North Coast
Citizen Serving North Tillamook County since 1996
Thursday, June 27, 2024 | Vol. 31, Issue 12
www.northcoastcitizen.com
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‘Unprecedented’ paralytic shellfish poisoning outbreak closes shellfish harvests on coast WILL CHAPPELL Citizen Editor
highway for extra visibility all the way up to adding passing lanes. Crawford said that restriping would cost an estimated $7 to $9 million, while adding passing lanes would cost between $45 and $133 million and stabilizing a selection of high priority slopes at risk of slides between mileposts 28 and 37 would run $50 million. The tour then made a brief stop at the weigh station outside Tillamook where Strickler discussed the work of ODOT’s commerce and compliance division, which is responsible for running weigh stations and checking for chain compliance in winter months. The bus then headed north to Garibaldi, where the committee members exited the bus for a short presentation on the soon-tobegin project there. Bill Jablonski, director of ODOT’s area one, said that the $10 million project would see a complete overhaul of Highway 101 between First and 12th streets in the city. In addition to repaving the roadway, new sidewalks featuring ADAaccessible crossings, street lighting and six new transit stops will be added during the project, which is scheduled to start later this summer. The committee then returned to the red barn for a roundtable with local officials, after which the committee reconvened at
For nearly a month, the harvesting of shellfish on the Oregon coast has slowed to a crawl as mussels, clams and oysters have been inundated with toxins that cause paralytic shellfish poisoning in humans. The outbreak occurred exceptionally quickly, striking at least 31 people ill, including several who were admitted to the hospital, and at least one who was put on a ventilator. Matthew Hunter, shellfish program leader at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW), said that the outbreak had occurred at a pace and on a scale that had never been recorded in Oregon before. Paralytic shellfish poisoning is caused by saxitoxins or domoic acid produced in algal blooms by phytoplankton, with a genus known as alexandrium responsible for the most recent outbreak. Those phytoplankton produce saxitoxin and are always present in algal blooms, but Hunter said that shifting wind, solar and nutritional conditions cause overstimulation and increased activity, leading to spikes in their prevalence. In turn, the phytoplankton are ingested by filter feeders such as mussels, clams and oysters, which are not impacted by the toxin but accumulate it in their flesh. Then, when a human consumes the impacted shellfish, they are unable to process the toxin and become ill. Hunter said that symptoms start within an hour of ingesting affected seafood and can start with tingling in extremities, stomach cramps, vomiting or diarrhea and extend to strokelike symptoms or inability to breathe, depending on the volume of toxin ingested. There is no treatment for the condition, but those who are affected should go to a hospital for monitoring. The current outbreak at the Oregon coast began in late May, with the first warning coming when six people fell sick shortly after consuming shellfish on the Sunday before Memorial Day. Officials from ODFW conduct regular testing of mussels and razor clams on the coast for both saxitoxin and domoic acid, but Hunter said that the speed at which levels increased outpaced the testing. Samples are colleted every ten days when tides are low and transported to a lab in Wilsonville, where it takes about five days tor results to become available. However, in the current outbreak, Hunter said that levels of saxitoxin detected in mussels at Cape Meares were 75 times higher in mussels given to the department by one of the people who fell ill than in those gathered five days before by department staff from the same rock. Hunter said that this meant the bloom had occurred so quickly and with such intensity that the increase in saxitoxin on each day would have been sufficient to cause sickness. After receiving word of the outbreak, department staff sprang into action, dispersing across the coast to gather samples from various species of shellfish. This temporarily led to the closure of harvesting for mussels, bay and razor clams, and oysters on the entire coast. Hunter said that such outbreaks usually did not impact razor clams, but that with the larger number of people harvesting and consuming them compared
See COMMITTEE, Page A2
See SHELLFISH, Page A5
The barge that will haul rocks across Tillamook Bay as workers finished welding the gangway at the aft shortly before rock transport began.
Rocks rolling for south jetty repair WILL CHAPPELL Citizen Editor
After building up a stockpile of six-to-ten-ton rocks at the Port of Garibaldi through May and early June, contractors working to repair the south jetty at the entrance to Tillamook Bay have started transporting rocks across the bay to Kincheloe Point. Andy Leavitt, project manager and president of Trade West Construction, the company performing the work, said that crews would begin placing stones near the root of the jetty within the month, at
which point work will speed up. Up to this point, stones have only been arriving at the staging area at the Port of Garibaldi in the early hours of the morning but as work ramps up, they will become common during the day. Leavitt said that they hope to place between 500 and 600 tons of stone a day once they are operating at full capacity. Throughout the entire project, crews will place around 100,000 tons, or between four and six thousand individual rocks, helping to repair two, separate sections of the jetty near its root and head.
Initially, the stones are being transported from the Port of Garibaldi staging area to Kincheloe Point directly on the deck of the barge but they will soon be placed in the backs of transport trucks that will drive onto the barge and then directly to the jetty upon offload. Before any of this work could begin, crews spent months preparing the area at Bayocean County Park between Kincheloe Point and the root of the south jetty to support the repair. Those efforts included constructing a portion of new road and improving another
section of existing road to accommodate the large transport trucks in the mile between the offload site and jetty. Crews also cleared a 10-acre site near the root of the jetty to be used for secondary staging of the stones, although Garrett Bryner, a quality control manager for Trade West, said that ideally rocks would move straight from the barge to the jetty. Workers also installed a temporary scale that will weigh the rocks for final payment to the contractor. Two or three teams of stone See JETTY, Page A6
Joint Transportation Committee road tour stops in Tillamook WILL CHAPPELL Citizen Editor
Members of the Oregon State Legislature’s Joint Transportation Committee spent the day in Tillamook on June 18, as part of a series of tours around the state to gather community feedback on Oregonians’ transportation needs. The Oregon Department of Transportation is hosting the tours, with the Tillamook visit marking the second stop with ten more scheduled before the end of September. During the day, committee members took a bus tour of various project sites around the central part of the county that demonstrated transportation infrastructure challenges on the north coast. They then participated in a roundtable discussion with local leaders before hosting a public meeting in the evening to gather citizen input. The committee’s tour began at the red barn at the Tillamook Creamery and Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) Director Kris Strickler welcomed committee members and local leaders as the bus
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Members of the joint transportation committee were joined by local elected officials and ODOT staffers for a tour of area transportation infrastructure, including a stop in Garibaldi.
departed. Strickler said that the purpose of the tours was to give ODOT officials and the committee members the opportunity to hear about the local needs across the state. While there would be some variation in the needs expressed in different areas, Strickler said that he expected a consistent theme across the state would be negative impacts caused by resource shortages at the department. Strickler thanked the legislators for the infusion of $19 million into ODOT’s coffers late last year, which he said had
been critical to allowing them to deliver the level of service Oregonians expect during the winter months. Savannah Crawford, director of ODOT’s region two that includes Tillamook, then took over as the bus continued on its way towards milepost 10 of the Wilson River Highway. Crawford discussed how the culvert routing Zig Zag creek under the highway at that point was failing and noted that it would need to be replaced by a bridge that will cost $14-16 million. The culvert is almost a century old, like many others along Highway 6,
and maintaining them is an ongoing challenge for the department. On the way back towards Tillamook, Crawford talked about safety issues on the highway and the study that was commissioned by State Senator Suzanne Weber to delineate them. Crawford said that the highway had seen 428 vehicle crashes between 2016 and 2020, which led Weber to sponsor a bill funding the study in 2022. That study, conducted in 2023, detailed a range of options for upgrading safety on the highway from initiatives like restriping the