Part of my gig is writing columns for the Oregon Coat Today, and they are deep and long and cover, in each case, one person’s mental, spiritual, intellectual, humanistic, and community-tied footprint. It’s called, Deep Dive with Paul Haeder.
As discussed in the below entry, I was one of many attendees for a marine sciences media summit at OSU, Hatfield Marine Sciences Center. I’ll post that column on the event here soon.
As I stated, though, I am living on the Pacific Coast, Central Oregon, now in a small community that is deemed Oregon’s most vulnerable town in the state for sea water inundation, tsunami, tidal surges, stormy weather, sea expansion.
There you have it, Mister Sustainability and Radical Ecosocialist, living the life (a lie) right near a sandy bay outlooking toward the Pacific. A few inches about sea level.
The summit had a couple of folk really working hard on earthquake mitigation and sea level rise. I’ll get those two individuals as column space subjects.
But the tour we all took at the end of the day was of the Marine Studies Building. More than $62 million, for classroom, meeting, lecture auditorium, coffee and food court, and some research facilities right there in Newport, Oregon, again, on a spit of land-sand, vulnerable to tsunami. Done in 2020, with the projection of adding hundreds of more students to the Hatfield campus — up to 500 in ten years.
This building has tsunami mitigation — earth cored out with grout injected underneath, an elevator that runs continuously with its own power source, thicker walls, supports that will collapse “safely” and a design that puts the building in an “l” shape, with the two parts not connected. Finally, a roof 42 feet high for the worse case scenario so students, staff and others can run up to the roof for that wave after the big quake.
Our bridge is supposed to collapse during quake and subsequent tsunami. That’s Highway 101. Hmm. There is an exit pathway to a summit, Safe Haven, a mile away.
Yikes. Who gets to live through that mess? And, that’s daytime. Ironically, the powers that be have designs and a site for dorms for up to 350 students somewhere else, out of the tsunami zone. Don’t want Johnny and Jane killed during their sleep . . . during classes, well . . . .
OSU geologist: Building marine science center in tsunami zone is ‘completely inexplicable’
Chris Goldfinger, a professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, said Friday that he will continue to oppose President Ed Ray’s decision to build the Marine Studies Initiative building in a tsunami-inundation zone near the mouth of Yaquina Bay.
The professor said Ray is going in the opposite direction of safety. “For the university administrator to essentially ignore all the science and double down on building in a tsunami zone is completely inexplicable to me,” Goldfinger said.
Goldfinger, who directs OSU’s Active Tectonics and Seafloor Mapping Laboratory and was featured prominently in the New Yorker‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning story about a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake, said Ray’s decision is “just the beginning.”
“Not only as an earthquake geologist, but as a taxpayer and as an Oregonian, I think this is a matter for public debate,” Goldfinger said. Last year, the Legislature approved $24.8 million in bonds for the project. OSU hopes to finish the building by early 2018. Earlier this year, Goldfinger and about two dozen faculty and staff signed a letter opposing the Newport site.
So I came across this bit of psychological hell — while writing and working in another job as a Site Manager for a non-profit out of SF-Boston, Site Manager for Lincoln County, where I live!
Don’t say retreat when talking about sea rise in California — Imperial Beach and Del Mar have taken that word off the table
This is the crap I have been working with since my teens — the Edward Bernays, psychological fascism, social engineering, marketing ploys that started here, a sucker born every minute, snake oil salesmen, Puritans Not the First Illegal Aliens.
Oh Americans as Disneyfied, McDonalds-ized, AmazonDotCom-ized, Walmartized, Militarized, Market-ized, Consumer-ized, and Infantilized beyond anything I could have predicted when I was a scuba diving, newspaper writing, hard-ass in Mexico more than four decades ago.
Read and weap — “
A workshop on July 12 brought together the League of Cities, California State Association of Counties, local government officials, and the California Coastal Commission. Sea level rise was a key topic, along with one of the most controversial tools in the arsenal.
“The big elephant in the room is managed retreat,” said Imperial Beach councilmember Ed Spriggs, who helped develop the workshop agenda, and whose low-lying community is one of the most vulnerable in California to sea rise.
“Unfortunately, we have a gap between what scientists are saying and the general population on this issue,” Spriggs told the workshop. “We’ve got to close the gap before we can have the kind of discussion we need to have.”
Managed retreat has been politicized in almost every community where it’s gone into early drafts of the local coastal plan, Spriggs said. That hampers planning, with the focus turning to the taking of private property, and eminent domain.
Commissioners suggested they should change the name to make it more palatable, but by any name, retreat means homes are removed so beaches can migrate inland. And that rarely goes down smoothly with homeowners.
Our own Oregon just voted down zoning restrictions for us in the Earthquake Tsunami Flooding area — you know, making sure police, fire, hospitals, schools and other public service outfits DO NOT get built in the known tsunami zones.
When you have the US Chamber of Commerce, the Developers, the Builders, the Faux Business Community, the Road, Paving, Hammering community dictating where public buildings go, at the expense of us — all of those of us — survivors — who will be scrambling to pick up the dead, to find missing loved ones, to find some shelter, some bit of food, water and medical help.
So many things about a country that shows its insanity — still spraying a million chemicals on baby Johnny and Janey’s food; guns, nukes, jets, ships, bombs to Israel, Saudi Arabia, UEA, et al.; a Pedophile in Chief and Bumbling Democrats and Repulsive Republicans still sauntering around as our old time religion of pitchforks, tar and feathers, and massive work stoppages has been replaced by screen-time with the idiots writing screen screed and un-News.
These stories stack up every day — how Capitalism is Insane, Mean, Murderous, A Death Ray for the 80 Percent, A Predatory and Parasitic System of Theft, Rape, Destruction.
Here, a big report by graduate students, out of state (U of Michigan), on:
Resilience of Oregon Coastal Communities in Response to External Stressors Hell, the New Yorker is writing about us down here: Oregon’s Tsunami Risk: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
So, these legislators (sic) voted down sanity, as they always seem to do:
Paul Haeder, Author 
Paul, thank you, as always, for communicating the awful truth. I should be doing the same about the insanity in my corner of the ecologically-in-over-its-head, capitalistically wanton SF Bay Area. I could start with all the new vineyards displacing local ecosystems and pillaging water, i.e., life, without any thought about the devastation local ecology has already sustained, let alone the dead-end lack of sense about what humans need to live: we are in the End Game, as noted years ago by Derrick Jensen. In general, politicians and “planners” are psychopaths – if only we could convince Gaia to be selective in her response to her rape, but then, I can’t plead innocence. 50 years of speaking up and out and trying to live some semblance of eco-sustainability hasn’t been nearly enough. But I’d be foolish to think I really had that much a choice in a world of no liberty and no away.
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Nnee biyati’ is the Apache name for Mount Graham, and Winona LaDuke says it so eloquently that reappropriating the original people’s language gives us all a return to sanity, to the reality of space-time-spirit-intellect-ecology working as one. We have to be as steeled as possible to call out these rapists, murderers, assaulters, thieves while the systems of oppression, structural and real violence eat at the soul of humanity — those very people who would be the ones helping move us out of madness.
So, I appreciate you putting words of merit and depth ahead of this psycho-babble vacuum we have ended up inside through the oppressors of language, at best, and violent linguists of Predatory Capitalism and Business PsyOps, at worse. We need to call a spade a spade, and not falter when “they” call us out — in their so-so Western (sic) Civilization (faux) tradition of pounding us with meaningless rhetorical devices, yelling that we are engaging in ad hominem attacks when, like you say, planners and politicians are indeed “psychopaths.” The quicker we lay truth at the feet of the monsters, the sooner we can advance some attack on these mutant humans.
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