Trees: vertical and horizontal - remnants of Astoria's "hurricane"

East of the column, from the road that leads to the top of Coxcomb Hill, you can still see the results of Astoria's big storm that occurred on the night of December 2-3, 2007. There are a number of places around town where damage is evident, particularly downed trees at the top of the hill and on the east and south sides of town. It always saddens me to see the degradation of our beautiful forest, but it could have been worse. We were told to expect "hurricane force" gusts and high sustained winds. Even so, our area is not noted for hurricane-force winds and storm reports usually err on the intensive side. While some individuals and businesses taped their windows and stocked supplies, many did not. In the morning, the town was a mess, with light poles and signs damaged, but destruction apparently random. One business would have its plate glass shattered (taped or not), while the next sustained no damage (taped or not). They say the "Columbus Day Storm" in the 1960s was a bit stronger, and apparenlty Astoria gets one of these whopping gales about once every 20 to 40 years. I think the official term ended up being "gale." If it had been designated a "hurricane," many property owners would have been ineligible for insurance or government aid, as it DOES matter what they call the high winds that blew off your roof! Astorians do not typically insure for hurricanes, because we've never had one. I understand that our area has only been given the opportunity to designate high winds as a "hurricane" in the past few years. In other words, the terminology is regulated by some board, and even hurricane-force winds could not have been given the designation of "hurricane" until this area had approval for the designation.

I do need to get back to work, so I'm not going to research further. I gathered bits and pieces from the web, but did not find any one resource that made a good link. I do know that we were among the 27,000 who lost power for several days. I was running my online business just gearing up for a much-needed Christmas season, and after the storm, I set up a base with Internet at a hotel an hour east of here. Lee drove between me with my printer and web connection and our cold, dark, building in Astoria daily while he and Sue packed and shipped orders in the freezing dark with flashlights. It could have been worse for us, and these trees stand as a reminder. We are back to normal again, with some lost time, some discomfort, and a few lost dollars of revenue, while the trees will take decades or centuries to recover. It gave us a little taste of what some of you go through on a yearly basis. I also treasure photos like this one showing the road to Coxcomb Hill in 2005. The forest is simply not as lush and full any more.

. Thursday Challenge: trees
. Think Green Thursday

Say it again

The Thursday Challenge is "communication," and I only hope I can describe the layers of it going on here. I took the photo last Saturday, and the objective is to raise the light plane from the river bottom, where it settled on Friday night after it crashed. What you see is the deck of a Coast Guard ship in the foreground, the plane being lifted out of the water in the center, and a barge with a crane on it behind the plane. About fifty people had gathered in the rain to watch the plane come up or were here in an official capacity. We can't see them in this photo, but there were two TV cameras to my right, and people all over the place with still cameras, cell phones and camera phones, and of course, they are all talking to each other, too. Lee was carrying on a long conversation with someone he hadn't seen in awhile. I don't know what everyone else was doing with their cell phones, but I was texting Laurel to let her know the plane was coming up, and I was also getting e-mail and a bunch of blog and news alerts I'd activated the other day through Google (crazy, huh?).

Just behind where I'm standing on the dock is a truck that travelled two hours from Portland. The company's name is Northwest Underwater Construction, LLC, and they'd brought a diver used to working with heavy objects under water, along with their communications technicians. You'll probably have to click on the photo to enlarge it. The bound red and green cables running into the picture from the foreground and coiling at the edge of the deck are the diver's communication to the truck, including his air line, camera feed, light, and voice communication. Inside the truck are the air tanks, some dial-type monitors for the diver, and a video monitor receiving a picture from under water. They communicated from the truck to the ships with walkie-talkies, and you can see one guy using his hand-held on the right of the photo. Those of us near the truck could hear them talking. I remember the diver saying the plane was on its back and they'd have to flip it before they brought it up, an operation that took some coordinating. There was also a guy in the truck with a clipboard recording notes on a chart.

The guy in the white hard-hat just in front of the crane is giving hand signals to the crane operator, and has been doing that since the lines first went down to secure the plane. Men on both decks are, of course talking about how best to make everything work. On the periphery, there's a Sheriff's boat and probably a small Coast Guard boat hovering near with radios.

There's some interesting non-human visual communication, too. The black and yellow stripes are saying, "This is the edge of the ship - you know what will happen if you get too close!" And the men's hard-hats and bright vests are telling the onlookers, "This is a danger area. Keep out." The buoys in the river tell ships where the shipping lane ends.

By the way, the man in the dark blue clothing and white hat in the center is the pilot who crashed. His mother and brother are on one of the high lookout points of the ship, and another relative is standing in the diver's truck to keep tabs on the action. Throughout the salvage, the pilot is talking to everyone and gesturing to his family.

Just because we need a little more communication here, when the plane was lifted out of the water, my zoom lens revealed that two headsets for the plane were dangling out of the door, attached together and to the plane by wires. They were dripping wet, and were probably the only communication devices that were not busy today.