Lascher at Large » Places

Along for the Ride: Streetcar Music Festival

Bill — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 19:17:01 +0000

Guitars, cellos, saxophones, toy pianos; how could I not include the Streetcar Mobile Music Fest as this week’s Along for the Ride?

Click play to listen: [Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Hosted by PDX Pop Now!, The New Rail~Volutionaries, Women’s Transportation Seminar and Portland Streetcar, Inc., the event featured musicians performing aboard various streetcars throughout the night. As Art Pearce told Portland Afoot’s Michael Andersen, it was the “Sunday Parkways of transit.” Instead of reading about it here, why not listen to what it was like when I went Along for the Ride? While you’re listening, click here to take a glance at my photos, which you can see after the jump (you can also find out how to contribute a few bucks to keep “Along for the Ride.” alive).

I can’t say the experience was a normal glimpse at everyday life aboard the streetcar, but it did seem to entertain two distinct groups of people: regular streetcar riders who stumbled upon the musicians as they explored Downtown and Northwest Portland, and an audience who came out specifically for the event. Some rode the entire length to listen to a particular musician’s full set. Others, like me, hopped from streetcar to streetcar for a chance to experience the variety of performances. Indeed, I became so focused on listening to the music that I nearly forget I was riding the streetcar, and definitely lost track of which neighborhoods I was in when.

Click any of the images to enlarge and start a slideshow.

Along for the Ride: Max Blue Line 1 — Hillsboro

Bill — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 18:03:11 +0000

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

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

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.

Along for the Ride: Island Time Aboard the 85

Bill — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:03:07 +0000

Welcome to the second week of Along for the Ride, my series of weekly chronicles of Portland, OR-area transit lines. If you haven’t already, check out the first edition and if you like the series, please spread the word, or even cover my bus fare.

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.

8:21: Realize I violated a central tenet of multimedia journalism. My audio recorder battery dies just as the ride starts. Silver lining: Next week I’ll have a better, easier to use recorder and, more importantly, more familiarity with the ABC – Always Be Charging – rule.

8:30: The bus gets lonely as three passengers leave.

8:36: Disembark at Fathom and Basin while watching UPS Drivers start their morning dance.

8:37: Begin wandering aimlessly.

8:59: Take obligatory cliché photographs of abandoned rail line.

9:09: Make a gruesome discovery.

9:12: Heed warnings at a boat launch.

9:13: Wait, maybe the warnings were unnecessary.

9:14: See, they’re fishing.

9:17: Lust for a life at sea.

9:28: Wait for the next bus along Basin Blvd. Wait ten more minutes. Finally decide to actually, you know, look at schedule. Start walking again. Wish I’d taken Daimler’s suggestion earlier.

9:50: Hit the beach!

10:01: Return to the real world.

Along for the Ride: Going Live on the 75

Bill — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 16:37:31 +0000

Today marks the public launch of “Along for the ride,”* a new series of mass transit adventure chronicles on Lascher at Large.

Watch an Audio Slideshow | Explore the Map | See the Photo Gallery

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:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4zCJR3l6OE

A tale of two Wunderlands

You ride,
And ride,
And ride,
Only at the end do you know the purpose of your trip.

One of twelve current “Frequent Service” Tri-Met bus routes — those designed to run every quarter-hour — the 75 averages intervals of about 17 minutes, according to the Portland Afoot Wiki.

I didn’t time the 75 when I rode it this week. I happened to arrive at its door just before it left Pier Park in St. Johns. Such details will have to be saved for Portland Afoot, or perhaps for future installments of this series. Anyhow, though I originally envisioned “Along for the Ride” as a series of journalistic accounts of individual transit lines, this first trip devolved into more of a solitary journey, albeit one in which my commitment to my profession was redeemed by the discoveries I made along the route.

My ride along the 75 started quietly. I barely made it on board. I don’t live by either end of the line, and my path to Pier Park, the route’s northern terminus, will remain a closely-guarded secret. What I can reveal: It involved an unidentified second transit line and a pedestrian meander to throw off would-be followers. I can, however, say I saw the biggest dog I’ve ever seen in my life along the way.

Anyhow, when I arrived the bus was empty aside from the older woman grilling the driver for details about how to make her connection. Despite the driver’s insistence that there would be plenty of warning before the woman’s required stop, she didn’t seem convinced, and the full-speed run I made to board the bus started to seem unnecessary. But I made it.

Before long we were on Lombard. A bunch of teenagers boarded at the first stop. One sat in the seats across the way from me. He was easily too cool for school. Every few seconds he’d erupt with smirking mirth. That wasn’t minimized by my donning of gigantic headphones as I slowly moved a cheap, underwhelming Radio Shack microphone around to pick up ambient sound (read, cacophonous static roughly reminiscent of rattling windows and engine noises). Already too shy for a journalist, I decided that wasn’t the time for an interview, and packed everything but my camera away.

This was the first instance of a dilemma that persisted throughout the day. People rarely want to be spoken with on buses, even less so than on the street, or so I led myself to believe. They don earbuds, they stick their noses into books, they sigh after a long day at work, they text friends, they flirt and gossip and stare intently out the window. Perhaps, at least for this first trip, the best way to experience transit in Portland was to do just that: experience it, fully.

So I took in the city as it passed. St. Johns’ mid-century downtown brimmed with summertime pedestrians. Friends met for coffee. Photographers ducked into a camera shop. Moms and dads pushed strollers. I saw one of two fencing halls I’d see along the 75.

It was the first of many pairs. The camera shop — Blue Moon Camera and Machine — also boasts typewriter repairs, and only a few blocks southeast, we’d also pass Ace Typewriter, possibly one of the only full-service typewriter maintenance businesses left in the entire country. Eventually, the bus passed two Trader Joe’s locations and two bowling alleys and not one, but two Wunderlands.

As it turns out, the two places I decided to get off the bus — in Portland’s Belmont neighborhood and Downtown Milwaukie — brought me a short stroll from two Wunderland Arcades. Sadly I lacked in nickels and competitors for air hockey, skee-ball, and scads of ticket-spewing games. Beyond the Wunderlands, which also feature second-run movie theaters, Line 75 passed, or stopped within a few blocks’ walk of, multiple cinemas, including the Baghdad, the Hollywood Theatre, and both of St. John’s movie houses.

Even more plentiful than movie theaters were parks. Big parks, little parks, dog parks, boring parks, fun parks, ugly parks, pretty parks, the 75 stopped near them all (actually, I don’t recall any particularly ugly or boring ones. They’re parks, after all). Parks too constrained for you? Why not take the 75 to the Springwater Corridor trailhead at Johnson Creek? Or head out on the water? Though I didn’t realize it at the time, my trip on the 75 was taking me to the river.

Summertime, and the Living is Easy

Upon arriving at the route’s terminus in Milwaukie, I headed out for a stroll. The day was far too beautiful not to do so. Of all the ways I’m nerdy, I’m not a comic-book reader. Were I so, I might have been thrilled to pass the headquarters of Dark Horse Comics (though the Darth Vader posters on the window were enough to excite the Star Wars nerd within). But my nerd-dom lies elsewhere, so I continued on toward a glistening shoreline I spied from Milwaukie’s Main Street.

I soon forgot about it all — the storefronts, the bus, my frustration with not interviewing anyone — when I reached the shores of the Willamette. There, dogs played, boaters launched, office workers strolled in khakis and button-ups and old men surveyed the landscape from recumbent bicycles flying hot pink banners. Summer surrounded.

It only continued. On my way to the water I’d passed the Main St. Collectors Mall and Soda Fountain, and I stopped in before re-boarding the bus home. Like any antique mall, its shelves were stuffed with pan-decade nostalgia — Star Wars Toys, World War II memorabilia, old record collections — but it featured an extra treat: the counter of a former Rexall Department Store — also known as Perry’s Pharmacy — where a family laughed over phosphates and hot dogs and an elderly mother treated her adult daughter to an ice cream cone. It was as if no one had ever moved. My only regret: not shooting the scene when I first glimpsed it through one of the store’s aisles. I did, however, enjoy my lunch and my dessert of chocolate peanut butter ice cream in a sugar cone.

This was no longer a bus ride. This was a journey. With a $4.75 day pass, I’d wandered across a metropolis, stopped for snacks and a stroll in a hip neighborhood (I’d grabbed a bite on Belmont Ave.), run an errand for a friend, and found myself on a quiet shoreline, where water lapped at my feet, dogs played fetch, kids laughed from inner tubes pulled behind motorboats and the world slowed down, if only for a moment.

More Transiting Portland Each Week

What’s “Along for the Ride?” It’s my evolving series of Portland-area mass transit chronicles. For the next, well, for the next long while I’ll be riding a new Tri-Met operated transit line. By new, I mean new to me. I’m beginning with lines I’ve never ridden, then I’ll move on to riding other lines I have taken, until I’ve ridden every bus, railway and shuttle operated by Tri-Met (and possibly routes on other public transit systems near and far, should the situation arise). Expect stories along the way. What kind of stories? I can’t quite be certain. Some newsy. Some reflective. Some only possible in the moment. Expect guest stars too. Perhaps expect to even come along yourself.

I expect Along for the Ride to also be a laboratory for new (to me) storytelling practices and a chance for me to hone audio recording, photography, videography, interviewing, mapping, writing, editing and other skills. Don’t be surprised if different forms are used to tell stories from week to week, though it’s conceivable the series will find its own rhythm, just as transit has its own pace.

You can help set that rhythm, however. You can start by getting involved. Tell me about your reflections of transit or via a tweet to @billlascher. If you use public transit, what do you use it for? What transit lines do you ride and why? If you don’t use public transit, explain why not. What might change your opinion about using transit, whether you currently use it or not? I want to know about transit in any city — after all, my love affair with transit writing started in LA, where transportation policy became the focus of my graduate studies — so why not reflect on your town’s best or worst routes?

For those of you familiar with particular Tri-Met lines, why not suggest in the comments what lines I should try next? Do you know of great stops along the way? If so, enter them on the map. Do you have a favorite transit story? Why not share some here, though I don’t want to step on the toes of Michael Andersen, and the great stories in each edition of his incomparable Portland Afoot (By the way, if you need something to read on the bus, or anywhere else you happen to be, I bet your $5 subscription or other support will be well worth it).

*By the way, special thanks to writer Christina Cooke for devising this series’ title, “Along for the Ride.” Check out Christina’s work at christinacooke.com.

Click on any image to enlarge:

New rankings beg question: what makes Portland sustainable?

Bill — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 17:56:11 +0000

Portland-based Sustainable Business Oregon reported yesterday that Stumptown once again won silver in Site Selection Magazine‘s Rankings of the nation’s most sustainable metroplitan communities.

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?

Let me know in the comments

Research shakes up seismic knowledge near Northwest nuclear plant

Bill — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 01:20:36 +0000

The making of a story

This story originally appeared as a three-part series at King5.com [Click to read parts 1, 2 and 3].
The piece was funded with the help of this story’s page at Spot.

Brian Sherrod’s a professional fault finder.

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.

The region also hosts the Columbia Generating Station, which provides 1,150 MW of electricity on land at Hanford leased from the DOE. A joint operating authority known as Energy Northwest and consisting of 27 member public utilities districts from across Washington runs the plant (Once known as the Washington State Public Power Supply System – WPPSS, or “Whoops” as the public often joked – changed its name to Energy Northwest in 1999 to distance itself from a massive municipal bond default that left additional reactors unfinished).

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.

After sustained public and political pressure, on April 1 the NRC convened a task force to examine nuclear safety.

“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.”

Meanwhile, the commission continues ongoing reviews of plant licenses, including Energy Northwest’s application to extend the Columbia Generating Station’s operating license to 2043 (the plant’s current license expires in 2023). Two plants – ~~Indian Point in New York~~ Vermont Yankee and Palo Verde in Arizona – have been re-licensed after the events at Fukushima.

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?

Now two months after the Tohoku quake, NRC staff stymied an effort by a coalition of citizens’ groups who want the commission to suspend other activities until it fully reviews lessons learned from the disaster. On May 2, NRC staff recommended that the commission deny the group’s emergency petition.

As a plant currently under review, the Columbia Generating Station became one of the petition’s focuses. The document said Portland, OR-based Northwest Environmental Advocates was “extremely concerned” about the implications of the Fukushima crisis

“They are particularly concerned about the implications of the Fukushima accident in light of earthquake risks to the Columbia Generating Station based on new findings of a structural zone that kinematically connects faults in central Washington with faults in the Puget Sound, the entirety of which may be seismically active,” the petition said. “The Fukushima accident also highlights the hazards associated with facility mismanagement, which has been a chronic problem at the Columbia Generating Station.”

According to Sherrod, who’s not involved with the petition, the findings it refers to are the same ones from his and Blakely’s paper.

Though the field is dynamic and growing, Dricks says in-house seismic experts are up to speed on earthquake data and research. Seismic and other hazards are too important only to deal with during plant licensing, Dricks says.

“All of the nuclear plants in the country are required to have designs that address and take into account the most severe natural environmental hazards that have occurred in the area,” Dricks said. After considering the worst case scenario, the commission then adds in a margin of error to its requirements of plant operators to account for unforeseen circumstances. The commission also studies historical data to determine hazards. If new data suggests inadequacies in the existing design of an NRC-regulated plant, the commission and the licensee analyze whether additional action is necessary. If the task force now reviewing nuclear plant safety has any recommendations to change current severe accident mitigation alternatives, or SAMA, reviews, then that could impact NRC’s review of Columbia’s license, Dricks says.

Meanwhile, the commission pays attention to current operating conditions at nuclear plants across the world.

“We’re always looking for information that can be applied to all U.S. reactors, and we analyze information that could become available from any incident, including Japan,” Dricks said. He said the 90-day review launched after Fukushima is looking at all aspects of NRC activities and will provide any lessons learned from the disaster.

NWEA Executive Director Nina Bell said her organization’s concern isn’t limited to earthquakes, or any single risk at the Columbia Generating Station. Rather, she said, Fukushima, illustrates that natural disasters can combine with human error, poor siting, inadequate design and operational mistakes into cascading problems.

“Northwest Environmental Advocates believes that nuclear power is inherently an experimental technology and that there are any number of unforeseen triggering actions that are likely to take place,” Bell said

Bell, who said it was “shocking” that the NRC issued Vermont Yankee’s new license so soon after the Fukushima event, said the public’s being left out of important decision-making by a public body, though she’s not surprised by the NRC staff recommendation to deny the petition

“Since the Nuclear Regulatory Commission seeks to the extent possible to eliminate public involvement in its licensing proceedings, the reaction by the NRC staff is, indeed, not a surprise,” Bell said. “At the same time, it is still rather amazing that this huge nuclear accident in Japan is continuing, we still don’t know all of the cascading failures that occurred, and the NRC staff is taking the position that, essentially, we in the United States have nothing substantial to learn from that accident.”

On the case

Rattling along a dirt road in his Silverado pickup, Sherrod describes features of the Wenas Valley that together tell a bigger story. He wants to know whether a scarp – a linear ridge that often indicates sudden shifts in the earth, often, but not always, from earthquakes – indicates an active fault, as he suspects. At first appearing a blur of scrub grass and shrubs, as Sherrod points out exposed basalt and deformations and slight differences in color, the scarp comes into view like one of those 3D images in a Magic Eye poster. The feature’s not new to geologists, but Sherrod believes that if he can dig a trench into it he’ll find more evidence of an active fault and take a step closer to describing a tectonic region far more seismically active and interconnected than once thought.

In a sense, Sherrod, a member of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, is a detective looking for clues of past tremors, and the faults responsible for them.

“I go around and try to identify where active faults are, and try to figure how active they are – in other words, how often earthquakes occur on these faults and how big these earthquakes are,” Sherrod said.

Everything – fossils, layers of sediment, the exacting detail of data from airborne lidar mapping and magnetometers and, of course, lots of digging in the dirt – helps Sherrod solve the case. Clues might include different types of rocks on each side of a scarp or depositions known as colluvium that form when soil that should be on an upper layer shows up further below, suggesting that an earthquake rearranged the layers.

“The more we work over there, the more we’re trying to fit this into a larger tectonic framework,” Sherrod said of his scrutiny of the Yakima Fold and Thrust Belt.

In just the last three years alone Sherrod and his colleagues have found evidence for what are likely three newly-recognized active faults around Yakima, and even more elsewhere in the state.

“I haven’t tallied it up, but I’m pretty close to finding a new active fault every year here in Washington,” Sherrod says. He believes he’d find more if only given the resources to go look for them. “It takes money, it takes time, it takes people.”

One retired geologist deeply familiar with the Yakima Fold and Thrust Belt is intrigued by the study.

“We may have structures here that are actually more active than what we thought in the past, “ said Steve Reidel, who was a Hanford geologist for 30 years and now teaches at Washington State University, Tri-Cities.

The author of “Big Black Boring Rock,” a book about Northwestern geology, Reidel said fault records are difficult to find because scarps are rare, thanks to a different sort of cataclysm: The Missoula Floods. “Only” about 15,000 years ago, the bursting of an ice dam on a glacial lake released huge volumes of water, then over the next 2,500 years, did so about 40 times more. The floods were so forceful that they buried scarps and washed out features that might have been the best evidence of faults.

Reidel says that’s why it’s so crucial that geologists be given the resources to trench suspect faults – even most young faults would still be older than the Missoula Floods – so they can dig beneath the surface, beyond where key evidence may have been washed away.

“The problem is how do you get funding to do it?” Reidel asked. “We did it on weekends and evenings. As a couple of my friends said, our wives funded our research.”

Now, Reidel says, data collection that was always low key until Sherrod, Blakely, and others started exploring links across the Cascades, is changing the minds of people like himself.

“The way I look at it, we’re just at the cusp of that knowledge base now,” he says. “My attitude and ideas of what’s going on over here are changing based very much on what they did, but we don’t know what it all means and we don’t know how significant the young faulting, because we’ve never really had a chance to trench some of the features.”

Even if previously unknown faults are found, that won’t mean a huge earthquake is coming tomorrow, but it also won’t mean there’s no chance of a temblor. What it will mean is better tools with which to evaluate safety of places like Hanford and the Columbia Generating Station. It also doesn’t mean Reidel will leave town any time soon.

“The west coast is particularly dangerous [for earthquakes], but the best way to look at it is the probability of a big earthquake is the same every day and it’s pretty small,” Reidel says. “Some day you’re going to have that earthquake. You don’t know when, but you’re going to have it, but it’s still a small risk every day.”

Old Models

Questions about the Columbia Generating Stations’s safety didn’t start with Fukushima. Last fall the AP reported that the industry-funded Institute of Nuclear Power Operations said the plant was one of two in the nation most in need of improvement. In 2009, the plant had five unplanned shutdowns – known as “scrams” – Seattle’s King 5 TV station reported this April.

Energy Northwest officials refused requests for interviews for this story, but three days after the Tohoku quake, company officials assured a jittery public that the Columbia Generating Station was well prepared for the unlikely event of natural disaster, thanks to redundant backup power systems, a safe distance from the Columbia River in case the upriver Grand Coulee Dam bursts, and engineering that would help the plant weather ground shaking exceeding what would come from the largest earthquake expected in their region

Two weeks after the quake, Energy Northwest CEO Mark Reddeman penned a widely-circulated op-ed further detailing the plant’s preparations and meant to counter public apprehensions about nuclear power.

“In the past weeks, too much misinformation about nuclear energy has played on people’s fears,” Reddeman wrote. “The anti-nuclear lobby has seen an opportunity and they are exploiting it.”

In the op-ed, Reddeman said this wasn’t the time to debate the merits of developing additional nuclear power resources in the U.S. Rather, he wrote, the nuclear industry will thoroughly study in minute-by-minute detail to incorporate lessons learned once the situation at Fukushima stabilizes and can be studied.

“What you should know – and may know already – is that your friends and neighbors who work at Columbia Generating Station have an unwavering dedication to safety,” Reddeman wrote.

On March 10, only a day before the Tohoku quake, Energy Northwest received the latest in a series of letters from the NRC questioning the sufficiency of calculations the company used to inform its cost-benefit analysis of earthquake impact mitigations. A July 1 2010 letter, meanwhile, reveals NRC’s concern that Energy Northwest used old seismic hazard analyses to measure ground-shaking, despite more recent studies of earthquake hazards, like ones done by the USGS or the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for projects related to the cleanup effort at nearby Hanford.

The NRC’s Dricks said these letters only seek to clarify technical details and don’t cast doubt on plant safety.

“There is no reason for people living near the plant to fear for their safety,” Dricks said in an email.

Dricks later said that Energy Northwest’s response to the March 10 letter, as well as some unanswered questions from the July, 2010 letter, is due May 9.

Energy Northwest did respond to the seismic hazards question from that letter in a Sept. 17 response. It told the NRC that the Columbia Generating Station is farther away from seismic sources in the Yakima Folds than the Hanford facilities in question, with different soil structures underneath. Moreover, the response continued, a 2005 study at Hanford suggests that estimates of hazards were similar to what earlier studies had shown, and that data from a 2008 USGS hazard map suggests the company was actually being more conservative than necessary in predicting ground motion.

The question will now become whether the next USGS hazard map – scheduled for release in 2014 – will include updated information about hazards in the Yakima Fold and Thrust Belt. That will depend in large part on how much study the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network team is able to do on the region and on what new knowledge research like that done by Sherrod and Blakely brings to the table.

Neighbors

Of course, shifting knowledge about the Yakima Fold and Thrust belt doesn’t just have direct implications for the Columbia Generating Station. As separate as the Columbia Generating Station and the Hanford Site may be from a management and oversight standpoint, the fact remains that the two are inextricably linked, if for no other reason but geography.

What happens, for example, if the World War II era “Canyon” buildings where uranium was processed collapse? What if the K-basins that store fuel from Hanford’s old N-Reactor leak? What if a radioactive release at Hanford hampers responders’ ability to address a crisis at the Columbia Generating Station?

Eric Holdeman, an emergency management consultant who previously worked at the Washington State Division of Emergency Management, says there’s a proximity challenge for the Columbia Generating Station.

“When you have hazards in proximity to one another, everybody is doing their own thing, but it would be interesting to know to what degree they’ve looked at their 360 degree view, not from natural hazards but technological hazards,” Holdeman, who writes the “Disaster Zone” blog, said. Typically, he said, disasters like the one in Japan aren’t single events, but multiple events that together cause worse problems to occur. “I’ve just lived long enough to know never say never.”

Even given the risk of unexpected events, there’s only so much that can be done about major infrastructure.

“Once a facility like a nuclear power plant is built, it’s built,” Holdeman said. “You might be able to do something with the backup power, but the containment vessel is the containment vessel, it is what it is.”

Ivan Wong, a board member at the Earthquake Engineering and Research Institute, says the seismic hazard in Eastern Washington has probably been underestimated.

“Seismology and geology and this whole business of earthquake hazards is not a perfect science, so as we learn more about earthquake processes and earthquake hazards we have to go back and revisit what we’ve done in the past,” Wong said.

Each earthquake brings new information that contributes to our understanding of risks, Wong said. Regulatory agencies keep tabs on scientific developments as they evolve. Critical structures like power plants are either safe from newly discovered risks, or they’re forced by regulators to retrofit, he said, and therefore the public can feel confident in their safety.

Room for new work

There are significant fears elsewhere in the Northwest.

The Cascadia Subduction Zone – which stretches approximately from Northern California to Vancouver, British Columbia – will someday, possibly soon, unleash a quake similar to the one in Japan. The Northwest is less prepared for subduction quake than was Japan or Chile, where another subduction quake struck in February, 2010, but such an event probably wouldn’t cause heavy damage in the Tri-Cities.

Nevertheless the Tri-Cities aren’t completely safe.

One of Washington’s largest documented quakes hit in 1872. Geologists are still trying to pinpoint exactly how big it was, or where it was centered, but it’s widely believed to have been a 6.8 temblor with an epicenter near the south end of Lake Chelan, perhaps as far south as the town of Entiat. That’s about 100 miles from the Columbia Generating Station.

It’s also unclear what sources inform Energy Northwest’s assessments of the Columbia Generating Station’s risks, since its probablistic safety assessments still refer to a 1994 study, long before much of the current research and data came together.

To be sure, the Columbia Generating Station based its design specifications on the far larger quake near Lake Chelan. Another significant large quake in the region was the 1936 shaker near Milton-Freewater, in Oregon. These quakes are still quite recent from a geological perspective, and the monitoring now in place at Hanford only reveals so much about the record.

In fact, there just isn’t much seismic data from the region surrounding the Columbia Generating Station. The first seismic monitors were installed at Hanford in 1969. The largest quake they’ve ever recorded was a 3.8 (the most recent quake detected in the region was a magnitude 3.3 shaker just east of Hanford on April 29), but that doesn’t mean a larger quake can’t occur.

“The 20 to 30 years we’ve been monitoring is a very short time,” says the USGS geophysicist Joan Gromberg.

In the 1970s, some of the first significant work at Hanford to support a planned Basalt Waste Isolation Project became the first detailed look at the region’s tectonics. That meant working on mapping the region’s faults and folds, work that continued until 1989, when the DOE abandoned the project to focus on a proposed nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Afterword the only data collected was seismicity, which helps provide information about how much the ground shakes or may shake but doesn’t give a sense of the long-term frequency or history of earthquakes.

When Reidel, who came to Hanford to work on the Basalt project, and Al Rohay, who managed the Hanford Seismic Assessment Program for the DOE until the task was transferred to a Hanford Contractor this month, wanted to trench Rattlesnake Mountain, a more than 3,000 foot high treeless mountain that dominates the Horizon, they couldn’t secure funding. Without the DOE building anything new, there wasn’t a justification to study potential faults any further.

“Out of all the industrialized countries, the U.S. has the least amount of geologic mapping done, which is kind of a sad state of affairs,” Reidel said.

Sherrod says his and his colleagues’ ability to map the state’s seismic risks is limited only by the amount of resources the federal government is willing to throw their way, not by a lack of subjects to study. They just need the time, funding and other help necessary to collect and sift through data.

The more data they collect, the more geologists will be able to shift a raging debate about the Columbia Plateau and the Yakima Fold and Thrust Belt: Whether these regions thin- or thick-skinned.

Thick-skinners think that deformations in the Columbia River Basalts cut deep into the seismogenic – or earthquake producing – part of the earth’s crust, and can thus cause larger earthquakes. Thin skin adherents say a structure known as a “decollement” – essentially flat faults where layers of rock slide across one another and bunch up into rises similar to the way a rug pushed across a floor might – shaped the Yakima Folds as it slid between the basalts and the crystalline basement.

Sherrod says his newly accepted paper puts forth a thick-skin model and that he and his colleagues have the data to support that hypothesis. But that doesn’t mean geologists have enough data about the region.

“I have thought for a long time there is just a general lack of knowledge about active faults in Central Washington,” Sherrod said. “There’s a lot of room for new work.”

People like Sherrod and Blakely might be finding the big faults, determining how frequently earthquakes occur on them and understanding how big they can be. There’s still one question they can’t answer.

“When’s the next big one going to be?” Sherrod says. “That’s the one we always get. We just don’t know.”

Sidebar: Proud of the cloud

Sidebar: Tearing down the wall

Sidebar 1: Proud of the Cloud

For decades, the Hanford site drove the economy of nearby Richland – essentially a company town for the nuclear industry – and, to a lesser extent, Kennewick and Pasco, Richland’s neighbors in a metropolitan area known as the Tri-Cities. Now the cleanup continues to define the region; commanding large portions of 2009 stimulus funds and keeping the Tri-Cities economy afloat as the Great Recession hit the rest of the Northwest hard.

All of this reinforces a sense of “plutonium pride.” All over the Tri-Cities are landmarks like Atomic Laundry and Proton Lane. Student athletes at Richland High School play for the Bombers. Their mascots are mushroom clouds.

“We’re proud of the cloud,” says Dave Acton, a Richland native.

Over pints of Plutonium Porter, Richland native Dave Acton – the general manager and brewmaster at Atomic Ale & Eatery – describes his hometown pride. Easily mistakable for Jeff Bridges’s title character from “The Big Lebowski,” Acton rolls his eyes at nuclear fears.

At the confluence of the Yakima, Snake and Columbia Rivers, two other cities besides Richland comprise the Tri-Cities. Pasco is a rail town that’s become a magnet for Latino immigrants. Panaderias, taquerias and predominantly Spanish signage fill the city’s business district. In a city that’s also the gateway to Eastern Washington’s grain farms, Pasco’s outdoor farmer’s market is one of the state’s biggest. To the south, meanwhile, Kennewick is the region’s shopping hub, with both an indoor shopping mall and a sprawl of arterials lined with big boxes and strip malls, while bars, tattoo parlors and headshops – as well as a number of wood furniture refinishers – now dominate the city’s older Downtown.

The surrounding region is largely agrarian. Volcanic soil from the Columbia River Basalts makes the hills and valleys of the Yakima Fold and Thrust Belt prime wine country. Combined with pleasant weather and a resilient economy, the Tri-Cities have grown faster than other parts of the Northwest.

“There’s a lot of people in this area, but they’re not from here,” Acton said. “People sold their cracker boxes in Seattle or California for 3 or 4 million dollars, came here and bought a mansion on the mountainside. Then they come in and they say ‘oh my god, this area is dangerous.’”

Acton’s fed up with newcomers who try to whitewash the region’s history by suggesting that the high school change its mascot, for example.

“Quit trying to change our area,” Acton said. “You moved here. We are who we are.”

Acton says he doesn’t take Richland’s nuclear history as a negative. He says the city has a reason to be proud. Those who came to work on the Manhattan Project are no different than shipbuilders who built the USS Enterprise, or the women who inspired Rosie the Riveter and helped build B-17s and Mustangs.

“Here in Richland we didn’t necessarily ask to be in the war, we didn’t necessarily want to be in the war, but we can say with complete and utmost certainty that we ended that thing,” Acton said. “It’s not about deaths, it’s not about destruction, it’s ‘let’s get this done, so we can all get along now for a change.’ Unfortunately, we never will.”

Now, Acton said, nuclear power is a way of turning the knowledge gained in the pursuit of nuclear weapons back into something useful He dismisses concerns as fear-mongering.

“Panic sells,” Acton says. “Peace doesn’t.”

-Bill Lascher

Sidebar 2: Tearing Down the Wall

Until recently, geologists and geophysicists believed that the young volcanoes of the Cascade Range separated everything to their west from everything to their east. In their new paper, Blakely and Sherrod tear down that wall.

“Now we’re looking at the Cascades as a mountain system,” Sherrod said. He sees himself in a faction of scientists that theorizes that – from the Snoqualmie Pass South – the Cascades are only five million years old, or younger (some volcanologists put their “birth” tens of millions of years before that). That would mean they might have formed after a 10 to 15 million year long period when lava oozed across 63,000 square miles of the Northwest. Those lava flows formed the Columbia River Flood Basalts, one of the largest such flows in the world and a defining feature of the Northwest.

Many subtle clues support this position. One is part of the Pacific Northwest experience: The “rain shadow” caused by the Cascades, for example, which block moisture from passing from the Pacific Ocean to eastern Oregon and Washington. With wet wetter in one side of the Cascades but not the other, you’d expect different vegetation, as is the case today. The Columbia River Basalts, however, contain fossils of wet-weather vegetation you might find in the Great Smoky Mountains, suggesting that the Cascades weren’t there to block rainfall when the basalts formed.

Over the last decade, the USGS mapped faults around the Puget Sound area west of the Cascades to identify hazards in the heavily populated area. As they did, they found fault systems that seem to link up with faults deep in the basalts of the Yakima Fold and Thrust belt. Previously, most geologists thought the Cascade Volcanoes separated the Pacific Northwest into two different tectonic regions. Knowing that the basalts existed before the volcanoes means it’s likelier that the two sides are connected and part of a larger, deeper fault system than previously thought, not isolated features. That doesn’t mean that all the faults will rupture at the same time if one does, but it does show a more complex interaction of seismic stresses than once taught.

“You have to view this as a whole, a whole system. you can’t just kinda look at things in one little piece in isolation,” says Joan Gromberg, a geophysicist who works with Sherrod.

-Bill Lascher

Plutonium pride on the Mid-Columbia

Bill — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 18:14:35 +0000

This update originally appeared April 15 on the blog for the Spot.us story I’m working on about seismic risks at Eastern Washington’s nuclear power facilities. Later updates — including news of a petition by environmental groups to stop the NRC from nuclear plant licensing and other proceedings until it completes a review of the Fukushima disaster — are available here. Expect the final story May 2.

“We’re proud of the cloud.”

That’s what Dave Acton – the general manager and brewmaster at Atomic Ale & Eatery in Richland, WA – told me last night. Acton grew up in Richland, part of Eastern Washington’s Tri-Cities area. The town’s biggest claim to fame, though, is the nearby Hanford Site, the site used by the U.S. government for decades to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. It’s also the place where, for more than 30 years, the Columbia Generating Station has produced electricity on land leased from the federal government from the only commercial nuclear reactor still operating in the Northwest.

Acton chatted with me over of “Plutonium Porter” last night. He explained to me how safe he felt growing up in Richland — and how happy he is to raise kids here. For Acton, concerns about safety at the Columbia Generating Station and the Hanford site are the result of fear-mongering and panic. Though the conversation happened spontaneously (the way the best journalism often does), it reminds me just how much more complex any story is. Of course, one person’s opinion shouldn’t be seen as representative of an entire community, but it’s worth remembering that as I consider the seismic hazards of Eastern Washington – and what it means for the Columbia Generating Station and the Hanford Site – there’s a real value in understanding how those most directly impacted by these facilities feel about them. I’m looking forward to sharing what Acton had to say in my final piece.

I’ll also have details from my enlightening conversation with Steve Reidel (without whom, coincidentally, I wouldn’t have found Atomic Ale after bumping into him long after our interview). Reidel, a geologist and adjunct professor at Washington State University, Tri-Cities, recently retired from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Recently retired after decades working on the Hanford Site, Reidel reminded me how little we still know about earthquakes in this part of Washington – a point he also made in a column in last Sunday’s Tri-City Herald (you’ll have to pay to see the story in the paper’s archives). More concerned about the risk such quakes might pose to aging buildings on the Hanford Site than at the Columbia Generating Station, Reidel reminded me just how much of a struggle it is to get scientific studies done consistently and thoroughly. There was much more to our conversation, but you’ll hae to wait until May to learn the full story.

When you read it (and I hope you’ll support it by clicking “fund this story” or, if funds are tight, by taking surveys to earn free credits to apply to this piece), you’ll also learn about my next destination: a newly trenched fault outside of Yakima that I’ll be visiting with Brian Sherrod later today. Sherrod, a paleoseismologist, works with the U.S. Geological Survey and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network to map and identify active faults. Thanks to LIDARdata that has become available over the past decade Sherrod and the PNSN have been able to identify one new fault a year in Washington. Their only limitation: having enough resources to collect and process data from around the state. Sherrod is also preparing to publish research that will provide a new understanding of the relationship between fault systems east of the Cascades, and those in the more heavily populated areas west of the mountains. I’m looking forward to seeing in person how Sherrod works and literally getting my hands dirty as I see his work first hand.

I’m happy to be out in the Tri-Cities and to have the opportunity to see what I’m writing about first hand (theres no reason why any journalists shouldn’t go in the field, but that’s a blog for another time). Disappointingly, I’ve yet to get Energy Northwest – the operators of the Columbia Generating Station – to talk with me about the basis for their safety claims. As i try, I’ll continue analyzing some of the other materials and interviews I’ve had – including a discussion with an emergency management expert, congressional research service reports on seismic safety near nuclear power plants, and more.

I can’t do any of this without your continued support. Please click “fund this story” or “free credits” if you want to help me tell this story.

Heart of the Monster: Journey to SEJ 2010, Part 3

Bill — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 21:11:01 +0000

As I prepare for a new journey, I’m thinking about past travels, so here is the third installment of my tales from last fall’s trip to the 2010 Society of Environmental Journalists conference. See Part 1 here and Part 2 here. Talk about slow journalism.

Imagining my own murder came easily. Shadows sapped what last fall warmth might have lingered from the forests around the confluence of the Lochsa, Clearwater and Selway rivers. Choosing a river-rafting resort for its off-season rate, I was the only guest on this, the day of the year’s first frost. I envisioned my role as the victim in a backwoods-set horror film. Having battled a cold all day, a fever crept through my brain in sharp contrast to the plummeting mercury outside. My thoughts ran wild.

In truth, they had all day, just as this text, as all text seems to escape my control.

Before succumbing, I ate across the highway at Ryan’s Wilderness Inn. I sat at the counter and watched a courtroom reality show through the static on a small T.V. What could have been my last meal was a French dip with over-salted, but tasty, au jus. It was served on a place mat depicting a map of the solar system (I think one of my best friends growing up had the same set). The mid-October day unraveled as I ate. Listening to crackle of the snowy TV screen and the waitress chit-chatting with the cook, I marveled at the vastness of the universe from this roadside eatery, just a speck in Idaho’s forests.

I’d left Oregon that morning before swinging across a remote corner of Washington. Along the way, I inched ever closer to my professional line in the sand. I wouldn’t arrive in Missoula, though, without facing the Heart of The Monster.

As I’ve previously recounted, my day began with deer at dawn in a campground on the shore of Wallowa Lake. After a breakfast in Joseph of polish sausage and eggs drove North through Enterprise (disappointed not to have realized the night before that the Terminal Gravity brewery was there). I left Enterprise along Oregon Route 3, following the road up a slowly-rising plateau until I traveled above the western rim of Joseph Canyon. I entered Washington where the Lewiston Highway becomes state route 129, then decends into — and rises again out of – the Grande Ronde River Valley on a tangle of twists and turns protected only by guardrails resembling white picket fences.

“Discovering” the land

Long before I descended again – this time approaching the Snake River at Asotin, just south of the twin cities of Clarkston and Lewiston – I learned these lands were not by any means as wild, as remote or as isolated as my first impression led me to believe. After Joseph, as “empty” as the land seemed, I started to learn something else that perhaps many of us don’t realize when we approach the “wild.” This land is — and has long been — home to many generations of people, even if perhaps the relationships those people had with these surroundings were so different, so much more subtly integrated than our current society’s.

That realization started to emerge about ten miles south of the Washington border, when I “discovered” Joseph Canyon. Having never seen the Grand Canyon and having reluctantly skipped Hell’s Canyon, I was easily impressed by Joseph. Beyond the natural beauty and beyond the fascination I felt for its geology, though, another thought circulated: what was this vast and dramatic and beautiful place like when there wasn’t a road above it, when tourists weren’t stopping at overlooks to peer down into the valleys that used to be the winter home of an entire nation?

Such questions rattle through my head wherever I travel. Here in my own nation, on a landscape so many of us so readily dub “ours,” they take on different meaning. It’s easy for Americans to still perceive spaces like these that contrast so sharply with our cities and towns and farms as “wild” or “untamed” or “unspoiled” lands untouched by civilization. What came before is often unacknowledged, if not out of sight.

In college, I was a history major whose focus – if inadvertently so – was on the articulation and formation of national identities. Even so, I must admit to having little knowledge about the nations and communities that exist and existed within the land we describe as the United States of America. This is true even though I grew up in the heart of the Chumash world and no matter how many times in elementary school we were assigned to read The Island of the Blue Dolphins. Nevertheless, the Channel Islands I gazed at my whole life were the same ones so important to the Chumash. I’ve strolled countless times past the Albinger Archeological Museum and, of course, Mission San Buenaventura, both reminders of one sort or another of what came before, what we’ve wrought upon one another, and what’s been buried by the passing decades. In many ways, though, the Chumash — and even the Spanish who subdued them — were abstract concepts in late Twentieth Century Southern California. The only time they really began to seem less so was after college, when I paid attention to longer and broader historic narratives, or when I worked on stories like this one I did for the about the impact of contemporary development projects on ancient Chumash sites.

Vague Knowledge

Of course, I’ve always known the vague superficial history of American exploitation, subjugation, extermination and marginalization of native communities, but I’d learned few details about specific histories and incidents. More straightforwardly put: I know little about Native Americans and their history aside from the cursory overview given in traditional California public school educations, and whatever knowledge I’ve occasionally picked up through other pursuits since.

Then, a year ago, when I moved from L.A. to Portland, I found myself fascinated by the history of the Modoc depicted at Lava Beds National Monument, a history I hadn’t known, even though it occurred in my home state of California (albeit a corner of the state quite distant from where I was raised). It’s likely I wouldn’t have learned of it had I not been drawn to the monument purely by its geologic appeal.

It may seem naïve to carry a sense of wonder in my discovery of these topics when so much of this history is so problematic. So be it. I can’t do anything to change that history, but I can welcome my broadened perspective upon it. I’ve been fascinated by what I have been able to learn, and by how my knowledge of tribal history has slowly grown as I’ve settled in the Northwest. Such lessons allow me to much more vividly understand the extent to which urbanization and settlement has extensively shifted our world.

Checking Eden off the List

My realization there above Joseph Canyon about the many thousands of people that must have crossed this landscape, a landscape I perceived as so untouched and so isolated, only served to make me feel more alone, especially as illness descended further upon me. My loneliness increased as the hours and miles stretched, and as I approached the Heart of the Monster, the site that represents the source of all creation to the Nez Perce.

Just ponder that for a second. The source of all creation. Many, many people trace all of humanity to this spot just south of U.S. Highway 12, a nation’s sacred source tucked away in Eastern Idaho and now managed by the park service of another nation. The last remnant of a monster that, months later, would be dwarfed by enormous shipments of equipment meant to squeeze from the ground more of the substance that our nation now prizes so reverently.

I stopped. I looked. I listened to a recording of the tale of the coyote who tricked a monster in order to save all the other living things the monster had devoured. I learned how all the people and animals sprung forth from the defeated monster to populate the land.

Then the recording ended. I watched a mom take her daughter on a stroll, and I saw a car load of retirees stretch their legs in the nearby parking lot, and I took photos, and I enjoyed the sun on the skin of my aching body, and I returned to my own car.

I checked Eden off the list without saying a word.

On this trip, I traveled with the precise goal of connecting with others, joining potential colleagues, establishing professional connections and honing my reportorial skills. The closer I came to Missoula and the more I discovered along the way, though, the further I felt from anywhere. “Isolated” with my thoughts as the landscape unfolded beneath my feet, the more my mind wandered into these sorts of reflections and recollections.

Meanderings of thought

I admit that the story – and this entire series, delayed as it may be – has meandered from its path. Nevertheless, I’m also wrestling with how to respond honestly to my experiences, with what happened in my brain on the journey and whether it’s self-indulgent to serve this soup of thought (it’s a little too stagnant to call it a stream) to you, instead of a straightforward report of the who and the what I saw where and when. Which approach provides the real, honest reporting?

You’ll notice in reading these recollections that I am extensively self-referential and that my thoughts are increasingly digressive. This isn’t an accident, exactly. On this trip, especially at this point, passing through these locations, I barely encountered anyone else. There were few sources to develop. The encounters I did have were simply inappropriate to develop into deep connections, if at all. To do so may have been to force a story that wasn’t there. This might be a reality of a solo road trip. You’re so encased in your car and then, over time, in your head. As you’re recollecting it hours or days or months later, doesn’t it follow that your words will be uniquely shaped?

I’m confident in my abilities and experience as a writer, but I’m trying to do much more reporting, more actual reporting, and I’d like to have done so on this trip. It’s pretty easy to write and to meander without a guaranteed paycheck. What I need to figure out is how to report without one, because I need to keep my journalistic skills as fresh as my writing, even when I’m not sustaining myself. Then I must figure out how to turn that writing, that reporting, that observation and reflection and analysis and curation into something that does sustain me.

I’ve long since encountered that professional line in the sand. Each day that passes, I wonder a bit more whether I ever really crossed it. Have I even properly acknowledged it? Did I skirt it? Did I place it further down the road?

Now, as my resume lingers on potential employers’ desks or in their inboxes, as reporting piles high like scaffolding around as-yet-unfinished stories, as pitches bounce about the ether, and as I prepare for another, shorter journey (this time with a clear reporting objective in mind), do I need to address what I’ve learned about myself and my career on the other side of that line? Do I need to stop asking myself questions, and start asking them of others (my suspicion is a loud, resounding “yes”)?

Do I understand whether I’ve encountered the monster, whether at 30 years old, after college and grad school and years as a reporter and editor and everything else I’ve built up, I’ve found the monster’s heart, whether I’ve found a way inside, to confront it and to spring forth again from within?

Uncertainty, seismic risks and nuclear regulation

Bill — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 01:30:09 +0000

This is a copy of a blog post I wrote today at spot.us to update supporters about my work on a story exploring the seismic dangers that could face the Columbia Generating Station near Richland, Washington. Click here to read more about that story and how you can help make it happen.

In more than a week of uncertainty following Japan’s largest recorded earthquake, its ensuing tsunami and the still unfathomable specter of a radiological nightmare, the only thing the world has to be certain about is uncertainty itself. We still don’t know the fate of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. We still don’t know how many people perished in the original disaster and how many still cling to life. We still don’t know how much of the Japanese landscape was contaminated with radioactive material, and we still don’t have a clear sense of the sort of recovery Japan faces.

We just don’t know.

So, here in the U.S., why are so many officials so quick to express such certainty, and why are journalists so quick to accept government officials’ and nuclear industry spokespeople’s assurances that yes, we swear, you’re really safe here in the U.S.? How can we be assured there really is little chance we will face disasters similar to that Japan now suffers through?.

I’m not referring to concerns about the immediate impacts of a radiation plume. The risk from this specific incident to U.S. citizens seems minimal. Nevertheless, I think we’re asking the wrong questions if journalists exploring dangers in the U.S. only consider immediate impacts in our country from the Fukushima Daiichi plant and don’t ask how what occurs in Japan to the Japanese people could be instructive for what may happen here. Meanwhile, there’s also problematic framing of the discussion.

This morning, for example, NPR’s Morning Edition led an interview by Renee Montagne with Georgetown psychologist Robert Dupont,who studies fear. Introducing the piece, Steve Inskeep almost jokingly said “As of now, the death toll from Japan’s nuclear emergency stands at zero.” Whether there may not have been immediate death, nor lethal doses, it misses the point to only look at the immediate aftermath and not the current risk. Dupont said other than Chernobyl we “don’t have bodies piling up.” But this isn’t just about bodies piling up. It’s also about bodies bombarded with radiation, bodies detoriorating over time.

Valerie Brown heartbreakingly reminded us of so much Monday in her “Pawning the Chernobyl Necklace” on The Phoenix Sun, fusing exquisite prose and detailed research and scientific knowledge to explain exactly how long lasting these impacts can be for an individual, what fear really feels like, and how blind assurances of safety serve no one.

I’m looking at the seismic risks facing the Columbia Generating Station because I just haven’t seen people telling the full story. Even if that full story reinforces claims that we are safe, it must be told credibly. I worry a bit that other outlets are exploring this topic, that they’ll get to it faster, dispatching salaried, staff reporters to tell it before I can, but then I realize two things: It’s a story that can’t be told too many times, that must be told in as nuanced a manner as possible; it’s also a story that deserves to be told in detail, in depth, and in as explanatory a manner as possible.

Our responsibility as journalists

That question has been rolling around in my brain since I first woke to news last week that officials from Energy Northwest – the company that runs the Columbia Generating Station, the only commercial nuclear plant in the Northwest, had assured the public that the plant is safe from Earthquakes. Officials certainly have to be cautious about panicking the public (especially when an American run on potassium iodide pills could threaten availability for the Japanese most immediately at risk).

So maybe the pressure is on journalists: we need to do a better job – without fear mongering – of asking just what evidence officials are using to justify their claims. How up to date are the seismic studies? What historic data they use? How thoroughly have geologists studied the Columbia Plateau’s potential, and how have those studies been integrated into designs at the Columbia Generating Station and the regulations that govern it? It’s our job to ask these questions and not to accept “we’re safe” as a satisfactory answer, especially when a simple google search – much like the one I performed the day I heard that story – reveals that historic quakes 90 miles away from the plant ahve exceeded its designs in magnitude and that dangers exist.

Simple Google searches, of course, are not enough. That’s why I’ve been poring through significant accident mitigation assessments, emergency management plans, and seismic profiles as I try to identify who I should call first. I always struggle with that when I start working on a story, and I should get over my uncertainty. What I’m finding so far, though, only prompted more questions. For example, the geologic area the plant sits on is one notorious for “bad data” about its seismicity. Again. Uncertainty.

Meanwhile, I also need to bring myself up to speed on current geology and seismology (why, for example, is horizontal ground shaking a better indicator of a quake’s strength than the ricter scale?), nuclear policy (if you thought the alphabet soup of federal agency names was bad, just read a report from the NRC – and hope you have a pot of coffee brewed) and just who would be at risk from a radiological release.

Thank you for your continued support

But I’m ready for the challenge.

We (read journalists) need to do a better job of asking people one simple question “how do you know what you know?” or “how do you justify the claims that you make?” So, if we want to know the risks earthquakes pose to nuclear facilities or any other sensitive area, shouldn’t we start with those who have spent their professional lives studying them?

Meanwhile I’m trying to strategize when I’ll go to the Tri-Cities to explore the community affected by this. I don’t want to do that until I have a better grasp of the issues involved so I can ask better questions, but I want to make sure I spend enough time actually getting to better know the area I’ll be reporting on.

It’s encouraging to see, however, that even before my first blog post dozens of you indicated you want these kinds of questions to be asked. Thank you so much for making this story a possibility and showing me that I’m asking the kinds of questions you want asked.

However, don’t be shy about telling me what more you want to know. What questions about this topic am I missing? what am I being too lazy about? What am I overlooking?

Day two, part 1: Deer at dawn

Bill — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 04:20:17 +0000

See the initial story in this series

Before the second day of my trip from Portland to Missoula for the 2010 Society of Environmental Journalists conference I’d hoped to visit Hell’s Canyon. That morning – if I could really call it that – I realized I didn’t want to make the solo trip down a gravel road from Imnaha after a freeze, not the way I felt. Lonesomeness had crept in a little, too, and I didn’t want to experience the gorge alone, knowing then that there was a traveling companion not there with whom I’d want to share the marvel. Anyhow, I didn’t know exactly yet how much time I had to linger.

Still, this was my time on the road, my time made uniquely possible by a few key people. I didn’t want to miss this world, knowing how remote this landscape was for me, and how rare my opportunities to visit might be. Though fatigued, it was important to me to let my spirit move me, even if it moved me slowly, even if it moved me differently than I’d expected or hoped.

First, the dawn. I can’t remember a morning I’ve welcomed as much as that one. I watched the world take shape, connected by fog between the trees on the hill behind my camp site. Though exhausted, I needed to stretch my legs, to soak in as much of the emerging daylight as I could, and summoned the energy to enter the space taking shape around me. I needed to draw some value, some strength, anything from that space.

Tweets from the road: Good morning from joseph OR. Woke today at wallowa lake state park to rutting deer. Will write post when i get internet access. – Oct. 12

It was little more than a typical state campground, albeit a heavily wooded one at the edge of a mountain valley. Two campsites to my left, a couple stirred from their tent, pulling sweaters and oatmeal and orange juice from their Subaru. College kids giggled inside a big tent at another site. A bald man pulled a bike from the back of his RV across the way. Though not crowded, the campground was far more occupied than it felt the previous night, when I barely slept. Instead, I pulled all the layers I’d surrounded myself with to the passenger seat of my Mazda, where I sat with the seat warmer on for half an hour. Wearied by fire and ice fighting their way through my body, I had stopped caring about energy-savings or frugality or any rational concern. In the dark of night I ate string cheese and freshly-baked chocolate chip and ginger cookies that had been given to me at the outset of my trip, and I drew solace from their nourishment, especially after skipping dinner the night before while I looked for a place to stay and collapsed into my campsite.

To calm my mind, to distract myself, to think of anything but there, I’d wandered through 100 pages or so of Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. (a bit “burdened by device” myself, but enjoyably so, happy for the escape from my nocturnal malaise). I took pleasure in noticing that the book began not far from where I was headed, and where I might end up after the SEJ conference. As I read of young T.S.’s fascination with the Berkeley Pit, near Butte, I lamented not having selected a conference tour of the Superfund site (though I remained excited for my own tour to Glacier National Park).

Before I headed out for a walk I picked up my journal, the one I’d written in the night before, still in the tent, still before giving up on the night, before succumbing to the cold. To this day, the pages beyond the entry are blank. Their potential having vanished as the breathing room around my brain filled and as my lungs clouded

Morning did return, though. With it came my breath, and at least a little enthusiasm. So I set out on my walk, planning first to stop at the bathroom. On my way I discovered a buck grazing on the frozen grass between me and the campground restroom. A few more deer grazed at other parts of the campground. I quickly realized whose land I was visiting.

Continuing to the still quiet of Wallowa Lake I was welcomed by a sharp clatter rattling from the frost-covered shore. Four more, younger deer stood there, playing and locking their antlers together. Other noises also filled the silence: quacking ducks lining up to waddle into the water, a creek somewhere I couldn’t see and the crunch of pebbles under the deer’s feet as they pranced toward the parking lot from which I’d watched them.

I watched the deer investigate trash cans outside a shuttered boathouse for while, then returned to my site, packed up and drove back into town, pleased I’d come here, that even as the rest of the campground woke in a rustle of orange juice cartons and sewage hookups and GPS devices, I experienced, seemingly all to myself, this brief sliver of nature waking up to itself.