In this photo provided by ODOT, a long line of 18-wheelers clogs the northbound lanes of Interstate 5 near Creswell, Oregon. Lane County was hit particularly hard by the recent winter storms, with snow and ice leading to road closures, downed trees and extensive power outages.
Courtesy of ODOT
Lane County was hit particularly hard by the recent winter storms that left many areas of western Oregon without transportation or power. Ice and snow led to downed trees, closed roads and extensive power outages in the county. Gov. Tina Kotek declared a state of emergency on Tuesday to help county officials access “critical federal resources to aid in reconstruction and recovery efforts.” That’s after the county Board of Commissioners declared its own state of emergency that same day.
Laurie Trieger is the chair of the Lane County Board of Commissioners. She joins us with more details on the storm’s impacts and the county’s recovery efforts.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Lane County has been hit particularly hard by the ongoing winter storms. Ice and snow led to downed trees, closed roads and extensive power outages in the county. Governor Tina Kotek declared a state of emergency there on Tuesday to help county officials assess “critical federal resources to aid in reconstruction and recovery efforts.” That followed the county Board of Commissioners own emergency declaration. Laurie Trieger is the chair of the Board of Commissioners. She joins us now with more details on the storm’s impacts and the county’s recovery efforts. It’s good to have you on Think Out Loud.
Laurie Trieger: Thank you so much. I’m really grateful to have the opportunity to talk with you today.
Miller: I want to hear a bunch of specifics, but I just thought we could start with the big picture. I mean, what has this rolling series of storms - snow and ice and cold and then more ice - what has it been like in Lane County?
Trieger: It has been really very intense, in some areas catastrophic, and in others extraordinarily inconvenient, and everything in between. And I think it might help your listeners, Dave, since you’re statewide, to understand Lane County a little bit. We are geographically well over 4,500 square miles, reaching from the mountains all the way out to the coast in Florence, with the Eugene/Springfield Metro center making up about half of our county’s population, which is approaching 400,000 people. We have 12 incorporated cities, lots of unincorporated areas, many rural communities and small cities, six different utility companies. So when we’re talking about responding to a weather emergency like this, it’s very contextual and that’s why we’ve seen very different ability to respond and impacts of the storm in different areas, even within our county and within the cities in the county.
Miller: What are some of the areas in the county that have suffered the worst damage? I mean, the word you used is, at the worst end, catastrophic.
Trieger: Yeah. So in particular, the southern part of our county, which includes one of the larger small cities of Cottage Grove, was exceptionally hard hit. Just the nature of how weather is so specific, depending on where the wind currents and how things land, they just got especially hard hit. And of course, the smaller the city, the fewer the resources, the less able they are to respond quickly with the large equipment and so on that it takes to mitigate. So, the entire county has been drastically impacted to varying degrees but some of our smaller cities and then our outlying rural areas even more so. As I mentioned in the case of Cottage Grove, just the weather was more severe there. In the more peripheral areas geographically, like way up east, up the Mackenzie River Valley and out to the west toward Florence, more and more downed trees means roadways are blocked, making it harder for first responders and recovery crews to access those communities. So those are just some examples of the differences.
Then of course, in the greater metro area of Eugene and Springfield, where half our population is, the power outages just impact more numbers of people. So it’s really different degrees and different types of disastrous consequences across our county.
Miller: What are the roads looking like right now? Whether we’re talking about in the Eugene/Springfield area or Cottage Grove or more rural areas, how passable are they?
Trieger: It has gotten dramatically better in the last 24 hours with the warming temperatures. We really just had impassable roads in terms of a thick layer of solid ice on the roads. And it impedes the ability for first responders to get out to folks for welfare checks and the like. So the conditions of the roads in that regard are much better. However, we have a lot of trees in Lane County and so the downed limbs and whole trees blocking roads has been a huge issue, but our public works crew has been out 24/7 and the roads are much more passable and we’re clearing that debris and that’s helping us get out to support folks a lot more easily now.
Miller: Do you have a sense for how many county residents are still without power?
Trieger: I haven’t looked at the most recent outage map but it is well in the thousands and in these smaller cities, as I mentioned, like Cottage Grove, this is more than just a tree snagging a line and pulling it down. In some cases, major power infrastructure has been damaged at its headwaters, if you will. And so the recovery is going to be long and expensive and this is much of what led us to do the emergency declaration. Of course, the emergency happened as soon as the ice and snow started to fall and the county did kick into gear our own internal systems and structures of emergency response. The declaration is a different layer and opens up access and opportunity for resources and assistance that we hadn’t met the thresholds to do until Tuesday. And of course, that’s when we did take that action.
Miller: I want to hear more about what that means, but just to stick with power for a second. I mean, my understanding is that at least as of yesterday, some people had been without power since Saturday.
Trieger: That’s correct.
Miller: My assumption is that at least for some people, that’s still the case. So Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday - I mean, six days now without power.
Trieger: That’s right. In many cases, as I said, that is due to the nature of the cause of the outage, which is the essential infrastructure that delivers that power, not just a downed wire on a particular block and what it takes to repair that, but the conditions for the first several days of this ice emergency. It wasn’t safe for repair crews to get out and even assess, let alone begin to work on the damage. It wasn’t safe to ask folks to be on the roads, to be in a bucket truck up in a stand of trees where giant limbs encrusted with ice were falling. So we just have faced extraordinary challenges in our ability to respond, in addition to the degree of destruction that’s happened to some of the infrastructure of the utilities.
Miller: A couple days ago, the [Board of Commissioners] asked for the governor to declare a state of emergency for the county. The governor, within hours it seemed, agreed. So what exactly follows from this official declaration at the state level?
Trieger: Yes. So, as I mentioned, there are certain thresholds and conditions that have to be met to qualify for the declaration of emergency from the state. We have been acting in a state of emergency at the county level from day one. But what this declaration now does is it allows for us to ask for and qualify for reimbursements for cost recovery. It also helps create a pathway for our cities and other eligible local agencies, like utility companies, to seek reimbursement for their added costs because again, this recovery will be weeks, if not months in the making.
It also allows us, as the county, to waive certain rules around procurement and contracting, which will allow our administrator to move more quickly to get supplies in, to contract with subcontracting companies, to help with recovery. So it just really helps relieve some of the pressures and the anticipated expense of cost recovery. It doesn’t do anything to limit or restrict travel or create curfews. It doesn’t automatically deploy other assistance, but it creates a pathway for us to ask for that assistance and get financial support for that.
Miller: Including potentially federal disaster relief, which is also potentially in the works.
Trieger: That’s right.
Miller: What has warming shelter usage looked like over the last six days?
Trieger: Well, again, really what we’re pivoting to now alongside the infrastructure, repairs and recovery, is the humanitarian impacts because as you say, there are people who have been without heat and electricity and in some case, potable water, going on a few days. The potable water issue has just come up in the last day or so. And of course, because of the impossibility of accessing the roads, even for emergency responders, people are in rough shape. So we’re doing our best to get out to folks. It was still safer to shelter in place, even if people were without heat, than to ask them to move to warming centers when the roads were just covered in a slab of slick ice. So more warming centers are opening and more help is getting out to people in their communities.
I have to just emphasize, we do not do this alone. We do this in partnership with our other municipalities, community organizations and the degree of mutual aid that we’ve seen, neighbors helping neighbors. We’ve seen this before, unfortunately, in fires and smoke events and heat domes and other ice storms and snowstorms. But the magnitude of this one has really brought out the worst in conditions and the best in people in terms of their support and response.
Miller: Laurie Trieger, thanks very much.
Trieger: So appreciate your time today. Thank you and I hope everyone stays safe and that we get through this quickly.
Miller: Laurie Trieger is the chair of the Lane County Board of Commissioners.
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