THE BULLETIN • SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2021 A5
UNITED AIRLINES PLANE | NEAR DENVER
Debris falls during emergency landing
This photo released by Broomfield Po-
lice Department on Twitter shows debris
from a commercial airliner that narrowly
missed a home as it fell onto Denver sub-
urbs during an emergency landing Satur-
day in Broomfield, Colorado.
BY GILLIAN FLACCUS
Associated Press
Debris from a United Airlines plane
fell onto Denver suburbs during an
emergency landing Saturday after one
of its engines suffered a catastrophic
failure and rained pieces of the engine
casing on a neighborhood where it
narrowly missed a home.
The plane landed safely, and no-
body aboard or on the ground was re-
ported hurt, authorities said.
The Federal Aviation Administra-
tion said in a statement that the Boe-
ing 777-200 returned to the Denver
International Airport after experienc-
ing a right-engine failure shortly after
takeoff. Flight 328 was flying from
Denver to Honolulu when the inci-
dent occurred, the agency said.
United said in a separate statement
that there were 231 passengers and 10
crew on board. The airline released no
further details.
The Broomfield Police Department
posted photos on Twitter showing
large, circular pieces of debris leaning
against a house in the suburb about 25
miles (40 kilometers) north of Denver.
Police are asking that anyone injured
come forward.
Tyler Thal, who lives in the area,
told The Associated Press that he was
out for a walk with his family when
he noticed a large commercial plane
flying unusually low and took out his
phone to film it.
“While I was looking at it, I saw
an explosion and then the cloud of
smoke and some debris falling from
it. It was just like a speck in the sky,
Broomfield Police Department
and as I’m watching that, I’m telling
my family what I just saw and then
we heard the explosion,” he said in a
phone interview. “The plane just kind
of continued on, and we didn’t see it
after that.”
Thal was relieved to learn later that
the plane had made a safe landing.
Video posted on Twitter showed
the engine fully engulfed in flames as
the plane flew through the air.
Aviation safety experts said the
plane appeared to have suffered an
uncontained and catastrophic engine
failure. Such an event is extremely
rare and happens when huge spinning
discs inside the engine suffer some
sort of failure and breach the armored
casing around the engine that is de-
signed to contain the damage, said
John Cox, an aviation safety expert
and retired airline pilot who runs an
aviation safety consulting firm called
Safety Operating Systems.
“That unbalanced disk has a lot of
force in it, and it’s spinning at several
thousand rotations per minute ... and
when you have that much centrifugal
force, it has to go somewhere,” he said
in a phone interview.
Pilots practice how to deal with
such an event frequently and would
have immediately shut off anything
flammable in the engine, including
fuel and hydraulic fluid using a single
switch, Cox said.
Former National Transportation
Safety Board Chairman Jim Hall
called the incident just another ex-
ample of “cracks in our culture in
aviation safety (that) need to be ad-
dressed.
Hall, who was on the board from
1994-2001, has criticized the FAA
over the past decade as “drifting to-
Portland Police launch team
to investigate rise in shootings
Associated Press
PORTLAND — Portland
Police said Friday they’ve
created a specialized team of
officers and detectives to fo-
cus full time on shooting in-
vestigations in response to a
jump in gun violence in the
last year.
The Enhanced Community
Safety Team will be comprised
of three sergeants, 12 officers
and six detectives. They’ll staff
a seven member on-call unit
to respond to shooting scenes,
examine evidence, interview
witnesses and do immediate
follow-up investigations.
Sergeants will determine
when to send out the on-call
officers, Deputy Chief Chris
Davis said.
The move is what Police
Chief Chuck Lovell pro-
posed in a December memo
to Mayor Ted Wheeler, who
serves as police commissioner.
Wheeler two weeks ago ex-
pressed support for the plan.
The estimated cost is
$153,348 through June and
$306,695 next fiscal year for a
total of $460,043.
Though a specific source of
the funding hasn’t been identi-
fied, the first on-call response
occurred Thursday, when a
sergeant, two detectives and
four officers responded to a
shooting in North Portland,
Davis said.
“We didn’t want to wait be-
cause of the urgent need,” Da-
vis said. He acknowledged the
Police Bureau would have pre-
ferred to have rolled out such
a team much earlier as shoot-
ings rose last summer.
The city recorded 55 ho-
micides in 2020, the highest
number in 26 years. Forty-one
of those resulted from gun vi-
olence, according to the Police
Bureau.
The new team’s focus will be
on identifying and arresting
what police suspect is a “nar-
row” group of repeat shooters,
Davis said.
It will be different from the
disbanded Gun Violence Re-
duction Team in that it will
focus on the investigative side
after shootings and less on
uniformed patrol and inter-
diction, Davis said. The City
Council last summer called
for the elimination of the Gun
Violence Reduction Team, cit-
ing concerns about the dispro-
portionate arrests of people of
color.
NORTHWEST OREGON
Goonies anniversary events are retired
BY KATIE FRANKOWICZ
The Astorian
Goonies never say die —
except when they do.
The Astoria-Warrenton
Area Chamber of Commerce
will retire an event held every
five years to celebrate the an-
niversary of the 1985 adven-
ture comedy, “The Goonies.”
The movie, shot in Astoria
and other locations on the
North Coast, draws hundreds
of fans to the area year-round
— sometimes to the conster-
nation of locals, especially
those who live near the fa-
mous Goonies House .
The chamber could not go
into detail about why it is retir-
ing the popular June event but
noted it had become increas-
ingly difficult to entice former
cast members to come to Asto-
ria with growing competition
from other, larger conventions
and pop culture events.
Regina Wilkie, the chamber’s
marketing manager, described
the decision as “taking a pause.”
She hopes to find ways to con-
tinue to offer Goonies-related
events for visitors and fans —
perhaps hosted by other orga-
nizations and spread through-
out the year instead of focused
on or around June 7, Astoria’s
official Goonies Day.
No plans have been finalized.
“Movie fans found their way
to Astoria and delighted in
their visits before we had these
events, and we know you’ll con-
tinue to do so without them,”
the chamber wrote in an email
announcing the news.
“Whether planning to come
in June to celebrate the end of
the school year or October to
stomp about in ‘muddy trail
season’ or any time in between,
you’ll find yourself among
friends who also enjoy seeing
‘in real life’ what has become so
familiar on screen.”
The chamber was due to
celebrate the movie’s 35th an-
niversary last year, but the
coronavirus pandemic de-
railed plans for a large, in-per-
son event. Celebrations un-
folded online instead. Fans
had hoped the chamber would
plan a do-over in 2021.
“The Goonies,” directed by
Richard Donner with Steven
Spielberg as executive producer,
is owned by Warner Bros.
Entertainment. Past promo-
tional materials for Astoria’s
Goonies Day events noted a
partnership with Warner Bros.
The chamber worked with
the company to license Asto-
ria-centric Goonies merchan-
dise for more than 10 years.
Without an agreement of
their own in place with War-
ner Bros., other organizations
interested in taking on their
own Goonies celebrations
will not be able to screen the
movie or use things like the
Goonies font on marketing
materials or merchandise,
noted McAndrew Burns, the
executive director of the Clat-
sop County Historical Society.
A sign at Ecola
State Park de-
scribes the scenes
of “The Goonies”
and “Kindergar-
ten Cop” shot at
the iconic view-
point in Cannon
Beach.
Edward Stratton/
The Astorian
NEW ORLEANS AREA
Matthew Hinton/AP
Bystanders react Saturday at the scene of a multiple fatality shooting
at the Jefferson Gun Outlet in Metairie, Louisiana.
3 dead in gun store
shooting in Louisiana
BY STACEY PLAISANCE
Associated Press
METAIRIE, La. — A per-
son went into a gun store and
shooting range in a New Orle-
ans suburb and fatally shot two
people Saturday, causing cus-
tomers and staff to open fire on
the shooter, said a sheriff. The
shooter also died.
The shooting happened at
the Jefferson Gun Outlet in
the suburb of Metairie around
2:50 p.m., according to a re-
lease from the Jefferson Parish
Sheriff’s Office.
Sheriff Joseph Lopinto said
the shooter initially hit two
people inside, and then sev-
eral other people — whether
employees or store customers
— opened fire on the shooter,
both inside and outside of the
building. Outside the building
a man could be seen behind
the yellow police tape yelling
“Where is my son?”
Guns and ammunition are
sold in the front of the outlet
that faces a main thorough-
fare through Jefferson Parish.
Customers who want to fre-
quent the gun range generally
go around to the side entrance
of the building. Staff who work
there often wear a sidearm.
Lopinto said two other peo-
ple were also hit by gunfire
and were hospitalized in stable
condition. He said there were
multiple shooters in all and in-
vestigators had just begun try-
ing to piece together what had
happened.
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541.382.1811
ward letting the manufacturers pro-
vide the aviation oversight that the
public was paying for.” That goes es-
pecially for Boeing, he said.
Despite the scary appearance of a
flaming engine, most such incidents
don’t result in a loss of life, Cox said.
The last fatality on a U.S. airline
flight involved such an engine failure
on a Southwest Airlines flight from
New York to Dallas in April 2018. A
passenger was killed when the engine
disintegrated more than 30,000 feet
above Pennsylvania and debris struck
the plane, breaking the window next
to her seat. She was forced halfway
out the window before other passen-
gers pulled her back inside.
In that case, the breakdown was
blamed on a broken fan blade in an
engine of the Boeing 737. The Fed-
eral Aviation Administration ordered
airlines to step up inspections of fan
blades on certain engines made by
CFM International, a joint venture of
General Electric and France’s Safran
S.A.
In 2010, a Qantas Airbus A380 suf-
fered a frightening uncontained engine
failure shortly after takeoff from Singa-
pore. Shrapnel from the engine dam-
aged critical systems on the plane, but
pilots were able to land safely. The inci-
dent was blamed on faulty manufactur-
ing of a pipe in the Rolls Royce engine.
“The flames scare the hell out of
everybody. But they are the least of
the problem because you’re going to
get them put out and you’re going to
shut off everything that can burn,”
Cox said.
Heidi Olson-Dunlap
Broker
Mountain Living Real Estate Group of Central Oregon
Mountainlivingreg.com