View Driving Home

I was capturing some of the scenery on our drive home. We were driving home as the sun was starting to set. I was able to get a nice set before we lost the light. Not bad considering these were taken as a passenger in a moving vehicle.

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Survived hurricane-force winds of 119 mph, infrastructure collapse Pacific County, Washington coast, December 2007 Pacific Northwest storm

More on page on this website (see tabs above) dedicated to ‘Storm of the Decade, Pacific Northwest, December 2007′

Today is Friday, Dec 7, 2007 and we just got power back yesterday, Thursday, Dec 6, 2007, after being without power, communications, access in or out of the county since the storm hit last Sunday, Dec 2, 2007. It was what it was advertised by the Chinook Observer to be - the storm of the decade and it affected most all of Washington coastline with grave flooding inland and great parts of Oregon coastline. Most hard hit with massive flooding was Lewis County and Grays Harbor County, our neighboring counties. Pacific County was hit hard too, enough to collapse a seemingly fragile infrastructure; no power, no land phones, no cell phones, no 911, no access in or out of the county and even emergency communications out of county to notify status were limited and curtailed. It was an eerie feeling to be so completely cut off.

Later as the week wore on the reality of not being able to access our own bank account or get gas as gas pumps need electricity to work, and word of possible contamination of water in South Bend/Raymond, the fragility of the infrastructure not only in our own county but any county became evident to me. We must learn to rely on individual preparedness, and preparedness and help from among our community to see us through those early days of catastrophic weather events. And given what we experienced with this storm, I'm inclined to believe that with climate warming, we will see other such storms, perhaps not at that magnitude, but enough to cause breaks in the infrastructure here in Pacific County and in neighboring counties.

Sorting out how to tell parts of the story, and rather than one big fat blog entry, I will want to break it down some. For the days without power and communications (phones, cell phones, 911, emergency access), I started a journal. Now that we have power back and I am seeing via internet news all the devastation around us in our own county and neighboring counties, I recognize we are among the very fortunate.

Providing the link to the Washblog interview Noemie did with me when she phoned me yesterday to check up on us where she gives an account of what I shared with her.

Report from Lietta Ruger: Storm Causes Complete Infrastructure Collapse in Pacific Co.

By noemie maxwell
Thu Dec 06, 2007 at 03:37:50 PM PST
Section: Pacific County Topic: Climate Change

I just spoke with Lietta Ruger, one of Washblog's editors, and she asked me to post a little summary of our conversation. She plans to post something more in-depth later.

She and Arthur Ruger live in the Willapa Bay community in Bay Center. There is no locally owned broadcast media in the area, and so they rely primarily on King 5 TV for their storm warnings. KIRO and KOMO generally don't provide coverage on their area. She said that no warnings came through mainstream media on the severe impacts that their community was expected to face from the impending storm last weekend. It was only because they happen to subscribe to what she describes as a tiny newspaper, a weekly called The Chinook Observer, that she learned her community was facing perhaps "the storm of the decade."

Having received this one warning, she and Arthur brought out their candles and blankets and cooked up the food in their refrigerator and battened down the hatches - just in case. The storm hit on Sunday and the three of them - including Lietta's mother - stayed indoors for two days as winds up to 119 miles an hour raged outside. There was no electricity, no phone service, no cellphone service. After the storm subsided, the roads were so impassible in every direction, and the power outage and the lack of emergency service so complete -- that as far as people in her community knew, they might have separated from the rest of the United States and floated off into the Pacific Ocean.

It wasn't until yesterday that a local store selling crank radios opened and she and Arthur were able to tune into coverage from Astoria, Oregon to find out the extent of the damage to the rest of Washington state.

Even then, most of the stores remained locked, the social services office, where emergency help is usually offered, remained closed and dark. The gas pumps, which run on electricity, don't work. People who have medical emergencies are out of luck. And at least one woman did die, when her house caught on fire from the candles she was using to provide light.

There was no safe way to travel by water, either, because the water was moving too fast and there were too many other dangers, low tree branches, objects, etc. Even the county's weather monitoring equipment failed. We know that winds reached 119 mph in Bay Center and 120 mph in Astoria, she said, because private citizens had equipment that withstood the wind, while the wind broke the county's equipment.

The problem wasn't with community members. People helped each other quite a bit. In fact, the owner of the Bay Center grocery store, a woman named Lori, drove from Long Beach through all the hazards to Bay Center and fired up the generator and stove and cooked soups and made sandwiches to serve the people in that community. And her husband and son did that in the other grocery stores owned by the family in other nearby communities. But now that the electricity has come back on, and she's learned that the rest of the world is still here -- though Grays Harbon and Lewis Counties appear to have suffered even more -- now she's feeling pretty upset.

This is a warning, she said, that we need to get our act together on emergency preparedness. We are experiencing the effects of climate change and we can expect more. This kind of storm is not on the usual scale. It's a clear signal, as well, that we need some major changes in how we do media. Pacific County needs its own broadcast media. We talked for awhile about testimony at the recent FCC hearing in Seattle that local communities are endangered by the centralization of broadcast media. That is absolutely correct, she said. Now that she has a little time to think, it's hitting her, the extent of this collapse of infrastructure: the lack of emergency preparedness and media coverage and the blackout on all services during the storm or for the 2 days afterwards. "This complete and utter failure, she said, "is unacceptable.

(read more at the Washblog story)

A few photos below taken by my mother of Bay Center in Pacific County, after the 2 days

of hurricane-force winds. Click on photos to see larger view.

Downed treee on Bay Center Road, Bay Center, WA in Pacific County, WA

Several downed trees at Bay Center residence, Bay Center, WA in Pacific County,WA

Tree down on power line Bay Center Road,Bay Center, WA in Pacific County,WA

Blow down trees in the county park at tip of Bay Center, WA in Pacific County,WA

More on page on this website (see tabs above) dedicated to 'Storm of the Decade, Pacific Northwest, December 2007'

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Law & Order, South Bend, Mexico, Patience and Extradition

blogged by my husband, Arthur Ruger to Willapa Magazine


from an article published in Seattle PI Fugitive's capture turned into mission.

For 13 years, accused drug kingpin eluded the law -- until last week

I took this picture last year from out the back door at the office where I work in South Bend. About 50 yards from that door the Willapa River flows from my right westward to Willapa Bay, less than 3 miles away. Almost in the center of the photo on the river's left bank you can see the large bright roof of what is now South Bend Packers, a seafood processor. That's the "fishhouse with no ice" mentioned in the story.

[Excerpts] and my comments.

Friday, April 6, 2007
By COLIN McDONALD
P-I REPORTER

He was the most prolific hashish smuggler the Northwest has ever seen, say U.S. marshals and federal investigators.

For years, they say, Jeffery Jay Warren orchestrated the rapid movement of the drug from Southeast Asia by ocean freighters, a fleet of Willapa Bay "fishing" boats and trucks. Tons of the illicit cargo were hauled through Washington en route to East Coast and Canadian markets.

... A coast-to-coast bust in 1994 nailed most of Warren's operatives -- but he managed to elude capture. Since then, a copy of Warren's wanted poster slowly yellowed on the bulletin board in the Marshals Service's Seattle office.

... His pursuers chased down tantalizing rumors of the kingpin's whereabouts: his favorite haunts, the luxury resort towns in coastal Mexico where he was reputed to be taking residence. The trail led investigators across the globe. There was evidence that Warren had been traveling extensively in South America and Europe. He apparently liked being near the ocean and in warm climates.

... He's now sitting in a jail cell in Mexico City facing extradition to the U.S. -- and a possible life sentence.

... When the indictment was handed down in 1994, 16 people -- including Warren -- were charged in connection with the drug-smuggling ring.

Two years earlier, federal agents had estimated the ring had moved 40 tons of hashish through the fishing port of South Bend in southwest Washington. The estimated wholesale value: $120 million.

... "These guys had been dumping big loads for at least four years," Lanier said.

He called them "old hippies," now in their mid- to late-50s, who had been smuggling marijuana and hashish into the country since the 1970s.

But the smugglers had their act together. Using fishing boats and an old fishing dock and warehouse at the head of Willapa Bay as a false front, Warren's team of ship captains, deckhands, truck drivers and radio operators moved the drugs from ocean freighters sitting hundreds of miles off the coast to waiting semis. Within a week, the drugs would be in New York.

Everyone I spoke to who lived in the area at that time remembers this big drug bust. Several chuckled when they said that the local police had no clue what was going on because the tight-lipped Feds weren't telling nobody nothing.

Others however thought that locally there was some other problem where the county knew what was up but didn't tell the city of South Bend or something like that. Either way, it doesn't seem to have been much the local's show.

Locals thought the fishhouse with no ice was odd but didn't ask many questions. The strangers paid for the equipment and service with crisp $100 bills.

That fishhouse is not much more than 1/4 mile from my office and I've been walking to it as part of the exercise regimen I use during my breaks now for a couple of months.

A co-worker said that as a teenage she went walking in the evening with her mother and sister past that ice-less fishhouse every night and they thought it was not only strange with no ice, but also strangely mysterious in that lighting was either absence or seriously restricted for a warehouse doing late-night and early-morning fishing operations.

She also remembered learning that there was a house up on the hill above the riverbank that was always dark but from which the crooks had been keeping lookout with with binoculars while watching for Coast Guard vessels and law enforcement.

"The (fishing) market was bad and anyone who came in and wanted to make a go of it got treated real good," said Jerry Benning, retired Pacific County sheriff. In 1994, Benning was the local law enforcement contact for the federal agents who raided the warehouse.

"By the time we got there, there was nothing but empty sacks," Benning recalled.

Which makes more sense than a city police department totally kept in the dark about something like this. My own impression is that the locals had the more difficult local job in keeping a lid on the whole activity long enough for the Feds to make their move.

...Cash-filled suitcases

Speed and deception was at the core of Warren's operation.

His group could unload 45 tons of drugs in an evening and have it in and out of Washington in less then 12 hours, authorities say.

U.S. Highway 101 runs right through South Bend North-to-South. As it has always been, day or night, it is not surprising to see semi-trucks backing refrigerated trailers into one of several fishhouse docks or pulling out with them and heading off up the road.

The group would send out decoy fishing boats so the Coast Guard wouldn't know which boat to track, said Fran Dyer, a retired agent from the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, who started working on the Warren case in the early 1990s.

"They were very good fishermen, but there is a hell of a lot more money to be made in moving 50,000 pounds of hashish in one night than fishing," Dyer said.

There wasn't anything in the article that indicated how many, if any, of those originally arrested in the raid were locals to Pacific County. But as an alternative to the shrinking seafood markets that have continually gotten smaller and smaller, I can see a few easy recruits responding to another more lucrative way to put food on the table, keep the roof overhead and include perhaps some genuine excitement.

40 tons of hashish?

May it would have been like Pacific County's West Coast version of moonshine.

Maybe the feds should have used this to help out:


Grampus or Pike on the Willapa River, at Raymond, Washington, circa 1912.
The A class subs were fitted with a bow fairing to improve sea keeping, this can be seen by the dark shadow area forward of the conning tower.
Both submarines were placed in reserve in 1912 at Bremerton. This photo was probably taken on the trip up the coast to Bremerton. The stern of the USS Chattanooga can be seen in front of the sub.

Photo provided by Steve Hubbard of the Pacific County Historical Society , Washington State

From Through the looking glass: a photo essay of submarines 1900-1940

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