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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 22, 2019)
SOCCER: Pirates remain undefeated in EOL play | SPORTS, A8 E O AST 143rd Year, No. 263 REGONIAN TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2019 $1.50 WINNER OF THE 2019 ONPA GENERAL EXCELLENCE AWARD From small town boy to SPACE ENGINEER Morrow County ready to crack down on code violations Planning department envisions a full-time employee dedicated to code enforcement By JESSICA POLLARD East Oregonian Staff photo by Kathy Aney Retired NASA engineer Jim McBarron models an astronaut’s glove after a presentation to students Monday morning at Pendleton High School. NASA veteran started as test subject at Wright-Patterson AFB in 1958 By ANTONIO SIERRA East Oregonian P ENDELTON — Before intro- ducing retired NASA engineer Jim McBarron to the students assembled in the Pendleton High School auditorium Mon- day, organizer James Loftus said there were two types of people in life — those who looked at the sky and those that looked at the ground. It was meant as a metaphor, but McBarron did spend a chunk of his life looking at the ground. McBarron spent his career working on equipment for some of the country’s most important space missions, culmi- nating in a Presidential Medal of Free- dom from President Richard Nixon in 1971, but his undergraduate degree isn’t in aeronautics or engineering, but geology. The son of a restaurant owner and a nurse, McBarron grew up in Lima, a small town in Northwest Ohio. See Engineer, Page A7 Staff photo by Kathy Aney James Loftus holds out a thrust engine like ones used in command and lunar mod- ules. Loftus spoke to students Monday morning at Pendleton High School and is the son of a former NASA engineer. He runs a micro space museum at his cafe and bed-and-breakfast in Stayton. MORROW COUNTY — Morrow County is planning to ramp up on code enforcement in coming years, but plan- ners and law enforcement aren’t sure exactly how yet. County commission- ers approved the creation of a Code Enforcement Task Force in June, and since then, the group — comprised of members of the planning department, Matlack health and environmen- tal agencies as well as the sheriff’s offi ce — has met three times to smooth out the details. “We’re trying to create a fast way of contacting everyone who may play a part during a particular (code enforcement) issue,” said Morrow County Sheriff Ken- neth Matlack. He said this will likely mean the imple- mentation of a phone tree-type system to connect different agencies — from local health departments to the Department of Environmental Quality — in order to assure that code violations, such as over- grown weeds and abandoned vehicles, are addressed effi ciently. “We want to have a program that is applied consistently. Our core objective is livability,” said Carla McLane, direc- tor of the county’s planning department. Matlack said the county has seen a rise in code violations relating to peo- ple living in fi fth wheels and recreational vehicles. In Morrow County, living in an RV outside of a designated park is not allowed except under special circum- stances with county approval. According to last week’s meeting agenda, the task force is also interested in determining who should be account- able for violations — landowners or rent- ers — and addressing issues of animal density. Currently, code enforcement is han- dled through the sheriff’s offi ce in Mor- row County. One sheriff’s deputy devotes around 20 hours to the cause each week, while cities within the county put extra monetary resources into more code enforcement. “The big catalyst for the task force was that our system is more com- plaint-driven,” Matlack said.“We’d have a complaint, we’d go out and the violator would feel picked on because the neigh- bor across the street was doing the same thing. That’s not the way that we should do things.” Instead, Matlack and others on the See Code, Page A7 Record number of Oregonians participate in earthquake drill Nearly one-fi fth of state’s total population takes part in ‘The Great Oregon Shakeout’ By SAM STITES Oregon Capital Bureau SALEM — At 10:17 a.m. on a recent day, 396,834 students, teach- ers, administrators and at more than 400 schools across Oregon dropped to the fl oor, clambering under their desks. The same thing was happen- ing for 65,286 state and local gov- ernment offi cials from Portland to Medford. And then there were the 59,000 or so business employees who took a few minutes out of their day to par- ticipate in the record-breaking state- wide earthquake drill. The widespread practice estab- lished that Oregonians are not scoff- ing at the threat of natural disaster. In total, it’s estimated that 739,785 Oregonians — or about one-fi fth of the state’s population — participated in The Great Oregon Shakeout last Thursday, an annual event at bring- ing awareness to the real danger that earthquakes pose and training peo- ple how to prepare. For Oregonians, the numbers indicate that the reports of a poten- tially catastrophic Cascadia Subduc- tion Zone earthquake happening in the near future have galvanized the residents of this state to foster what the Oregon Military Department’s Offi ce of Emergency Management calls a “culture of preparedness.” According to state geologists, there’s a 37% chance that a 7.1 mag- nitude earthquake or higher will occur in our region within the next 50 years that would destroy homes and buildings, and upend infrastruc- ture, such as sewers, electricity and roadways. “It’s one thing for FEMA or the state, or counties to prepare like this, but we say ‘culture of preparedness’ because it really takes the entire community,” said Cory Grogan, Emergency Management spokes- man. “Everybody has to be doing their part for us to effectively be prepared.” Grogan said “the drill was a huge win.” And the more people that sign up for it, the more awareness we can create and to help foster that culture of preparedness the state is trying to build. The Offi ce of Emergency Man- agement is one of several state agen- cies that joins with the Southern Cal- ifornia Earthquake Center and U.S. Geological Survey to put on the event each year. In Oregon, participation has increased dramatically since the fi rst state drill in 2012, when just 164,909 people participated. Participation in 2019 was up 10% from 668,914 last year, according to the earthquake center. See Earthquake, Page A7