A2
THE ASTORIAN • SATURDAY, JANUARY 22, 2022
Offi cials look to address chronic fl ooding
IN BRIEF
Seaside man sentenced to prison
for role in fatal crash
A Seaside man was sentenced to more than nine years
in prison for his role in a 2021 crash that left a baby dead.
Rony Evelio Tomas-Garcia, 24, was sentenced in
Circuit Court on Thursday to 110 months in prison for
manslaughter in the second degree, assault in the second
degree and driving under the infl uence of intoxicants.
On Feb. 15, 2021, Tomas-Garcia was driving on
Ecola State Park Road with two passengers: Esperanza
Martin-Ramirez and her daughter, Kenia, 3 1/2 months.
The car went off the road and fl ipped over.
Kenia died at the scene. Martin-Ramirez suff ered
serious injuries.
Seaside man sentenced
to prison for kidnapping
A Seaside man was sentenced Friday to more than six
years in prison for kidnapping in the second degree and
being a felon in possession of a fi rearm.
Troy Wayne Skinner, 33, received a 50-month sen-
tence in Circuit Court for a kidnapping that occurred in
April 2020. For the same case, he had already served 18
months for unlawful use of a weapon.
Skinner got an additional 24 months for the fi rearm
charge from a December case.
State discloses virus cases at local schools
The Oregon Health Authority has disclosed two new
coronavirus cases at schools in Clatsop County.
Both cases were students, according to the health
authority’s weekly outbreak report. One case was from
Lewis and Clark Elementary School, while the other was
from Jewell School.
Transit district announces
Ridership Appreciation Day
The Sunset Empire Transportation District announced
that its annual Ridership Appreciation Day will be held
on Tuesday.
The transit district will off er free bus service on
all regular bus routes throughout Clatsop County as a
thanks to the community for its ongoing support.
The day will coincide with Project Homeless Con-
nect, which will be held at the Seaside Civic and Con-
vention Center on the same day from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
— The Astorian
Correction
Incorrect percentage — The Clatsop Enterprise
Zone off ers businesses tax breaks on new investment
in return for creating new jobs that pay at least 130%
of the average county wage. The percentage was incor-
rectly listed as 150% in A1 stories on Jan. 20 and Jan. 8.
ON THE RECORD
Encouraging child
conduct, unlawful sexual
On
the
Record
sexual
abuse
penetration in the sec-
ond degree, three counts
of unlawful sexual pene-
tration in the fi rst degree
and seven counts of sex-
ual abuse in the fi rst
degree.
The crimes are alleged
to have occurred in 2012,
2015, 2016 and 2021.
Menacing
• Cameron Darnell
Petteway, 33, of Steu-
benville, Ohio, was
arrested on Wednesday
at Walmart in Warrenton
for unlawful possession
of a weapon, menacing
and disorderly conduct
in the second degree.
He allegedly threatened
a store employee with a
knife.
PUBLIC MEETINGS
MONDAY
Warrenton Marinas Advisory Committee, 2 p.m., War-
renton Marina Offi ce, 501 N.E. Harbor Place.
Seaside City Council, 5 p.m., special meeting on camping
ordinance, City Hall, 989 Broadway.
Jewell School District Board, 6 p.m., Jewell School library,
83874 Oregon Highway 103.
Seaside City Council, 7 p.m., City Hall, 989 Broadway.
TUESDAY
Clatsop County Planning Commission and Countywide
Advisory Committee, 9 a.m., joint meeting, (electronic
meeting).
Sunset Empire Park and Recreation District Board of
Directors, 5:15 p.m., 1225 Ave. A, Seaside.
Astoria Planning Commission, 5:30 p.m., City Hall, 1095
Duane St.
Seaside Airport Advisory Committee, 6 p.m., City Hall,
989 Broadway.
Warrenton City Commission, 6 p.m., City Hall, 225 S. Main
Ave.
PUBLIC MEETINGS
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DailyAstorian.com
By R.J. MARX
The Astorian
SEASIDE — During this
month’s heavy rains, police
issued alerts for some vehi-
cles to avoid U.S. Highway
101 between the Cannon
Beach junction and Avenue
U in Seaside due to fl ooding
— a yearly issue.
“Guys, you know we had
a little bit of water,” Sea-
side Public Works Director
Dale McDowell said at the
City Council’s meeting ear-
lier this month. “Everybody
did a great job and all our
residents were patient. We
helped everybody that we
possibly could and I think
we did quite well.”
But the fl ooding that
occurs near Highway 101
by Circle Creek RV Resort
during heavy rains is some-
thing city offi cials hope
to address and possibly
mitigate.
Parts of Seaside fl ooded
during the recent storms.
With snow melt, rain swell-
ing the rivers and king tides,
the city had a lot of standing
water, McDowell said.
Near Circle Creek, rain
and snow melt made passage
diffi cult if not impossible.
“I do think it would be
interesting to have a con-
versation with the Oregon
Lydia Ely/The Astorian
Cars crossed a submerged section of U.S. Highway 101 south
of Seaside early this month.
Department of Transporta-
tion again concerning the
fl ooding that does take place
south of town,” City Man-
ager Mark Winstanley said.
Changes were made sev-
eral years back that lowered
the frequency and level of
fl ooding, “but it has obvi-
ously not solved the prob-
lem down south of town,”
Winstanley said.
In the 1970s, berms had
been built to hold back
the Necanicum River and
improve the land for devel-
opment, City Councilor Tom
Horning said.
Much of the seasonal
water was constrained by the
berm, but fl oodwaters could
not fl ow into the fi elds and
wetlands, and had nowhere
to go but across the highway,
causing delays and closures.
In 2013, the Depart-
ment of Transportation, the
county and North Coast
Land Conservancy com-
pleted remediation of a par-
cel of wetlands designed to
fl ood-proof the area of land
near Circle Creek.
While the Department
of Transportation acknowl-
edged the wetlands mitiga-
tion project would not stop
the highway from fl ooding
entirely, they hoped to sig-
nifi cantly reduce fl ooding by
allowing the water to drain
naturally onto the wetlands.
The removal of parts of
the berm along the west side
of the river on North Coast
Land Conservancy prop-
erty did solve a large part of
the fl ood problem, Horning
said.
“However, not all of
the berm was removed, so
not all of the problem was
fi xed,” Horning said. “It
stands to reason that the
remaining berm could be
removed to return the high-
way and river fl ooding to the
way they were in Novem-
ber 1972 when the fl ooding
really began in earnest.”
Its total removal should
restore that fl ooding section
of road to nearly dry, he said.
The fi xes in 2013 were
“both expensive and exten-
sive,” Winstanley said.
“Coming back and taking
a look at that again is some-
thing that would be inter-
esting,” he said. “It’s about
time for the city to engage
the Oregon Department of
Transportation again and see
whether they have any ideas
on how they might solve
that. We complain just like
anybody else would, but I
think we can see if we can’t
have some more conversa-
tion about that.”
City Councilor Steve
Wright, the Seaside board
member for the Northwest
Oregon Area Commission
on Transportation, brought
the issue to the group’s Jan-
uary meeting.
Group members were
responsive, he said, and will
look for a regional coalition.
“The areas that fl ood are
outside the city so a regional
agency seems a good place
to start,” Wright said. “We
need to keep working on
solutions. The problem
occurs less frequently but it
still shuts down 101.”
After Tonga eruption, a focus on Pacifi c Northwest volcanoes
By KALE WILLIAMS
The Oregonian
CORRECTION
• John Mark Dai-
ley, 61, of Seaside, was
arrested this week for
nine counts of encour-
aging child sexual abuse
in the fi rst degree and
nine counts of encourag-
ing child sexual abuse in
the second degree. The
crimes are alleged to have
occurred in October.
Rape
• Ronald Lee Har-
rod, 56, of Astoria,
was indicted on Thurs-
day for rape in the fi rst
degree, rape in the sec-
ond degree, sodomy in
the fi rst degree, sodomy
in the second degree,
using a child in a dis-
play of sexually explicit
Rain still impacts
section of
Highway 101
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The eruption of the Hunga
Tonga Hunga Ha’apai vol-
cano in the South Pacifi c
last week was brief, but
extremely powerful.
A mushroom cloud of
gasses and ash rose nearly
20 miles into the atmo-
sphere. The shockwave cre-
ated by the massive explo-
sion traveled around the
world twice and was report-
edly heard in Alaska, about
5,000 miles away. The blast
triggered tsunami warnings
across the Pacifi c Ocean.
The eruption only lasted
about 10 minutes but likely
triggered some longer intro-
spection for residents of the
Pacifi c Northwest, which is
dotted with volcanoes, both
active and dormant, onshore
and off . While the north-
west Pacifi c is home to one
of the world’s most active
undersea volcanoes, known
as the Axial Seamount, there
is little threat of a cataclys-
mic eruption like the one in
Tonga.
“There’s no real risk,”
said Bill Chadwick, an
Oregon State University
researcher who has been
studying volcanology in the
Pacifi c Northwest for the
past 30 years. “It’s pretty far
off shore, and it’s in pretty
deep water.”
That was far from the
case last weekend in Tonga.
The volcano sat at a depth
of just 650 feet, optimal for
creating a large explosion,
Shane Cronin, a volcanol-
ogy professor at the Univer-
sity of Auckland, told the
Associated Press.
When the pressure of
building magma and gasses
grew too great, the cone of
the Tonga volcano ruptured
and seawater fl ooded in and
met with molten rock. The
crack allowed the pressur-
ized gasses to expand rap-
idly, Cronin said, and the
water above vaporized in a
fl ash, steam augmenting the
already-towering mushroom
cloud.
At least three people are
confi rmed to have died in
Tonga, which is about 50
miles south of the eruption
site, and the ensuing tsu-
nami killed two people and
caused an oil spill in Peru.
Still, given the size of the
eruption, it’s relatively shal-
low depth and its proximity
The Axial Seamount, a 3,600-foot-tall active volcano, sits under about a mile of ocean water
300 miles west of Cannon Beach off the Oregon Coast.
to Tonga, experts have said
the damage was surprisingly
limited.
By contrast, the top of
the Axial Seamount, which
rises to just over 3,600 feet
tall about 300 miles west of
Cannon Beach, sits under
nearly a mile of ocean water.
You don’t have to look far
back in the history books to
fi nd an eruption, either. The
seamount has erupted sev-
eral times over the past cou-
ple decades, most recently in
2015.
The only way to actu-
ally detect an eruption of the
seamount, though, is with
technical instruments. The
volcano is so deep under-
water, Chadwick said, that
even if you were directly
over it during an eruption,
there would be no detectable
change at the surface, not
even a bubble.
“The deep ocean is very
secretive,” he said. “To
detect an eruption at Axial,
if you were over it in a ship,
you’d have to lower some
instruments down over the
side. Either something to
measure temperature or
chemical anomalies from
the hydrothermal plumes
being produced.”
The seamount sits over
a “hot spot” in the Earth’s
crust. As the tectonic plate
moves over the hot spot,
the ground is forced up. The
result has been a chain of
seamounts forming, much
like the Hawaiian islands.
Axial is the youngest and
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only active member of the
chain.
What it lacks in pyrotech-
nics, the Axial Seamount
more than makes up for in
research opportunities.
The seamount is home to
an array of sensors that mea-
sure geophysical, chemical
and biological changes on
the seafl oor and in the water
as well as cameras that cap-
ture images of the volcano,
all sent back to shore in real
time via undersea cable.
“It’s totally unique in the
world,” Chadwick said. “It’s
one of the most active sub-
marine volcanoes that we
know of, and it’s the best
monitored in the world.”
The volcano has provided
data that allowed research-
ers to predict its most recent
eruption seven months in
advance, which could hold
the key to forecasting erup-
tions on land, according to
Chadwick.
“During its eruptions,
Axial’s seafl oor drops sud-
denly by about 8 feet, and
then over the next several
years it gradually rises back
up,” he said. “When it rein-
fl ates to a certain level, the
volcano is almost ready to
erupt again.”
The seamount essentially
acts like a balloon, Chad-
wick said, except instead of
fi lling with air, the chamber
fi lls with molten rock.
Early predictions called
for another eruption some-
time in the fi rst half of
this decade, but the rate
of magma fi lling the sea-
mount has slowed recently,
Chadwick said. In his most
recent paper, published in
December, he and a team
of researchers pushed back
their forecast for an erup-
tion to the latter half of the
2020s.
The next time it does
go off , Chadwick and doz-
ens of researchers will be
poring over the data, look-
ing for clues they can apply
elsewhere so that those who
live near volcanoes that
pose very real threats, like
the people of Tonga, can be
better prepared next time
a more dangerous eruption
occurs.
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