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Headlight Herald Headlight Herald
Tuesday, October 21, 2025 | Vol. 137, Issue 42
Citizen North Coast
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Work progressing on new TPUD ODOT officials transmission line to Oceanside discuss Hwy 6 issues
WILL CHAPPELL
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Headlight Editor
long-envisioned project to add a transmission line and substation to serve Tillamook Peoples’ Utility District customers in Oceanside is nearing completion, with pole placement complete and work well underway on the substation. The project will shorten the length of power outages in the community, as the existing distribution line that follows Highway 131 will no longer be the sole source of power, increase the quality of electricity reaching users and decrease power loss during transmission. “Eventually, just running long distribution lines and having that voltage loss is not the way to go,” said Tillamook Peoples’ Utility District General Manager Todd Simmons. “You build up the transmission line, you get no voltage loss, you have the substation, then you’ve got the backup feeds and that’s the way you build the system.” The need for eventual system expansion to supplement Oceanside’s service was identified by TPUD staff as early as the 1960s, but the project moved to the front burner in 2015. Currently, Netarts and Oceanside are served by a distribution line, meaning that when an issue
WILL CHAPPELL
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pursuing. The group then created a master interpretative plan for the museum including how it would look and what would be in its collections with assistance from Alchemy Design from Portland and crafted a mission statement. Early work was supported by and done under the auspices of the Pacific City Dorymen’s Association, with additional support coming from a $75,000 grant from Tillamook County in 2020, but the group has since formed a separate, registered nonprofit to manage the project. A major step forward came in 2022, when Tillamook County’s board of commissioners reached out to project leaders and offered a potential home for the center on a property adjacent to the Kiawanda Community Center. The county had purchased the property, known as the Jensen property, in 2021 for $2.875 million in transient lodg-
titched together in the 1930s from a series of logging roads and paths to give fire crews access to the forest during the Tillamook Burn, Oregon Highway 6 uses a far from ideal alignment. Every year, maintenance workers from the Oregon Department of Transportation battle against at least five different areas that slide between mileposts 33 and 36, spending upward of $100,000 in a Sisyphean struggle to keep the road open. “It’s really because of the underlying geology,” said Rory “Tony” Robinson, a senior geotechnical designer with the Oregon Department of Transportation. “The rock is weak, and we have these just tremendously large, unstable areas that we don’t have any control over. The road is where the road is, and unfortunately, we inherited it this way, so we just have to deal with it.” Robinson and ODOT Region 2 Public Information Officer Mindy McCart recently sat down with the Headlight Herald to discuss the underlying geologic situation in the area impacted by slides and possible solutions. Robinson is part of a team that monitors more than 1,200 slides in ODOT’s region two, which comprises western Oregon counties from the border with Washington south to Lane County. The team uses satellite images and aerial radar, as well as in-ground instruments to monitor movement at the sites. In the section of road on Highway 6 just on the east side of the crest of the coast range in Washington County, McCart said that geotechnical problems emerged as soon as the road was built in the 1930s. Through the years, multiple projects have been undertaken to try to improve the issue, including the installation of a drainage tunnel in the 1960s and two soldier walls in the 2010s. But still, the slope moves. A map of the slides in the area shared by Robinson showed five distinct areas that experience sliding on the hill, including one mega-slide with two lobes, one of which is causing the issues at milepost 34.8.
See CENTER, Page A2
See ODOT, Page A3
Views of poles along the route as it crosses Mount Maxwell. Courtesy TPUC
occurs at any point, all customers beyond that point are without power until TPUD crews can repair the problem. Additionally, Simmons said that the length of the line meant that three to four households’ worth of power are lost during transmission and that power arriving for users near the
end of the line might be suboptimal, comparing it to attaching a power tool to a long extension cord. The new, 115-kilovolt transmission line will address both those problems, by providing noloss transmission to the Oceanside substation and giving users a sec-
ondary route for power delivery in cases where one of the lines goes down. Work on the new transmission line began earlier this year, and 70 poles have been installed along its course, starting at the substaSee TPUD, Page A3
Planning progressing on Dorymen’s Heritage Center WILL CHAPPELL
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Headlight Editor
ince 2017, a group of committed citizens in Pacific City have been working on a plan to preserve the unique history of the city’s dory fleet with the construction of a heritage center. A nonprofit entity to support the project has been formed with a board selected, land for the center was secured in 2022 and at a recent town hall meeting, project leaders said that they were shifting focus to fundraising. “This is an important part of history for the state of Oregon, the county and beyond and locally,” said Dorymen’s Heritage Association Board President Dave Larkins, “it can’t get lost, it can’t.” At the town hall meeting, Larkins’s wife Linda, treasurer of the board, project engineer Bob Grummel and project manager Brook Olsen updated interested citizens on the project’s progress. Linda spoke first, giving a brief
A rendering of a potential design for the museum.
history of the work that has already occurred. Linda said that the project had been the brainchild of Paul Hammond, who spent more than 50 years collecting information and writing about the dory fleet. In 2017, when work on the project
started in earnest, Linda said that the first step was setting forward a one-page narrative with the vision for the heritage center. That was followed by a feasibility study, completed in 2021, which determined that the project was worth
Headlight Editor
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