Salem Political Snark

Time to really freak out about climate change, Salemians

I'm a big believer in global warming. But until this weekend the stark reality of what climate change means for everybody on our planet hadn't really hit home for me.

Sure, last September Oregon suffered through devastating wildfires exacerbated by drought conditions and rare high winds. My wife and I breathed a lot of smoke as our furnace filters turned black.

And February of this year saw an unusual ice storm that cut off power to hundreds of thousands of Oregonians. We had no electricity for eleven days and got to be best friends with our wood stove and Honda generator.

Those were extreme weather events. Neither could be directly tied to global warming, though climate change was implicated in each.

Now, Oregon is facing the hottest temperatures in recorded history. Extreme heat is to global warming as an ice cube is to a freezer: they're so closely related, seeing one means seeing the other.

Today Portland broke the all-time record for a high temperature at the airport, 108 degrees.

Today Salem tied the record for a high temperature in the month of June, 105 degrees.

Tomorrow, Sunday, it's almost certain that Salem will break its all-time high temperature record of 108.

Salem tied its record high temperature for June on Saturday by hitting 105 degrees at the Salem Airport, but the capital's all-time record for heat looks all but certain to fall on Sunday. 

Meteorologists said just about every weather model is showing Salem hitting a high of around 113 on Sunday, which would shatter the previous record of 108 that was set in 1981, 1941 and 1927.

Records in Salem date all the way back to the 1890s. 

So, yeah, it's time to freak out about global warming, fellow citizens of Salem. (I call us Salemians, because saying Salemites is just flat-out wrong.)

Rob Davis is an investigative reporter with the Oregonian. He speaks the truth. There's no denying the reality of climate change, though many people still do.

Today the Oregon Senate passed House Bill 2021. It requires Oregon utilities to provide 100% carbon  free electricity by 2040, with an 80% reduction in the next ten years. Both PGE and Pacific Power supported the bill.

Yet no Republican senator voted for it. I guess Republicans love making our planet minimally habitable for humans, something most of the rest of us think is a really bad idea.

If I could rule the state legislature pecking order, I'd demand that a bill be passed that requires every legislator who voted against HB 2021 to live in a dwelling without air conditioning.

That way global warming deniers in the Oregon legislature will have to experience what they wrongly claim isn't happening: rapidly rising temperatures and more extreme weather events.

Alternatively, they could be required to wear a heavy coat outside when the temperature exceeds 90 degrees. That's what our dog, Mooka, has to do all the time, given her coat of fur. When we let her out in the yard  to pee this very hot afternoon, she instantly laid down and didn't want to get up.

Kind of pathetic that our dog is more attuned to the reality of global warming than Republicans are.

PGE's storm communications are astoundingly inept

Along with a disturbingly large number of other people, my wife and I have endured a full week of no electricity after the February 12 ice/snow storm devastated much of Oregon.

(Our dog is doing just fine.)

How much longer will our electricity be off? Starting last Monday, Portland General Electric, or PGE, has considered this to be a secret not to be disclosed to their customers. 

Whenever I log into my PGE account, I'm met with a cryptic "not available at this time" in the Estimated Time On part of our outage report.

OK, I can understand that PGE wouldn't be able to provide its customers with a valid estimate of how long their power will be off in the early days of a widespread outage.

But even after a week, PGE still won't tell people how much longer they have to put up with all the inconveniences that come with having no electricity. 

This is causing a lot of frustration. 

I know, because regularly I pick up my iPhone, click on Tweetbot, a Twitter app, and search for tweets matching "@PortlandGeneral."

Maybe a quarter of tweets with this tag praise PGE for restoring the person's power.

The rest run the gamut from mildly critical of PGE to full-on rants about how horrendously awful PGE's response to the storm has been -- both in terms of turning electricity back on and PGE's dreadful communications strategy, which seems focused on keeping customers as much in the dark as possible regarding when their power will return.

This afternoon, though, I noticed a tweet from PGE that seemed promising. 

It didn't take long, though, for me to realize that the new online map not only wasn't useful, it was less than useful. Here's why.

On Thursday, I think it was (yesterday), PGE announced that it expected to have power restored to 90% of its customers by Friday. This is what the Storm Restoration Update page on the PGE web site says.

It's difficult to tell how many customers comprise that 90%, or the remaining 10%, without knowing what "currently" means in the screenshot above.

Regardless of the number, the important thing is that thousands of customers are going to be in the unfortunate 10%, which includes me, since our power is still off. 

On that same web page, PGE described how many customers would lack power after Friday night and where the longest waits to have power restored would be.

This certainly implies -- in fact it basically says it outright -- that the 15,000 customers who haven't had their power turned on by Friday night, tonight, and don't live in the areas listed above, won't have to wait as long as the people who do live in those areas.

UPDATE: I just came across a PGE tweet that said "As of 5pm today, 54,900 customers are still without power." So unless a lot of customers got their power restored between 5 pm and midnight today, PGE underestimated how many customers would lack power on February 19 by 39,900. Sure doesn't make me feel any more confident in PGE's competence.

So, yay, I thought after reading this. My wife and I live in rural south Salem near the Ankeny Wildlife Refuge. We're nowhere near the areas hit hardest -- Silverton, Woodburn, West Linn, Canby, etc.

I looked forward, then, to learning from the new map when we'd have electricity again. 

That hope was dashed when I actually looked at the map. The title above the map was a giveaway: Check Your Zone. I didn't want to check a zone. I wanted to check our specific outage area, our local neighborhood which had been showing 503 customers without electricity.

This is a screenshot of the overall area, showing the Legend. Light blue has an estimated restoration time of up to 3 days; yellow, up to five days; brown, up to nine days.

The map looks much different when it is zoomed in on my iPhone. This is Salem.The whole city of Salem appears to be in the yellow "up to 5 days" category. The purple dots show individual outages. I'm assuming the mass of dots obscuring much of Salem is covering up yellow.

How useful is this information? So minimal I'd call it useless.

People want to know when the electricity for their home or business will return, not the maximum amount of time it will take to restore power in all parts of Salem, which could range from one day (Saturday) to five days (Wednesday).

Likewise, here's the screenshot for my area. Our house is a bit north and east of Spring Reservoir, better termed Spring Lake. Our neighborhood is in the brown "up to nine days" zone. Again, though, this information is useless.
Here's a zoomed-out screenshot of the brown area. It's huge. There's no way every customer currently lacking power in this area is going to wait a similar length of time to have their electricity back on.

Thus PGE has produced a map that contains essentially zero useful information. It seems to be a way for PGE to say "we're providing customers with an estimate of when their power will be restored" without actually doing this.

Also, saying "up to nine days" is meaningless. A neighbor talked with a PGE employee today who was inspecting a downed line in our neighborhood. Reportedly the PGE guy said we might have power restored as early as tomorrow.

That's within the "up to nine days," because tomorrow would be one day. But one day is much different from nine days. 

Botton line: PGE is persisting in its screwed-up post-storm communications strategy -- which is aimed at giving customers as little useful information about their specific outage as possible. I sure hope legislators and state officials conduct hearings into how PGE has handled getting electricity back for its customers.

I have many questions about this, as I'm sure others do also.

Lastly, the conflict between this map and the list of hardest hit areas listed on the PGE web site -- Woodburn, Silverton, West Linn, Canby, etc. -- is huge. Most of those "hardest hit" areas are shown in the same color as Salem, yellow, up to five days restoration time.

So PGE is saying one thing at the top of that web page, then it is saying another thing in the map further down the page. Like I've been saying, the PGE communications strategy is so bad, it would be comical if being without electricity weren't so serious.

Hazardous waste from Santiam Canyon fire may have polluted Salem

A few days ago the Statesman Journal ran a story about clean-up efforts after hundreds of houses were destroyed in the Beachie Creek fire that ravaged the Santiam Canyon in early September. 

KATU News photo

Here's some excerpts from "EPA hauls hazardous waste from homes burned in Beachie Creek fire."

Static from Geiger counters and creaks from metal echoed as crews in hazmat suits carefully inspected and sorted rubble where a house once stood off E. Central Road in Gates. 

The property, devastated by the Beachie Creek Fire in early September, is one of many sites across the state being cleared of hazardous waste by crews from the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

...The EPA's cleanup effort is the first in a two-step process funded by FEMA and the State of Oregon. The service is free to residents who submit Right of Entry forms. 

Crews are collecting material ranging from bleach containers to batteries, paint to propane tanks —"anything that is compromised and potentially threatens public health," said Randy Nattis, incident commander for EPA. 

So far, the teams have been able to clean up about 450 properties across Oregon, Nattis said. Officials anticipate the process will take several weeks, and each property can cost about $75,000.

The goal is to have the hazardous debris removed to start phase two: ash and trash cleanup. 

Problem is, now it's late October. As you can read below, earlier this month someone sent me their concerns about metal from burned homes being handled at Cherry City Metal in north Salem. 

It appears that this was debris being removed from the Santiam Canyon before environmental agencies began to put into place protocols for separating out hazardous waste from non-hazardous waste. Here's what I was told:

The largest environmental catastrophe to ever hit the Salem community is at the beginning stages.

 

Federal, state and local governments are allowing this catastrophe to unfold in plain sight. The impacts will last for centuries unless there is action in the next month.

 

There are two components to the environmental catastrophe. Let us begin with the "point source" in north Salem.

 

There is a plant that is raining down heavy metals, sulfur, and asbestos across the Salem metropolitan area that originates within blocks of the Blind and Deaf School in North Salem.

 

Many pounds of toxins are being released into the air six days a week with no government monitoring.  How could this be happening in Salem Oregon in the year 2020?

 

Well, here's how it's happening and it is similar to the environmental and economic catastrophe that unfolded in Kellogg Idaho in 1973 that left the region as a Superfund site.

 

"In 1973, a fire broke out at Bunker Hill and destroyed part of the baghouse—the main pollution-control system for the lead smelter. For the next year and a half, the smelter continued to operate, and dust polluted with heavy metals rained down on the area." (Quote from Newweek article in 2016. https://www.newsweek.com/2016/06/24/bunker-hill-superfund-silver-valley-lead-poisoning-469222.html)

 

Salem has our own Bunker Hill that began operation in early October 2020 that is raining heavy metals down on the area and it should be shut down before it runs for a year and a half and leaves a legacy that will need to be remediated at tremendous cost and harm the lives of thousands of Salem residents.

 

Cherry City Metal is the destination for hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal that is being recovered from the 600 plus homes that burnt in the North Santiam Canyon.

 

Six days a week plumes of toxic dust with heavy metals and sulfur originate at the Cherry City Metals operation in North Salem.  There is not even a minor attempt to control the dust which is filled with toxic ash. If they sprayed water to control the dust, they would have another environmental catastrophe like what will be washing down the north Santiam River beginning this rainy season.

 

If you have not driven up to Gates and made a loop back on the opposite side of the North Santiam River, you need to take a drive to see ground zero for the source of Salem's environmental catastrophe.

 

Metal dumpsters are being loaded and hauled west on Highway 22 to the Cherry City Metals plant. Foundations at the edge of Salem's drinking water are being cleared of ash and debris.

 

While dump trucks of ash are disappearing into private non-regulated landfills all through the North Santiam Canyon and will leach into Salem's water supply for centuries, the metal recycling semi trucks are running down Highway 22 in plain view and releasing plumes of toxin over North Salem.

 

I watched a recording of the Marion County Commissioners meeting this week where they got an update on the fire debris response. Kevin Cameron read out loud a letter from a resident in the North Santiam Canyon and then proceeded to ignore the concerns.

 

The reality is that a property owner in the North Santiam Canyon has to pay at least $2,000 just to get their ash and fire debris tested. Only after a high-priced consultant writes a report, can the ash can be trucked to Coffin Butte landfill near Corvallis.

 

There are plans being developed for how government can help to clear the burned building debris, but the deadline for initiating that process is October 16th.  Government supported efforts to remove ash will likely not begin for six to nine months. 

 

Hundreds of property owners are not waiting. The deadline for applying for help is a month and a half after the Beachie Fire raged. Many property owners are not waiting around for government, they are creating their own landfills at the edge of the North Santiam River which is the source of water for Salem residences.

 

Even aside from the toxins, there is a complete lack of awareness of the forest ash and mud flows that will impact Salem's drinking water.

 

Regarding that last observation, I was sent links to two related brief articles about the long-term impact of wildfires on water quality in streams and rivers. Since Salem gets its drinking water from the Santiam River, this certainly is something city officials need to be monitoring. See:

"Legacy of severe wildfires on stream water quality"
"The legacy of a severe wildfire on stream nitrogen and carbon in headwater catchments."