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For my latest edition of the Along for the Ride series of transit chronicles I rode Line 14 from Downtown Portland to Lents, and back again. Along the way I stopped for lunch at a taqueria I’d once visited on another spontaneous journey, met a man well-equipped for his trip to Vancouver, Washington, and learned why a young couple preferred to head all the way to Downtown Portland to shop at Buffalo Exchange. Listen above, then follow the jump to get a glimpse of what it looked like or follow my ride in “real time” by viewing my tweets from the bus.
I’ll explain why. First, a note about why I’m posting today.
This is the third anniversary of Lascher at Large’s launch, of the day I first penned a modest declaration about how, “Whether breath on our lips, ink spread across a page, keys hammering into a ribbon or electrons running through a circuit, I’m concerned with how thoughts are captured, contained, altered and disseminated.”
Lascher at Large’s third birthday also marks a massive redesign of the site. I hope the redesign will make it even easier for me to “offer a deeply connected, reflective banquet of thoughts,” and that it will allow me to better reflect upon the places I’ve been and promote the endeavors I’ve pursued. Whether you’re new or returning to L@L, please peruse the site, preferably from the front page or my portfolio (and please let me know if something doesn’t work).
With the redesign, I look forward to recommitting to the site. I see both this third anniversary and the start of 2012 as an opportunity to reflect, to take stock and to ponder again my passion for “In-depth, unrushed reporting, storytelling and reflection” in this world that “still values words, but doesn’t neglect the power of images and sound.”
As I thirst for some sense of clarity in an increasingly muddled world, I’m enthusiastic about how I’ve already seized the outset of 2012 as a chance to refresh everything about my life. I have a tenuous relationship with resolutions, but I feel as if I’ve resolved to do something this year, and that something is living my life. My life.
To live my life, I need to be honest, so why not be honest about what I’ve poured so much energy into these past three years? When it comes to journalism and my effort to provide ”a perspective on the world wider than a slim glimpse, something more than just a taste,” sometimes I just want to come right out and say it: I’m a failure.
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This week’s installment of Along for the Ride, my series of weekly chronicles of Portland, OR-area transit lines. is an audio postcard from a rush hour trip aboard the MAX Blue Line to Hillsboro. In a future edition, I’ll explore the rest of the line, from Downtown Portland, east to Gresham.
Listen to the Story
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Along for the Ride is an evolving experiment in exploring Portland’s transit system. I’m excited to hear what you have to say about it. If you like this project or if you hate it, why not let me know? Comment! Share the project on your social networks. Participate by suggesting routes to take and things to see along the way, or anything else you think might improve this project. And, if you want to make it more possible for me to ride more often, and to take time doing these stories, why not offer a few dollars? Just click below.
This week, I woke early Wednesday morning intending to ride Line 85 commuters travelling to work in the warehouses and distribution centers of Swan Island. Transformed into a peninsula in the 1920s after a multi-year dredging effort, the island once housed Portland’s airport and was an important shipbuilding center during World War II. It’s now a major industrial area.
I visited a touch too late in my morning (boarding my first bus a little after 8 a.m.) to experience the daily commute. That just means I’ll eagerly anticipate a future “Along for the Ride” entry about the Swan Island Transportation Management Association’s free evening shuttle. For now, though, it’s time to come along for the ride:
Moments in Transit
8:12 a.m.: Arrive at the Rose Quarter Transit Center. Watch a couple fight. Wait with a man clad head to toe in red clothing and a woman in a green dress chatting energetically on a cell phone. Get disappointed when they all board a different bus. Finally board with six other passengers seven minutes later.
Continue reading “Along for the Ride: Island Time Aboard the 85″
The concept: explore Portland as seen from the metropolitan region’s transit lines. Each week, through a highly scientific selection process (in other words a combination of my mood, any errands I may have to run, suggestions from the peanut gallery and other such extremely formal criteria), I’ll be riding the full length — each direction — of one of Tri-Met‘s bus or rail lines (and perhaps those of surrounding transportation authorities, like Clark County’s C-Tran). Who knows what I’ll experience along the way or what I’ll observe, or even what form my storytelling will take? Learn more about the project, how to support it, or how to come along for the ride at the end of this post.
For this inaugural week, I rode Line 75, a megaroute running from St. Johns through much of North, Northeast and Southeast Portland, all the way to Milwaukie (for the non-Oregonians among you, that’s a city immediately south of Portland, not the alternately-spelled lakeside Wisconsin metropolis). For a taste of the route, check out the following audio slideshow. The speaker was a slightly counter-culture, late middle-aged man who identified himself as Robert. Reflecting on Portland’s public transit system and his regular commute to and from St. Johns, this afternoon, Robert, who refused to give his last name, accompanied family on a trip from Portland’s Woodstock neighborhood North to Burnside Blvd.
Before you read the rest of the story, listen to what Robert has to say about riding the 75, check out some images I snapped along the route, and even enjoy a moment of riparian pleasure, all brought to you by the 75:
Continue reading “Along for the Ride: Going Live on the 75″
Once again coming in second to the Bay Area (Site Selection‘s lede about San Francisco’s ban on unsolicited Yellow Pages was cornily fantastic), Portland ranked high alongside Oregon, which came in third on the list of “Top Sustainable States.” Congratulations!
But is praise premature? Subjectively, we’re probably not going out on a limb to gauge Portland and its neighbors among the nation’s most sustainable communities. There exists here an unquantifiable, do-it-yourself, simple approach I like to call Portland’s “Pot-luck” culture, where many groups bring their diverse skills and resources to the table. We’re all now quite well aware of the bike culture and transportation alternatives and ecoroofs and every other bright green badge of pride we wear. Meanwhile, as I detailed in the May, 2011 issue of Biocycle (Subscription Required) Portland has many more concrete sustainable projects in food scraps composting, urban gardening and new, private efforts like the upcoming June Key Delta Community Center (which was featured in a sidebar with the Biocycle story).
Nevertheless, are we measuring sustainability properly here, or anywhere? To rank the top metro areas, Site Selection used the number and per capita rate of LEED Certified green building projects, the extent of green incentives and amount of manufacturing and other facilities involved in renewables and green industry. Can our ability to live healthily, prosperously and durably over multiple generations (my rough definition of sustainability) be gauged by simply totaling up new construction and how many gizmos it features, dollars spent, and the new kilowatt-hour reducing technology we build? Or should our analysis be a little more complex? Should we explore our actual behaviors, i.e., the actual effectiveness of the programs we incent, the way our buildings – LEED or not – get used and the type of demands we place on our power grid? Wouldn’t that be the real measure of sustainability?
My un-scientific, un-journalistic assumption is that Portland would probably end up pretty far ahead on that sort of scale as well, but we — everyone, but particularly journalists reporting on the environment — might be well served by asking these sort of questions.
What do you think? Are we measuring sustainability properly? Is Portland “Green?” What do you think is the most sustainable community?
The United States Geological Survey paleoseismologist scrambles up a shrub-covered hillside outside Yakima, WA, points a few hundred yards away and describes how a long stretch of slightly off-colored soil could change perceptions of an entire region’s earthquake readiness.
Three years from now, when the latest iterations of the USGS’s national hazard maps appear, they’ll likely include new information about the Yakima Fold and Thrust Belt. That’s a crinkled landscape of anticlines and synclines – hill-like folds of the earth’s crust – spread across Central and Eastern Washington, including the spot where Sherrod now stands and, further east, the home of the Northwest’s only commercial nuclear reactor.
A new paper by Sherrod and Richard Blakely accepted for publication May 2 highlights compelling new evidence that the Yakima Fold and Thrust belt may be much more seismically active than long thought. If true, these findings could reshape assumptions used in assessments of nuclear safety, just as regulators try to reassess the controversial energy source in the wake of the March 11 Tohoku earthquake in Japan.
The magnitude 9 Tohoku quake wreaked unfathomable havoc in that country. Buildings collapsed. The ground split and a furious ocean stormed the coast, overwhelming defenses. Roiling, flaming seas of debris marched across cities and farms and deep down river valleys, upending houses and decimating one of the most advanced nations in the world.
Barely before the Japanese could grieve, the sight of smoke at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant stoked new concerns. Soon, news of hydrogen explosions and lost power and overheating fuel rods emerged. Emergency responders pumped seawater in a seemingly quixotic attempt to prevent a radioactive release. Officials declared and expanded evacuation zones. The one country that perhaps most viscerally understood the power of the atom found itself haunted by it again.
Overheated debate
Fukushima’s shadow stretched across the Pacific as anti-nuclear activists and industry proponents alike quickly mobilized.
Attention almost immediately turned to the Pacific Northwest, where the Cascadia Subduction Zone has in the past and could again produce quakes similar to what struck Japan.
Nervous thoughts also wandered to a tumbleweed-strewn compound known as the Hanford Site hundreds of miles inland, where nearly six decades ago, as part of the Manhattan Project, it provided the plutonium used in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Throughout the cold war, experiments on Uranium and other elements were conducted at Hanford, where nine nuclear reactors produced plutonium for weapons. Operated by the U.S. Department of Energy, the nearly 600-square-mile Hanford Site is now North America’s most contaminated place. A massive cleanup there will last years.
Industry leaders and regulators alike tried to reassure Americans that nuclear power plants across the U.S. are safe.
“At the moment, based on all the information we have, we are convinced that all the plants that are operating in the United States are operating safely,” Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Victor Dricks said.
“We’re conducting a 90-day review of the safety of all of the nuclear plants in the country in response to the events in Japan; a quick look to determine if there are things that we need to do, actions we need to take and things we see there,” Dricks said. “ Later, when we’ve had a chance to thoroughly review all the lessons we learned from Fukushima, we will conduct another review.”
So far, the Columbia Generating Station’s license application has proceeded smoothly, with a draft environmental impact statement from the NRC scheduled in June. However, NRC letters sent as part of the licensing process reveal the NRC had multiple questions for Energy Northwest about the assumptions it used to develop its response plan for potential accidents. Among the questions: Why did Energy Northwest continue to use 15-year-old studies as the basis for its earthquake preparations, when much more up-to-date information about the region’s seismic profile were available from the USGS and Hanford itself?
Continue reading “Research shakes up seismic knowledge near Northwest nuclear plant”
Life has been hectic lately, but to continue the food theme I thought I’d share some glimpses at some of the pleasant tastes (or temptations) I’ve experienced. I hope you don’t get too hungry.
Dear world: I’m a failure.
