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About Wallowa County chieftain. (Enterprise, Wallowa County, Or.) 1943-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 21, 2016)
Wallowa County Chieftain News wallowa.com September 21, 2016 Mass-casualty drill PLAN tests county’s response Continued from Page A1 By Steve Tool Wallowa County Chieftain The Enterprise High School bus driver who was texting while driving is slumped over the wheel, deceased. A smashed truckload of chemical fertilizer is leaking profusely while a female EHS student staggers off the wrecked bus crying and bleeding profusely from several wounds. Other injured students sit wounded in the bus. It wasn’t real, but rather a planned mass-casualty drill for Wallowa County’s emer- gency services and Wallowa Memorial Hospital on Thurs- day evening. Wallowa County emergen- cy services director Paul Kar- voski said the drill mainly was a test of Wallowa Memorial Hospital’s new emergency operation plan and the emer- gency room’s ability to handle multiple patients. “We just decided to throw in the wreck and the hazmat material for the local ire de- partment,” he said. Personnel from Enterprise Fire Department, Enterprise Police Department, Wallowa Memorial Hospital and Emer- gency Medical Services par- ticipated in the drill. Enterprise High School and the Alternative Education School contributed 10 stu- dents between them to serve as accident victims. EHS ju- nior Paul Stangel volunteered. Two members from the Ore- gon Health Authority, Dean Marcum and Kris Hansen, oversaw the event and provid- ed a later critique. The crash scenario took EVENT Continued from Page A1 Plenty of folks already love this event, but for those still sit- ting on the fence, here are a few good reasons to give it a try this year. • Ladies, you can dress the part. These little dresses and vests are adorable and fun and you can get them at Heidi’s Dress Shop in Joseph. It’s amazing what a little embroidery and lounce can do for your spirit. • The polka is easy to learn. Don’t be intimidated by the professional dancers you’ll marvel at during the Alpenfest. You don’t have to know what they know, you just have to get inspired to take the loor. To help you out, you can take free 45-minute lessons on both Fri- day and Saturday at noon and 5 p.m. • Liquid courage is readily available. A pint of Terminal Gravi- ty Alpenfest Ale is part of the enjoyment this year — served in free souvenir pint glasses. Classy. • There are accordions. Sure, accordions are the subject of a lot of bad jokes made by people with limited musical taste — or folks who once overdosed on a single mu- Steve Tool/Chieftain Emergency services personnel, including firefighters and EMTs, load a wounded Enterprise High School student into an ambulance during a mass casualty incident drill on Thursday. place at approximately 6 p.m. at the county’s gravel pits several miles north of Enterprise along Highway 3. Beforehand, students and county personnel gathered at the Cloverleaf Hall for the ap- plication of faux wounds and blood stains. EHS junior Jean Luc Pal- ma also volunteered for the exercise. “I volunteered to help be- cause I thought it was import- ant,” he said. Palma’s injuries included a severe concussion with bleed- ing from both ears. He later said he received excellent treatment during his subse- quent interactions with emer- gency services and medical personnel. The incident required three ambulances to transport 10 students and the “dead” bus driver to the hospital. Before the “hot wash” (critique) offered later in the evening, Marcum praised the performance of the iremen he supervised. “These guys did good,” he said. “We’re not here to yell at people. We’re here to help them help the public the best way they can.” Hansen added that emer- gency room personnel stood up well to the incident, espe- cially considering they hadn’t had a mass casualty drill in some time. “Overall they did well. There’s some lessons to be learned, but they want to im- prove,” she said. “I was impressed with the scale of it, getting all the de- partments involved, because that would be all the depart- ments involved in a real-life situation,” said hospital infor- mation oficer Stacy Green af- ter the critique. “It was a good exercise to go through.” “I think overall it went well and opened some eyes in areas we need to improve on,” Karvoski said. sical style. Those folks will not be at Alpenfest to ruin your fun. Accordions are amazing inventions with world-wide appeal, and when they came to our country with our forefa- thers, they were the best thing to happen to a community gath- ering since the iddle. They’re easier to carry than a piano, encompassing rhythm and base in addition to a keyboard, loud- er than a mouth harp for great projection into a packed room of revelers and well respected by many musicians from jazz to country to chamber music artists. • You can be an outdoor sport enthusiast, despise loun- cy dresses, choose to wear lycra compression gear and still love Alpenfest. This year is the ifth anni- versary of the Alpenfest Race, a serious multi-discipline event that includes a 5.5K paddle, a 31.5K road bicycle race that gains 2,300 feet in altitude, an- other 25K trail bicycle ride that gains 600 feet in altitude and a inishing 10K trail run that gains 1,200 feet in altitude. The bike race begins at 9 a.m. Saturday at the Wallowa Lake State Park boat ramp and ends at the beer tent at the foot of the Tram. Alpenfest kicks off Thurs- day in Enterprise with the cer- emonial Main Street proces- sion from Depot Street to the Wallowa County Courthouse Gazebo at 3:45 p.m.. It then moves to Terminal Gravity for the tapping of the irst barrel of Alpenfest Ale at 5:30 p.m. The many events of Alpen- fest, which include art shows, dancing, yodeling, alpenhorn demonstrations, dancing, eat- ing and drinking, begin at the Edelweiss Inn at Wallowa Lake at noon Friday. wallowa.com No matter what your business is, the Wallowa County Chieftain has the audience you need! We have many options to market your business in an affordable and effective manner. Call Jennifer Powell today! 541-426-4567 (office) or email jpowell@wallowa.com The group, which includes County Commissioner Susan Roberts, Commissioner-elect Todd Nash and Wallowa Cham- ber of Commerce Director Vic- ki Searles, then discussed other details of branding the project: the need to become a 501c3; a theme for signs at both ends of the city; and their irst real proj- ect toward the dream — mov- ing the Lostine train station to Wallowa. The revitalization dream is in the most preliminary stag- es with little “nailed down,” but the “visioning” option of determining what residents most want to see is something they feel will work well for the group, Lowe said. This is not the irst time the city has geared up to attempt a revitalization. In 2008 Wallowa was among local cities to par- ticipate in a study, conducted by Johnson-Gardener LLC, a consulting irm with experience working with communities to visualize their industrial fu- tures. Much has changed since that time, and Wallowa is ready to test the waters in a new craft. Northeast Oregon Eco- nomic Development District (NEOEDD) Development Spe- cialist Sara Miller was on hand to explain the process of gath- ering consensus through a pro- gram called Vision to Action. The program asks members of the community to come togeth- er and literally draw pictures of their ideas for revitalization. The pictures, along with some facts about the physical layout of the town and the amenities it already provides (new water system, for example), are taken to an artist who then creates a conceptual visual plan of what the new Wallowa might look like. “It’s really helping you go through a process where you ind those common things that enough people in the commu- nity can support that you get that traction you need to move forward,” Miller said. The conceptual rendering shows where a community wants to go, that the communi- ty has worked together to create their plans and can be included in grant applications or presen- tations made to potential inves- tors. The process has worked well in many other cities. A brochure from the city of Cre- swell, Ore., was distributed at the meeting. Creswell has a project in mind similar to that of Wallowa — revisioning the site of a former lumber mill. Time for a Computer Tuneup? Spyware Removal • 541-426-0108 103 SW 1st St., Enterprise Doing something with the Bate’s Mill site certainly is on the minds of Wallowa res- idents, but much would have to be done to make that a re- ality and discussions center- ing around the site have been had before. The fact that it’s a Brownields site that may need expensive restoration has been a major hurdle for potential sale of the site for years. A prelim- inary Department of Environ- mental Quality Phase 1 study — a survey of operational func- tions only — was completed in 2008. That study is now out of date and the DEQ will require a new Phase 1 before the process of converting a Brownield site to a building site can be begin. For now there is just one project on the table — moving the Lostine Train Station from Terry Jones’ property in Los- tine to Wallowa and placing it on 1.5 acres of land that will be deeded to the Wallowa Home- town Project by Bud Phillips of Wallowa. The new Wallowa Hometown Project already owes $2,400 for the partition- ing of that property, and fund- raising must start immediately. Lowe’s goal is to have the train station moved and fund- raising done before November. The need for quick action is pushed by the fact that the train station needs a roof before win- ter. That one project is the nu- cleus of a much grander plan, but it encapsulates that grand plan well because, as it stands, the grand plan centers around the railroad. In thinking about what Wallowa City had to of- fer, Lowe said, it became clear that they had one of the larg- est industrial properties in the county, adjacent to rail, in the Bates Mill site. They had the “incubator” building, in which entrepreneurs built their busi- nesses for a set time also sitting right on the rail line. And they had a product at the Integrated Biomass Resources plant that could be shipped out by rail. “Timber is not coming back to what it was,” Lowe said. “Timber harvest is not the an- swer, but it’s part of the answer. Tourism is not the answer, but it’s part of the answer. Industri- al shops are not the answer, but they are part of the answer.” Lowe also serves on the A7 Wallowa Union Railroad Au- thority (WURA) and is in a po- sition to know what the railroad can and cannot offer. So an ear- ly move on his part was to pres- ent WURA with a petition from the city to have the train service returned to Wallowa — provid- ed WURA had a good working budget for that, and provided the city got the Friends of the Joseph Branch (who own the engines and cars) to agree. “Both those requirements have been met,” Lowe said. “WURA sent inspectors from Minam to Wallowa and they let WURA know the cost.” But that’s not all there is running in Lowe’s train of thought. WURA owns the rail and rail bed, but Union Paciic owns the land beneath. So Sara Miller asked Union Paciic if they’d be open to letting some- one run iber optic cable down the rail bed. Union Paciic said yes. No plans were discussed, no agreements signed, but there was willingness on the part of Union Paciic to consider such a plan. “We’ll be looking for i- nancing for that (rail work), and if you’ve got to ix the rail you might as well throw iber optics under it,” Lowe said. Lowe contacted Sen. Jeff Merkley and mentioned the fact that the state gave $5 bil- lion to iber-optic companies and they’ve not yet delivered on that investment in Wallowa. “We have suggested the legislature appropriate some of that money and give it to a company who’ll get iber optic out to Wallowa.” Lowe said. Jeff Crews, Vice President of Eastern Oregon Net, Inc., also attended the meeting and helped establish the new web- site name and address. It’s another big push for Wallowa, but Lowe inds the community ready to give it a go. He’s certainly ready and has volunteered to be the point man through which companies, grantors, politicians and others can communicate. “We’re strong citizens here in Wallowa,” Lowe said. “I’m putting my money where my mouth is. My wife Beth (Mc- Crae) Lowe is ifth generation and the minute we got married I started planning on how we’d get back to Wallowa.” September 26-30, we are offering a RABIES VACCINATION SPECIAL for previously unvaccinated dogs, cats and horses: $15 rabies vaccination, free exam. Call now to schedule 541.426.3331
