Weakened wall threatens commerce
By ERIK ROBINSON
The Columbian
Thursday, October 29, 2009 11:12 AM PDT
ASTORIA — It’s a mild October morning on the Oregon Coast.
Yet, even on a windless day with the ocean glassy smooth, it’s a rough ride at the point where the Columbia River smashes into the Pacific Ocean. A 60-ton boat, designed to ferry elite pilots to ships waiting offshore, heaves atop 6-foot swells like a rubber duck in a bathtub.
Capt. John Torjusen doesn’t flinch at the stomach-gurgling ride.
Torjusen, a Vancouver resident in his eighth year of piloting ships across one of the roughest harbor entries on the planet, has seen much worse. Imagine driving a ship the length of two football fields through a channel less than half a mile wide in a howling gale, with swells the size of three-story buildings. Sliding on the down side of a wave, a ship’s rudder and propeller can come out of the water.
“It’s like putting your car on ice,” he said.
A pair of jetties, jutting into the boiling Pacific from the north and south edges of the river’s 2-mile-wide mouth, stand as thin lines of defense against the bar’s worst instincts. The jetties tamp down waves from the ocean. They also serve as a barricade against beach sand that would otherwise quickly clog the relatively narrow shipping channel and close the gateway to ports more than 100 miles upriver in Vancouver and Portland.
Battered by storms, the jetties originally constructed from huge boulders mined in Camas are now eroding away.
The government bought some time with a series of repairs beginning four years ago, but that was only temporary. “It’s already deteriorating pretty badly,” Torjusen said. Meanwhile, the risk of a jetty breach increases with each winter storm.
Maintaining the jetties is imperative.
Together, they serve as the Columbia’s front gate, welcoming 2,000 ships per year — nearly 500 bound for Vancouver — and billions of dollars worth of trade. When the bar shuts down, it freezes a conveyer belt of commerce from the ships that enter the river to barges and trains carrying grain from as far as Kansas.
“It’s a little frightening to know that if one of those jetties failed, it would all stop very quickly,” said Larry Paulson, the Port of Vancouver’s executive director.
Next month, the Army Corps of Engineers will unveil a rehabilitation plan involving the placement of a million tons of Volkswagen-sized rocks, as well as several perpendicular rock “groins” designed to shore up the jetties’ sand foundations. Repairs will cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Yet, even after these repairs, a potent combination of natural and man-made factors will pose long-term threats.
The river’s peculiarities have vexed ship captains ever since American Capt. Robert Gray found the rumored Great River of the West in May 1792. Over the next century, some 2,000 ships would run aground, costing more than 1,000 lives. With ever-shifting sandbars and violent storms, the treacherous Columbia entrance became known as the Graveyard of the Pacific.
In 1885, upriver business interests convinced Congress to pay for a jetty on the south side of the harbor entrance — opposite the rocky headland of Cape Disappointment.
By 1917, the Army Corps of Engineers had delivered two jetties: one 6 miles long on the south side of the river’s mouth and the other extending 2 miles out from the Cape Disappointment on the north side.
These jetties eased the passage for ships, but they also changed the river’s geometry.
Squeezing the Columbia’s current, the jetties created a firehose.
