WEDNESDAY, MARCH 7, 2018
HERMISTONHERALD.COM • A9
LOCAL
Umatilla’s Downtown
framework plan wins
national award
By JADE MCDOWELL
STAFF WRITER
STAFF PHOTO BY KATHY ANEY
Eastern Oregon Prescription Drug Overdose Prevention Coordinator Mike Stensrud, of Umatilla County Public Health, holds
an overdose kit containing naloxone, under the brand name Narcan. Umatilla County Sheriff’s deputies will start using Narcan
to reverse overdoses from prescription painkillers, heroin and fentanyl.
Police to carry anti-overdose drug
Naloxone reverses
effects of opioid
overdose
By KATHY ANEY
STAFF WRITER
Umatilla County Sher-
iff’s deputies will start car-
rying anti-overdose drugs.
The medication nalox-
one saves lives by revers-
ing overdoses of prescrip-
tion painkillers, heroin and
the synthetic painkiller fen-
tanyl. The law enforcement
agency received 60 doses
Friday from the Umatilla
County Health Department
to use over the next two
years.
Eastern Oregon Pre-
vention Drug Coordinator
Mike Stensrud, of Umatilla
County Public Health, will
train officers on the use of
naloxone (with the brand
name of Narcan). Funding
from Purdue Pharma to the
National Sheriff’s Associa-
tion helped bring the kits to
Umatilla County and vari-
ous other law enforcement
agencies across the county
at no cost to taxpayers.
Local ambulance crews
already carry the drug. Last
year, emergency medical
service workers adminis-
tered naloxone 177 times in
Umatilla County. But, the
earlier the drug is adminis-
tered the better chance the
person will recover.
According to the Centers
for Disease Control and Pre-
vention, 42,249 people died
in opioid-related deaths in
2016. According to the Sub-
stance Abuse and Mental
Health Services Adminis-
tration, Oregon ranks sixth
nationally for non-medi-
cal use of prescription pain
relievers like Percocet and
OxyContin.
One reason to use nalox-
one is a recent shift away
from spot testing drugs
found during traffic stops
so that officers won’t be
exposed to the potent syn-
thetic painkiller fentanyl
which comes in both pill
and powder form. A small
amount of the drug, which is
50-100 times more powerful
than morphine, can trigger
an overdose. An Ohio law
enforcement officer over-
dosed in May after he got
deadly fentanyl powder on
his uniform.
“It’s a big concern,” Sten-
srud said. “Simply touching
or inhaling extraordinarily
small quantities of fen-
tanyl can cause an overdose.
By equipping our sheriff’s
officers with this life sav-
ing drug, they can respond
to emergencies with less
apprehension and risk of a
contact overdose.”
The officers would have
the ability to respond before
the arrival of ambulance
crews.
One beauty of nasally
administered naloxone is its
lack of side effects.
“There are no adverse
effects,” he said. “Within
three to five minutes, if there
is no improvement, you can
administer another dose.”
He said the drug even
works with police drug
dogs that inhale drugs in
powder form.
Besides
administer-
ing naloxone, officers will
provide overdose data to a
nationwide network using
an application they pull up
on phones or computers.
“Officers have enough to
do without additional paper-
work,” Stensrud said.
“They can pull up the
program on their patrol
phone in their cruisers. This
program allows us to track
overdose events in real
time.”
Umatilla County Sher-
iff Terry Rowan praised the
National Sheriffs’ Associa-
tion and Purdue Pharma for
giving officers another tool
to fight heroin and opioid
abuse.
“We are grateful for the
national support,” Rowan
said. “Solving this crisis will
take the collective effort of
our entire community.”
Jonathan
Thompson,
CEO of the National Sher-
iffs’ Association, said the
program has saved 120 lives
since it was launched at the
end of 2015.
Strangulation bill aims to stop abuse
By JADE MCDOWELL
STAFF WRITER
A bill passed by the Ore-
gon Legislature last week
will put domestic abusers
who strangle their victims
behind bars for longer.
Senate Bill 1562, passed
unanimously by the Senate
and the House of Represen-
tatives in the waning days
of the short session, will
upgrade strangulation from
a Class A misdemeanor pun-
ishable by up to 364 days in
jail to a Class C felony pun-
ishable by up to five years
in prison when it involves
a relative, household mem-
ber or intimate partner. It
also expands the definition
of strangulation to include
knowingly halting a per-
son’s breathing by applying
pressure to their chest.
Advocates for domestic
violence survivors applaud
the bill’s message.
“It makes a statement
about what will not be toler-
ated,” said Kathryn Chaney,
director of Domestic Vio-
lence Services in Umatilla
County. “Hopefully it could
be a deterrent.”
She cited a 2008 study
published in the Journal of
Emergency Medicine, which
found that abusers who have
escalated to strangulation
are 750 percent more likely
to eventually kill their vic-
tims. The act of cutting off
a victim’s air supply —
using methods ranging from
squeezing the neck to cover-
ing the mouth and nose — is
a huge red flag for “potential
lethality” Chaney said.
“Preventing
someone
being able to breathe is say-
ing, ‘I’m thinking of killing
you,’” she said.
In her line of work
Chaney has met many vic-
tims of strangulation by a
family member or significant
other, who are often “abso-
lutely terrified.” Even when
the incident convinces the
person to face that fear and
leave their abuser, post-tra-
mautic stress disorder can
linger for a long time.
Physical trauma can lin-
ger, too. Although stran-
gulation can cause instant
death, Chaney said one
of the most sinister things
about that particular act of
violence is sometimes the
effects can kill victims days
or even months later. They
may look undamaged from
the outside but experience
internal swelling, damage to
the spinal cord, permanent
brain damage, vision loss,
vocal cord damage, seizures
or fluid in the lungs caus-
ing pneumonia. Strangula-
tion can cause blood clots
that later lead to death by a
stroke, or can damage the
carotid body in a way that
later causes a heart attack.
Sometimes loved ones of
those being abused imagine
that if their friend or family
members were being stran-
gled they would have visible
bruising on their neck, but
Chaney said sometimes no
bruising ever emerges.
Umatilla County is not
immune to strangulation
as a form of domestic vio-
lence. Hermiston Police
Chief Jason Edmiston said
in Hermiston last year there
were 36 cases of aggra-
vated assault, of which 36
percent involved strangu-
lation. Fifty-eight percent
of the assaults were domes-
tic, and of the domestic
assaults 57 percent included
strangulation.
He said the department
did a “deep dive” into the
assault data, analyzing
everything from time of day
to race and gender, to look
for preventive measures.
“What we’re looking for
is patterns, trends,” he said.
“Is there something we can
do?”
In more than half the
cases, it was verified that a
controlled substance was
involved, but Edmiston said
recent drug decriminaliza-
tion laws in Oregon aren’t
helpful there. He said adding
another officer to the depart-
ment to bring back a dedi-
cated street team would help
sweep up abusers who have
warrants. Alert citizens who
call the police when some-
thing is off can help too.
“Go with your gut,”
Edmiston said. “Make the
phone call and we’ll respond
and maybe intervene before
the situation gets out of hand.”
As for Senate Bill 1562,
Edmiston said while he
believes in holding perpe-
trators of abuse, including
strangulation, accountable,
he feels skeptical that the
longer sentence will act as
a deterrant in the moment.
He said he has seen shock-
ing cases of “just pure rage”
in domestic violence that
didn’t necessarily seem to fit
the commonly-held narra-
tive that strangulation comes
as part of an escalating pat-
tern over time.
Senate Bill 1562 would
provide up to five years in
prison for strangulation in
domestic violence cases and
leave the perpetrator with
a felony record. Sen. Bill
Hansell of Athena spon-
sored a similar bill in 2015
which would have made
all strangulation a felony
and also added a number of
other protections for domes-
tic abuse victims, including
justifying the use of physical
force against an abuser who
had previously assaulted the
person and seemed in immi-
nent danger of doing so
again. The bill never got out
of committee, which Hansell
said was due to concerns by
the committee chair about
making all strangulation on
the same level in the sen-
tencing guidelines instead of
treating certain cases, such
as strangulation in the pres-
ence of a minor on a higher
level.
This time, Hansell said,
thanks to agreements on
making some strangulation
circumstances a higher level
on the sentencing guide-
lines, the bill that Hansell
signed onto as a co-spon-
sor got the support to pass
the Senate unanimously and
move onto the House, which
will hold its third reading
and vote on the bill Friday.
“Everyone was very
pleased,” he said. “We’re
getting to where we wanted
to be a few years ago.”
Hansell said he became
passionate about domestic
violence-related legislation
in his early days as a state
senator after being invited to
a meeting of domestic vio-
lence advocates in Pendle-
ton. He said strangulation is
“almost without fail” part of
the pattern in cases of fatal
domestic violence and for
that reason he thinks get-
ting perpetrators into prison
for longer will help protect
victims.
“It’s going to save lives,”
he said.
Umatilla’s downtown
framework plan is now a
national award-winner.
The plan, titled Uma-
tilla Together and avail-
able on the city’s website
in both English and Span-
ish, was put together by
Portland State University
students in the Master of
Urban and Regional Plan-
ning program. It won the
2018 American Institute
of Certified Planners Stu-
dent Project Award.
“It’s just really exciting
to have that group recog-
nized,” said Tamra Mab-
bott, community develop-
ment director for Umatilla.
She said the other
award-winners for the
year were from Massachu-
setts Institute of Technol-
ogy (MIT). She plans to
go down to the National
Planning Conference in
New Orleans on April 24
when the students offi-
cially receive their award.
The Umatilla Together
framework
was
put
together in 2017 by stu-
dents Amber Ayers, Laura
Voss, Nate Miller, Samuel
Roberts, Carlos Callava
and Belen Herrera. They
made multiple trips from
Portland to Umatilla to
engage with citizens, busi-
ness leaders, city staff and
elected officials during
meetings, focus groups,
mixers and a community
open house.
The resulting docu-
ment outlined suggestions
for the revitalizing Uma-
tilla’s downtown core and
increasing the communi-
ty’s livability. Since being
hired in the city’s brand-
new community devel-
opment director posi-
tion, Mabbott said much
of her work has revolved
around working to imple-
ment those suggestions,
such as identifying gaps
in the community’s net-
work of trails and search-
ing for funding to connect
those trails. Councilors
and other city staff are
also using the plan as a
framework.
“The credit goes to the
students, who engaged
people over and over
again,” she said.
When Sen. Bill Hansell
of Athena visited Umatilla
on Feb. 1 to meet with city
councilors and tour city
projects, Mabbott said the
Umatilla Together plan
was shared with him too,
and he told them he was
impressed with where the
city was headed.
In a news release from
PSU, planning student
Amber Ayers said it feels
“impossible to capture
the depth of our apprecia-
tion” for the city of Uma-
tilla and others who made
the project and the result-
ing award possible.
“This is not an award
just for us, but for the
entire city of Umatilla,”
Ayers said. “The commu-
nity members of Umatilla
provided guidance, enthu-
siasm and devotion. We
sincerely feel we lucked
out having the opportu-
nity of work with a city
and a community as rich
as Umatilla.”
The students also won
a statewide award for the
project in the fall from
the Oregon chapter of
the American Planning
Association.
STAFF PHOTO BY E.J. HARRIS
Winter seemed to have returned to the region on February
20 after snowfall covered the hills in Pendleton.
Snowpack fills in,
still below average
By GEORGE PLAVEN
EO MEDIA GROUP
February was a tale of
two seasons for Oregon’s
snow-starved mountains
and river basins.
The first half of the
month saw warm and dry
weather carry over from
December and January,
with total snowpack lan-
guishing around 40 per-
cent of normal levels state-
wide. But winter has come
roaring back over the last
few weeks, doubling the
amount of snow on the
ground across some areas,
especially in the northern
Oregon Cascades.
Julie Koeberle, snow
survey hydrologist for the
USDA Natural Resources
Conservation Service in
Portland, said the amount
of snow at Mount Hood
rose from 53 inches on
Feb. 11 to 118 inches,
showing an impressive
turnaround.
“It’s been really inter-
esting,” Koeberle said.
“What we waited all sea-
son to get, we pretty much
got in the last two weeks.”
While conditions are
much improved, Koeberle
cautions snowfall is still
lagging behind on average.
“We still need quite a
bit more if we’re going to
catch up to normal,” she
said.
Portions of southern
Oregon are in particularly
dire straits, with the Klam-
ath and Owyhee basins still
registering below 50 per-
cent of normal snowpack.
Klamath County com-
missioners have already
declared a drought emer-
gency, and farmers are
bracing for a painful year.
The U.S. Drought Mon-
itor shows virtually all of
central and Eastern Oregon
in some type of drought
designation, from “abnor-
mally dry” to “moderate
drought.” Koeberle said
she would not be surprised
to see more drought decla-
rations as summer nears.
“In a perfect world, we
will continue to get snow,
but we can’t count on
that,” she said.
According
to
the
National Oceanic and
Atmospheric
Adminis-
tration’s Climate Pre-
diction Center, the next
three months should bring
colder weather to north-
ern Oregon and an equal
chance of normal precipi-
tation throughout the state.
The lower temperatures
should at least bode well
for sustaining the current
snowpack, Koeberle said,
which in turn will help
sustain streams longer into
the season.
The NRCS will soon
release its monthly stream-
flow forecast for March,
which Koeberle said will
reflect the latest gains in
snowpack.