
Mazzarella-Tisch, the women make up the
newly-formed Astoria Odd Fellows, LLC.
The nearly 100-year-old building was
listed for $575,000 and sold for around
$425,000. West and Mazzarella estimate
they face about $260,000 worth of repairs,
not including major updates to plumbing or
See BUILDING, Page 9A
From Bigfoot and butterflies to poetry
Author speaks at
Columbia Forum
By KATIE FRANKOWICZ
The Daily Astorian
After years of being known for Bigfoot
and butterflies, author and professional lepi-
dopterist Robert Michael Pyle is now a poet.
Or, rather, he has always written poetry
— from a fourth-grade poem about animals
in the forest (“In the forest lives a bear, he
looks like a hunk of hair”) to his two pub-
lished collections — but writing poems has
taken on a new significance.
“I’d say they’re the heart of my writ-
ing now,” he said Thursday at the Colum-
bia Forum.
Pyle is best known for his natural his-
tory writing and nonfiction: the handbooks,
essays and books on butterflies; “Winter-
green,” a series of essays about the land-
scape and wildlife of Washington state’s
Willapa Hills region; “Where Bigfoot
Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide,” a book
about Sasquatch first published in 1995,
rereleased last year to include updated
information.
But poetry and science, poetry and prose,
go together, he told an audience at Colum-
bia Memorial Hospital’s Community Cen-
ter. Poetry just gets there faster. A poem can
be “a quick response to any event or aspect
of life, for which prose takes just too damn
long to write or to read,” he said.
Though, he added, “a good poem can
take as long to get right as a long essay.”
Joshua Bessex/The Daily Astorian
See PYLE, Page 9A
Robert Pyle, author and professional lepidopterist, spoke about
poetry Thursday night at the Columbia Forum.