Serving Central Oregon since 1903 • $1.50
MONDAY • February 22, 2021
OREGON ELECTRICITY
Can utilities prevent extreme
outages? Maybe, but at a cost
BY TED SICKINGER
The Oregonian
Kristyna Wentz-Graff/OPB
PGE contractors repair a transformer box on a power pole in Portland
on Tuesday. This month’s snow and ice storms knocked out power for
340,000 customers in Oregon.
Saturday marked day No. 8 without
power at Elizabeth Bartolomeo’s house in
Mulino. No water to drink or wash. Us-
ing water from greenhouse rain barrels
to flush toilets. Generator power to the
fridge. Surge protectors everywhere.
Because this is far from the first time.
But this power outage was worse. Lon-
FAIR-WEATHER
FLY FISHING
ger. No restoration information on Port-
land General Electric’s website. No luck on
the phone. More than a week in, no util-
ity trucks on her road in rural Clackamas
County.
The electricity finally came back Satur-
day midmorning. But Bartolomeo was far
from appeased.
Worse things happened. Four people
and a dog in Clackamas County died in
three separate instances of carbon monox-
ide poisoning. Medically vulnerable cus-
tomers were put at risk. Appliances fried
in power surges. Hundreds of roads were
blocked by downed trees, branches and
power lines. Countless people endured
spoiled food, cold showers and the dif-
ficulty of continuing remote school and
work without internet service.
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As the sun briefly breaks through the clouds Saturday, a pair of anglers cast
to a pod of rising trout while fishing the Crooked River.
Photo by RYAN BRENNECKE • The Bulletin
FIRST OF ITS KIND
Oregon releases missing, murdered Indigenous persons report
BY LAUREN DAKE
Oregon Public Broadcasting
Rosenda Strong was missing for
nearly a year before her body was
found in an abandoned freezer on
July 4, 2019, near Toppenish, Wash-
ington.
“We have her back; not the way
we wanted but we can after 275 days
looking, wondering, our baby sister,
mother, aunt, cousin, friend is com-
ing home to our mother,” Cissy Strong
Reyes, wrote in a Facebook post, ac-
cording to reporting by the Yakima
Herald-Republic.
For years, activists have tried to
draw attention to a growing crisis of
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missing and murdered Indigenous
people, particularly women. There
have been many challenges, includ-
ing confusion surrounding different
jurisdictions, a lack of coordination
between law enforcement entities,
not enough resources and gaps in
data.
Over the period of time Strong was
missing, the conversation around
missing Indigenous women grew
louder. Reyes started sharing her sis-
ter’s story as loud as she could, deter-
mined to not let her be one of the for-
gotten ones.
“I read stories on the internet and
stopped to think, like, there’s these
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other women missing, and I can’t let
my sister be one of these people. She
has to be found,” Reyes told the Ya-
kima Herald-Republic.
In 2019, a national strategy was
created in an attempt to rectify the
underreporting of missing and mur-
dered Indigenous people. Last week,
the U.S. Attorney’s Office released its
first annual report.
“For generations, American Indi-
ans and Alaskan Natives have suffered
from disproportionately high levels of
violence. Tragically, this is not a crisis
of the past; it’s a crisis of the present,”
U.S. Attorney Billy J. Williams said in
a statement.
Under what has been coined the
Missing and Murdered Indigenous
Persons Initiative, officials in 11 U.S.
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Attorney’s offices, including Oregon,
will create a more coordinated law
enforcement response to missing per-
sons cases, according to the press re-
lease from Williams’ office. The new
effort also calls for improving data,
both collection and analysis, and for
more training for local response ef-
forts when a person is reported as
missing.
One of the first steps is to create
an overview of current missing per-
sons cases connected to Oregon. The
report draws on data from several
different databases and identified 19
unsolved cases of people who have
connections with Oregon. The latest
information, while only considered a
“snapshot” of the full picture, shows
11 missing Indigenous persons, six
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women and five men. Of the 11, six
are members of Oregon tribes:
• Two are from the Confederated
Tribes of Warm Springs.
• One is from the Confederated
Tribes of Grand Ronde.
• Two are from the Confederated
Tribes of Umatilla.
• One is from the Klamath Tribes.
The report identifies eight mur-
dered Indigenous people, three men
and five women. Of the eight, seven
are members of an Oregon tribe.
One of those is Strong, who was
a 31-year-old mother of four and a
member of the Confederated Tribes
of Umatilla. Strong’s family is hoping
in 2021 they will find out who killed
her and finally be able to bury her
body.
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Effort meant to rectify the underreporting of such data
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