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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (March 6, 2019)
BOYS HOOPS: Bucks get tough draw in quarterfinals | SPORTS, A8 E O AST 143rd year, no. 100 REGONIAN Wednesday, March 6, 2019 $1.50 WINNER OF THE 2018 ONPA GENERAL EXCELLENCE AWARD Legislature settles $1.3M harassment suit BOLI admits politicized investigation as lawmakers vow to fix problems INSIDE Senate president takes medical leave, Page A2 By AUBREY WIEBER AND CLAIRE WITHYCOMBE Oregon Capital Bureau saLeM — The Oregon Legis- lature will pay $1 million to nine victims of harassment at the Cap- itol, settling a complaint by state labor officials that has put a cloud over the 2019 session. In a deal announced Tuesday afternoon, legislative leaders also agreed to push harder and by cer- tain deadlines to reform work behavior at the Capitol. The settlement followed pri- vate talks between top legisla- tors and representatives from the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. The bureau said in January that it found substantial evidence that not only were employees and legis- lators themselves harassed, but that Senate President Peter Courtney and House Speaker Tina Kotek, as well as administrators responsible for responding to harassment alle- gations, were ineffective in han- dling their complaints. “We sincerely apologize to the women who suffered harm during their time in the Capitol,” Kotek and Courtney said in a joint statement. Eight women, not identi- fied in the settlement, will share in non-economic damages of amounts ranging up to $415,000. State Sen. Sara Gelser, D-Corval- lis, will get $26,000 for legal fees and other expenses but didn’t seek damages, according to the labor bureau. The legislature will pay that, but it wasn’t immediately clear where specifically that money will come from. The settlement was announced UNDERSTANDING WILDFIRES Research underway to study fire behavior in live fuels By GEORGE PLAVEN EO Media Group researchers are working to better understand how large wild- fires behave on the landscape. Wildfires last year in Ore- gon scorched 1,402 square miles — an area larger than Gilliam County — at a cost exceeding a half-billion dollars. The North- west Interagency Coordina- tion Center also reported people started 1,330 fires in Oregon that blackened 515 square miles and lightning started the other 689 wildfires, which burned across 887 square miles. Oregon’s total number of wild- fires dropped to 2,019 from the 2,049 in 2017, but wildfires that year burned a little more than 1,1167 square miles. The 1,743 wildfires in 2018 in Washington charred almost 686 square miles and cost nearly $174 million. The season before, Wash- ington had 1,346 wildfires across a total of 631.6 square miles. As fires grow in size, the U.S. Department of Defense is fund- ing a four-year, $2.1 million proj- ect through the agency’s Stra- tegic Environmental Research Development Program to study the burning of live trees. David Blunck, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Ore- gon State University, was chosen to lead the team. “Live fuels are basically trees that are green and living,” Blunck said. “These trees are often what torches, but historically, dead fuels have primarily been studied.” Studying live fuels is a newer area of wildfire research, Blunck said. In the past, research has focused mostly on burning char- acteristics of a single species at a specific time of year. The chal- lenge for fire managers is predict- ing how blazes will interact with a new fuel, in terms of ignition and burning. “We have a finite number of live fuels we’ve tested,” Blunck hours after Courtney said he was taking medical leave for 10 days, which his staff said wasn’t connected to the harassment settlement. The scope of harassment was put into full public view on Jan. 3 when then-Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian released the results of his months long investigation. But the settlement also required the labor bureau, now led by for- mer legislator Val Hoyle, to acknowledge its own investigation See Settlement, Page A7 Job vacancies in Eastern Oregon reflect growing area By JAYATI RAMAKRISHNAN East Oregonian EO file photo An Oregon Department of Forestry firefighter uses a hose line to douse some flames Sept. 20, 2018, while battling a fire on Cabbage Hill east of Pendleton. said. “Do you create a differ- ent model for each fuel? If I can create a model that’s predictive over a wide number of live fuels ... that model would be a lot more advantageous.” To achieve that model, Blunck theorizes that just a handful of processes cause differences in burning behavior when live fuels burn — including temperature and flammable gases given off by different trees. If researchers can understand what those are, they can better predict how new spe- cies will burn, Blunck said. Oregon State University will collaborate with the Forest Ser- vice on field work during con- trolled burns later this year. Lab- oratory samples will also be analyzed, burning pencil-sized tree limbs and shining lasers to determine which gases are given off. Blunck is also wrapping up another three-year study look- ing at how the live trees spread embers when they are engulfed in flames. In recent months, the team has burned more than 100 trees from 10 to 15 feet tall, including EO file photo A firefighting air tanker drops a load of fire retardant into a draw in Har- rington Canyon as a large wildfire burned out of control Aug. 17, 2018, southwest of Pilot Rock. Douglas fir, grand fir, western juniper and ponderosa pine. What they found, Blunck said, was ponderosa pine gave off the fewest total embers, while west- ern juniper gave off the most. That includes hot embers capable of starting new fires. “Embers are wildfires’ most unpredictable modes of causing spread,” he said. “By understand- ing how embers form and travel through the air, we can more accurately predict how fire will spread.” Ultimately, the goal of the research is for firefighting agen- cies to have better information when fighting fires, and when deciding whether or not to do a controlled burn as part of respon- sible forest management. Though eastern Oregon saw hundreds of vacancies in construc- tion, manufacturing, and natural resource jobs in 2018, a local econ- omist says it’s not because people are quitting their jobs, but rather because there’s more growth hap- pening in the area than before. Chris Rich, an economist with Oregon Employment Department, published a report on Monday enti- tled “Help Wanted in Eastern Ore- gon,” detailing the number of job vacancies in eight eastern Oregon counties in 2018. After mailing surveys to 1,300 employers on the east side of the state, OED heard back from about 520 employers. Rich reported that most industries are seeing fewer vacancies, and there has been a 29 percent drop in total job vacancies in the past year. The report stated that five spe- cific occupations accounted for about one-third of all vacancies in 2018: production and shipping, packaging and filling machine operators, and truck drivers. Rich noted that there are fewer vacan- cies in such as health care occupa- tions, community and social ser- vice jobs. But he said there have been more vacancies in food ser- vice and trade jobs, like construc- tion. Some industries reported more vacancies, such as finance, construction, leisure and hospi- tality, natural resources and min- ing. Rich said that’s likely due to increased activity in those industries. “These industries are recov- ering and expanding,” he said. “They’re starting to pick up in the area, especially in construction.” Similarly, he said, in leisure and hospitality, they’re starting to see more businesses such as restau- rants opening in the area. “I think for those specific See Jobs, Page A7 New leaders expand Campus Life offerings By JADE MCDOWELL East Oregonian Jeff and Ashley Umbarger know Campus Life can do good things. It’s where they met. The husband and wife duo have been leading the nonprofit, which provides wholesome activities and hangouts for teens, since September. But when they were teenagers themselves (Jeff grew up in Pendle- ton and Ashley grew up in Hermiston) they spent plenty of time in the blue metal-fabricated building across the street from Herm- iston High School. “It’s really cool that we’re here doing this, because there are so many stories we have here,” Jeff said. Jeff moved away after high school, but when he came back years later he looked Ashley up on social media and couldn’t believe she was still single. After asking a mutual friend to make sure she really was available, he asked her out for a day of four-wheeling and fishing. The rest, as they say, is history. Although they had ini- tially followed different career paths, both felt called by God to work with youth. They eventually ended up running Jubilee Leader- ship Academy, a Christian boarding school for trou- bled boys in “the middle of nowhere” near Prescott, Washington. The atmosphere there was different than Cam- pus Life — it was all boys, who were being forced to be there. But Ashley said a lot of the experience she and Jeff got at Jubilee has helped them better relate to the teens that hang out at Cam- pus Life. “We had a lot of training relating to kids with a lot of hurts, habits and hang-ups,” she said. Jeff said he learned to “look past the attitude” Staff photo by Jade McDowell See Teens, Page A7 Participants enjoy an icebreaker game at high school night in the Campus Life building on Monday.
