News Archives - Page 241 of 456

Washington mudslide yields more bodies, but not all may be found

By Jonathan Kaminsky, Reuters

DARRINGTON, Washington (Reuters) – Search teams picked through mud-caked debris for a fifth day on Wednesday looking for scores of people still missing in a deadly Washington state landslide, as officials reported finding more bodies while acknowledging that some victims’ remains may never be recovered.

The known death toll stood at 24, with as many as 176 people still unaccounted for near the rural town of Oso, where a rain-soaked hillside collapsed on Saturday and cascaded over a river and a road, engulfing dozens of homes on the opposite bank.

The latest tally did not include an unspecified number of bodies that state police spokesman Bob Calkins said had been found on Wednesday. He declined to give further details.

Earlier in the day, local emergency management officials sought to fend off criticism of property development that was permitted just across the river from the caved-in slope after previous landslides in the area.

As hope faded that any survivors might be plucked from the muck and debris that blanketed an area covering about one square mile (2.6 square km), residents of the stricken community and nearby towns braced for an expected rise in the casualty count.

“My son’s best friend is out there, missing,” said John Pugh, 47, a National Guardsman who lives in the neighboring village of Darrington. “My daughter’s maid of honor’s parents are missing. It’s raw. And it will be for a long time.”

Asked whether he expected the death toll to rise significantly, Governor Jay Inslee told CNN: “Yes, I don’t think anyone can reach any other conclusion.

“It’s been very sad that we have not been able to find anyone living now for probably 36 or 48 hours,” he said. “The most discouraging thing is we were hopeful that we would find folks who might be protected by a car or a structure, but the force of this landslide just defies imagination.”

About 200 search personnel, many wearing rain gear and hard hats, painstakingly combed through the disaster zone under cloudy skies on Wednesday, taking advantage of a break from Tuesday’s rain showers to hasten their search for more victims.

Snohomish County Battalion Fire Chief Steve Mason, directing part of the operation, said teams were making slow but steady progress in locating additional remains.

“There are finds going on continually. They are finding people now,” he told reporters visiting the search site. “People are under logs, mixed in. It’s a slow process.”

But Jan McClelland, a volunteer firefighter from Darrington who was among the first to arrive at the scene and has spent long days digging through the muck since then, conceded it was possible some bodies may end up forever entombed at the site.

“I’m fearful we won’t find everyone,” she said. “That’s the reality of it.”

NO HUMAN HEAT SOURCES DETECTED

Bill Quistorf, the chief pilot for the county sheriff’s office, recounted that helicopter crews conducting low-altitude scans of the disaster zone with infrared equipment found no human heat sources in the hours after the slide.

“We located one dog in the bushes, and that was it,” he said, also acknowledging that some remains may never be recovered.

At the same time, authorities sought to whittle down their list of unaccounted-for individuals, with missing-persons detectives from the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office working to resolve likely redundancies on a roster of people whose fate remained unknown.

County officials also started to address criticism for allowing new home construction on parts of the disaster site after a 2006 landslide in the same vicinity, which followed numerous reports detailing the risks of slides dating back to the 1950s.

A 1999 study by geologist Daniel Miller for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had warned of the potential for a “large catastrophic failure” in the area, about 55 miles northeast of Seattle.

“There’s definitely a blame-game going on,” Miller told Reuters. “I’ve always thought it’s inappropriate to allow development in flood plains, in areas at risk of landslides, in part because of the danger to human life and also in part because when something happens, even if no one is hurt, public agencies end up coming in to make repairs,” he said.

The county’s emergency management director, John Pennington, told reporters local authorities had spent millions of dollars on work to reduce landslide risks in the area after the 2006 event.

He suggested that while officials and residents were aware of vulnerability to unstable hill slopes, Saturday’s tragedy came out of the blue.

“We really did a great job of mitigating the potential for smaller slides to come in and impact the community,” Pennington said. “So from 2006 to this point, the community did feel safe; they fully understood the risks.”

But he also said: “People knew that this is a landslide-prone area. Sometimes big events just happen. Sometimes large events that nobody sees happen. And this event happened, and I want to find out why. I don’t have those answers right now.”

Search and rescue operations tapered off overnight but ramped up to full strength again at first light on Wednesday. Searchers used dogs to pinpoint possible locations of victims, as well as electronic equipment such as listening devices and cameras capable of probing voids in the debris.

“We’re not backing off. We’re still going at this with all eight cylinders to get everyone out there who is unaccounted for,” local fire chief Travis Hots said.

The presumed tally of dead rose on Tuesday night from 14 to 24 when county officials reported that search crews laboring in a steady drizzle had recovered two more bodies from the disaster zone and located the remains of eight additional victims.

Eight people were injured but survived the slide, including a 22-week-old baby rescued with his mother and listed in critical condition but improving. The mother and three other survivors also remained hospitalized.

The slide already ranks as one of the worst in the United States. In 1969, 150 people were killed in landslides and floods in Virginia, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

(Additional reporting by Bill Rigby in Seattle, Bryan Cohen in Arlington, Washington, and Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Cythia Johnston, Dan Grebler and Gunna Dickson)

Indian affairs receives 1.2 increase in fiscal 2015 budget request

By Ryan McDermott, Fierce Government

Bureau of Indian Affairs programs would receive a 1.2 percent increase over this year’s enacted amount under the White House budget proposal for the next fiscal year.

The budget request totals $2.6 billion for Indian Affairs – $33.6 million more than fiscal 2014 enacted, said Interior Department Assistant Secretary Kevin Washburn during a Senate Indian Affairs Committee Wednesday hearing.

Tribal self-determination and self-governance programs have eclipsed direct service by the Indian Affairs Bureau at DOI, Washburn said.

More than 62 percent of the appropriations are provided directly to tribes and tribal organizations through grants, contracts and compacts for tribes to operate government programs and schools, Washburn said.

But committee Chairman Jon Tester (D-Mont.) said the budget request isn’t enough.

“Every line item is deficient,” Tester said. “1.2 percent is not right. This needs some work.”

He said the percentage increase for Indian Affairs pale in comparison to increases at other part of the DOI. The National Park Service request is for 22.2 percent more than this year and the Land Management Bureau request is 6.1 percent more.

But Washburn argued that Indian Affairs budgets under Obama have been larger in the last five years than another other parts of the DOI. The BIE budget request for fiscal 2015 makes up $2.6 billion of the agency’s $11 million total request.

Other parts of the DOI might see a larger percentage increase under the request, Washburn said, but they make up much smaller parts of the agency so the comparison is apple to oranges.

For more:
– go to the hearing page (webcast and prepared tstimony available)

New Microbattery Could Help Track Salmon Through Northwest Rivers

Researcher Jie Xiao with the microbattery, which packs twice the energy capacity compared to other microbatteries currently used to tag fish. | credit: Contributed photo by Kristin Nol / East Oregonian

By George Plaven, East Oregonian, Source: OPB

A new microbattery no larger than a long grain of rice could help biologists track the movement of younger, smaller fish through Northwest rivers.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland developed the tiny battery to power transmitters placed in juvenile salmon and steelhead, monitoring the fish at earlier stages in their life cycle.

By studying how subyearling chinook behave and migrate down the Columbia River, federal managers can make better decisions to improve overall habitat and survival. The challenge is creating smaller tags for smaller fish, which take smaller batteries that still pack enough of a charge to work.

PNNL now believes it has the answer. Its battery, at 6 millimeters long and 3 millimeters wide, isn’t the smallest ever created but packs twice the energy compared to current microbatteries, according to the lab’s findings.

That’s enough power for acoustic fish tags to broadcast signals every three seconds for about three weeks, or about every five seconds for a month. It’s also teeny enough to inject into fish using a hypodermic needle, as opposed to surgically implanting the transmitter, which is more expensive and stressful for the fish.

Brad Eppard, fisheries biologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Portland, said battery size was the biggest obstacle to tracking such small juvenile salmon. This microbattery not only clears that hurdle, but essentially revolutionizes the market, he said. “We have a pretty good tool here,” Eppard said. “It helps us to better understand what’s happening when (the fish) are migrating.”

The Corps was first required to study subyearling fall chinook salmon based on a 2001 biological opinion by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the Columbia River hydroelectric system. Researchers launched the Juvenile Salmon Acoustic Telemetry System, or JSATS, developing tags for the young fish.

It took five years to get their first functioning transmitter, Eppard said. In 2010, the Corps turned to PNNL to create an even smaller, injectable device. Lab engineer Daniel Deng called on Jie Xiao, a materials science expert, to come up with the battery design.

Xiao and her team ultimately perfected a painstaking process that involved cutting snippets of battery material, running them through a flattening device and stacking them on top of each other in layers. Each battery is then rolled by hand with tweezers — like a jellyroll — and inserted into an aluminum container.

“It was pretty difficult in the beginning,” Xiao said. “Once you learn how, as well as all the tricks, it becomes very standard protocol.”

Samuel Cartmell and Terence Lozano, scientists in Xiao’s lab, hand-rolled more than 1,000 of the batteries last summer. A PNNL team led by Deng then surgically implanted 700 of the tags into salmon in a field trial at the Snake River, where preliminary results show the technology worked exceedingly well. More details about the experiment will be released in a later publication, according to PNNL. Xiao said she has high hopes for developing the tags, as well as other uses for the microbattery. Battelle Memorial Institute, which operates PNNL, has applied for a patent. “There is a lot of opportunity,” she said.

State allowed logging on plateau above slope

In recent decades the state allowed logging — with restrictions — on the plateau above the Snohomish County hillside that collapsed in last weekend’s deadly mudslide.

By Mike Baker, Ken Armstrong and Hal Bernton

Seattle Times staff reporters

The plateau above the soggy hillside that gave way Saturday has been logged for almost a century, with hundreds of acres of softwoods cut and hauled away, according to state records.

But in recent decades, as the slope has become more unstable, scientists have increasingly challenged the timber harvests, with some even warning of possible calamity.

The state has continued to allow logging on the plateau, although it has imposed restrictions at least twice since the 1980s. The remnant of one clear-cut operation is visible in aerial photographs of Saturday’s monstrous mudslide. A triangle — 7½ acres, the shape of a pie slice — can be seen atop the destruction, its tip just cutting into where the hill collapsed.

Multiple factors can contribute to a slide.

With the hill that caved in over the weekend, geologists have pointed to the Stillaguamish River’s erosion of the hill’s base, or toe.

But logging can also play a role in instigating or intensifying a slide, by increasing the amount of water seeping into an unstable zone, according to an analysis of the watershed submitted to the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR).

In May 1988, when a private landowner, Summit Timber, received approval to begin logging above the slope, scientists raised alarms about the removal of trees that intercept or absorb so much water, according to documents obtained by The Seattle Times.

Paul Kennard, a geologist for the Tulalip Tribes, warned regulators that harvesting holds “the potential for a massive and catastrophic failure of the entire hillslope.”

Others echoed his concerns. Noel Wolff, a hydrologist who worked for the state, wrote that “Timber harvesting could possibly cause what is likely an inevitable event to occur sooner.” And Pat Stevenson, an environmental biologist for the Stillaguamish Tribe, cited “the potential for massive failure,” similar to a slide that occurred in 1967.

The agency that issued the permit — the DNR — responded to the concerns by assembling a team of geologists and hydrologists to study the harvest’s potential impact on landslides.

Lee Benda, a geologist with the University of Washington, wrote a report that said harvesting can increase soil water “on the order of 20 to 35 percent” — with that impact lasting 16 to 27 years, until new trees matured. Benda looked at past slides on the hill and found they occurred within five to 10 years of harvests.

In August 1988, the DNR issued a stop-work order, putting Summit Timber’s logging operation on temporary hold.

“1988 was maybe the first time that we were getting serious as to what you should or should not do in terms of logging and road construction around those things,” said Matt Brunengo, at that time a DNR geologist.

GRAPHIC BY THE SEATTLE TIMES;PHOTO BY TED S. WARREN / APUse an interactive tool to look at the effects of the mudslide. — GRAPHIC BY THE SEATTLE TIMES;
PHOTO BY TED S. WARREN / AP
Use an interactive tool to look at the effects of the mudslide.

A week after the stop-work order, a Summit representative wrote DNR, saying $750,000 to $1 million worth of timber was at stake. He listed alternative steps that could be taken to lessen the risks of a slide — for example, having the state relocate the channel of the Stillaguamish River that was cutting into the hill’s base.

“I can only conclude that the real issue here is not slides and water quality, but timber cutting,” he wrote.

Although records indicate that at least 300 acres were harvested on the plateau in the late 1980s, the state moved to prevent Summit Timber from clear-cutting 48 acres considered most likely to discharge water down the slope.

Mapping out the areas most likely to feed water into unstable terrain is “fraught with uncertainty,” wrote one geologist who studied this landslide zone in the 1990s.

Summit Timber was a family-logging business led by Gary Jones, who grew up in nearby Darrington. Jones believed the acreage atop the hill was second-growth forest, initially logged in the 1920s or 1930s. He said the company eventually backed away from its request to log the 48 acres, given the hill’s history.

“It was a little bit risky,” Jones told The Seattle Times. “We decided not to do it.”

Jones said he was always cautious when working around the river, especially considering he was an avid fly fisherman fond of the Stillaguamish.

Kennard, who now works as a geomorphologist at the National Park Service, said the 1988 application was contentious because the state rarely objected to proposed harvests. Getting the DNR to limit the cut’s scope was no small task, he said.

“That was considered kind of a big victory,” Kennard said.

Concerns about landslides surfaced again in 2004, when property owner Grandy Lake applied for a permit to clear a 15-acre tract near the plateau’s edge.

The state rejected the application, saying some of the proposed logging fell within a sensitive area that could feed water into the slope. Working in that zone would require years of intensive monitoring of precipitation and groundwater.

Grandy Lake revised its application, halving its proposed harvest to avoid the sensitive zone. The final plan — a clear-cut shaped like a right triangle — had an eastern border that abutted the area.

The state approved Grandy Lake’s application while attaching conditions, including: “All yarding and log-hauling activities will cease at the onset of heavy or steady rain and will not resume until the rain has subsided for at least 24 hours.”

Harvesting in that area was finished by August 2005.

Officials with Grandy Lake did not return calls seeking comment Tuesday.

In January 2006, a large slide hit, with so much mud crashing into the Stillaguamish that the river was diverted. Where the hill fell away was maybe 600 feet southwest of the clear-cut area.

Saturday’s slide took more of the hill, reaching right up to that triangle.

Grandy Lake has done selective logging on the plateau in more recent years. Following the approval of a 2009 permit that also included an area abutting the sensitive zone, the company reported to the state that it removed 20 percent of the area’s trees. It returned in 2011 and got approval to take 15 percent more.

Staff reporter Justin Mayo contributed to this report. Mike Baker: mbaker@seattletimes.com or 206-464-2729; Ken Armstrong: karmstrong@seattletimes.com or 206-464-3730

Quinault tribe declares coastal flooding emergency

Taholah, WA Photo from Panoramio Larry Workman QIN

March 26, 2014

TAHOLAH, Wash. (AP) — The Quinault Indian Nation has declared an emergency for coastal flooding in the lower village of Taholah on the Washington coast about 30 miles north of Ocean Shores.

The tribe says the seawall was breached Tuesday by pounding waves in high winds. The water has destroyed a smokehouse and several outbuildings.

Tribal President Fawn Sharp issued a voluntary evacuation order and is asking for a federal disaster declaration for help.

In January the Corps of Engineers placed 800 tons of rock along the seawall. The tribe says its coastal defenses need a more permanent fix.

Arlington’s MicroGreen to expand, ramp up production of cups

Arlington based company, MicroGREEN InCycle cup

By Jim Davis

The Herald Business Journal

March 18, 2014

ARLINGTON – A company that makes cups from recycled soda and water bottles is undergoing a $10 million factory expansion here.

MicroGreen will be able to produce 2 million InCycle cups per day after the expansion, up from the current 400,000.

“Our investors expect big things from us – it’s go-time,” said Tom Malone, CEO of MicroGreen, in a statement. “Production is running 24/7 on our existing lines, while we’re also managing the construction site and training new employees.”

Investors include the Stillaguamish Tribe and the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in Oregon.

“We are pleased that our investment in this young company has resulted in creating more than 100 jobs in our local community,” said Shawn Yanity, chairman of the Stillaguamish Tribe, in the press release.

In December, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde funded an equipment loan to MicroGreen and followed that with $5 million in January. This allowed MicroGreen to proceed with expansion.

The company is changing the industry, said Titu Asghar, director of economic development for the Grand Ronde, in the statement.

“We are looking ahead several generations to create an economically sustainable future, supporting clean technology that helps correct wasteful practices with environmentally sound products that are simply better in performance,” he said.

The company, at the Jensen Business Park near Highway 9, uses technology developed at the University of Washington to make the InCycle cups. The idea is to reduce the waste in landfills by using plastic bottles to create cups that can be recycled over and over.

MicroGreen has contracts with several airlines to provide cups for hot beverage service in flight. It’s also looking at using the same technology to expand to other markets, ranging from building construction and electronics to transportation.

Marysville schools ‘Dream Big For Kids’ March 29

MARYSVILLE — The Marysville School District will be presenting its summit on education, “Dream Big for Kids! Imagine Where We Can Go Together,” from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, March 29, in the commons and gymnasium of the Marysville Getchell High School campus.

In February of 2013, the Marysville School District Board of Directors began an initiative to increase community involvement, by including parents, students, business and civic leaders, and other community members in conversations to improve the educational opportunities for Marysville students.

The Marysville School Board began the process with a series of community forums, to help identify the successes of the Marysville School District and the areas where it needed to improve. The school district then utilized this information to focus on what it needed from a new superintendent, to help lead the district to its next levels of success.

This led to the hiring of Dr. Becky Berg as superintendent, who has since done significant community outreach work, including meetings with parents, staff and community members, as well as a series of “Coffee and Conversations” with families in the community. While the district has learned much from this process, more insights are needed, which is where “Dream Big for Kids” comes in.

Hundreds of Marysville and Tulalip community members are expected to join business leaders, parents, students and school district staff at this educational summit, to help envision the future of the Marysville School District and its children.

This is a no-cost event, but space is limited, so it’s recommended that you reserve your seat at a table ASAP.

To register, or for more information, call the Marysville School District at 360-653-7058, or visit its website at www.msvl.k12.wa.us.

California drought has migrating salmon hitching truck rides

By Michael B. Marois

Bloomberg News March 25, 2014

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California began hauling 30 million young chinook salmon hundreds of miles toward the Pacific Ocean in tanker trucks to save the fishing industry after a record drought left rivers too low for migration.

Three climate-controlled trucks, each bearing 130,000 silvery three-inch smolts, left a federal hatchery 180 miles north of San Francisco on Tuesday for a sloshy, three-hour drive to San Pablo Bay, where they are held in netted pens to acclimate before release. Officials had said they might need as many as four vehicles.

Visitors walk over Salmon Falls Bridge, normally submerged, at Folsom Lake in California last month. California began hauling 30 million young chinook salmon hundreds of miles toward the Pacific Ocean in tanker trucks to save the fishing industry after a record drought left rivers too low for migration.KEN JAMES — BLOOMBERG NEWS — Visitors walk over Salmon Falls Bridge, normally submerged, at Folsom Lake in California last month. California began hauling 30 million young chinook salmon hundreds of miles toward the Pacific Ocean in tanker trucks to save the fishing industry after a record drought left rivers too low for migration.
KEN JAMES — BLOOMBERG NEWS

“Water conditions, because of the drought, are going to be horrible for the fish,” said Harry Morse of the state Fish and Wildlife Department. “Depending on how far those fish have to go, the longer they must travel through the system, the higher the losses.”

The fish taxi is the latest in a series of emergency steps that state and federal authorities are rushing into place as reservoirs ebb one-third below normal and farmers idle thousands of acres. Gov. Jerry Brown has called for a voluntary 20 percent cut in water use and many areas have declared mandatory restrictions. More than 800 wildfires have broken out since Jan. 1, three times more than usual, according to state records, and smog in Los Angeles is worse without winter rains to clear the air.

California’s 38 million people endured the driest year on record last year. The most-populous state has only about a quarter of the average amount of water in mountain snow that melts in the spring to fill lakes and rivers.

The hatchery fish that typically migrate through the Sacramento River Delta to the sea are key to the state’s $1.5 billion commercial and recreational fishing industry, according to the Nature Conservancy. Fish released now will be part of the population that can be harvested in a few years.

The Pacific Fishery Management Council, which helps set fishing seasons, predicted earlier this month that more than 630,000 fall-run Chinook salmon from the delta are in the Pacific Ocean now. That’s less than last year but more than enough for a normal commercial fishing season, the council said.

The lack of rainfall means that the Sacramento River will prove too shallow and too warm for the tiny fish to survive the 200 to 300 miles of river and tributaries some must navigate to reach the Pacific.

Convoys of four to seven trucks daily will make the trip from the federal hatchery for 22 days during the next two and a half months. In all, 12 million juvenile fish will be taxied from there, along with 18 million raised in four state-owned hatcheries in June. When released from the pens, the tiny fish will migrate to the ocean and mature. They return to the rivers as an adult to spawn.

“Our 2016 fishing season may be riding on the survival of the fish in these trucks,” said Roger Thomas, chairman of the Golden Gate Salmon Association, an advocacy group based in Petaluma. “We know that fish trucked around dangers lurking in the rivers and delta survive at much higher rates than those released at the hatcheries.”

While the state usually trucks some of its hatchery fish to the ocean, this year’s haul will be about three times the usual. It costs California taxpayers $1,500 a week to rent the tanker trucks, and the state expects to spend $150,000 on trucking, including fuel costs, Morse said.

The U.S. Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation said last month that it won’t be able to deliver any of the more than 2.4 million acre-feet of water requested by farmers in California’s Central Valley, the state’s most productive agricultural region. An acre-foot is the volume needed to cover an acre of land one foot deep with water.

The Bureau of Reclamation supplies water to 1 million people and a third of the irrigated farmland in California through a 500-mile network of canals and tunnels.

About two-thirds of Californians get at least part of their water from northern mountain rains and snow through a network of state-managed reservoirs and aqueducts known as the State Water Project, which also has said it won’t be able to deliver any of the water requested.

The California Farm Water Coalition said March 17 that farmers probably will fallow as much as 800,000 acres of land because of the lack of water at a cost of $7.5 billion.

16 and pregnant in the Choctaw Nation

Stormy Davidson with her son Aiden in Rattan, Okla. She, and her husband Glen were teenagers when she got pregnant, they have had a characteristically up and down relationship. Ultimately Glen decided to take responsibility for their child and now counsels other young teenage fathers, an underserved demographic in the Choctaw Nation communities.Photo by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum for MSNBC — Stormy Davidson with her son Aiden in Rattan, Okla. She, and her husband Glen were teenagers when she got pregnant, they have had a characteristically up and down relationship. Ultimately Glen decided to take responsibility for their child and now counsels other young teenage fathers, an underserved demographic in the Choctaw Nation communities.
Photo by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum for MSNBC

03/24/14 msnbc.com

By Trymaine Lee

QUINTON, Okla.— “He’s still not talking yet,” said Autumn Sisco, staring down at the beefy little boy in the Buzz Lightyear sweatshirt playing at her feet. She scooped him up and swiped at his runny nose with her shirt sleeve.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” she said, sinking back into her living room sofa, watching the two-year-old bounce like a pinball across the living room floor to the kitchen, down a hallway and back.

This isn’t what her life is supposed to look like. She’d imagined herself a college co-ed, partying somewhere with a drink in her hand, giggling with girlfriends, or pulling an all-nighter for an exam she didn’t study for.

Instead she’s an underemployed 19-year-old mother and wife, struggling to keep her young marriage together and raise a kid in a small rural town where opportunities are few and disappointments are many.

“Trouble,” she lamented quietly. “You’re always in trouble here. There’s nothing positive.”

Life as a teen mom could be difficult under any circumstances. But it’s even more so here in the Choctaw Nation, a vast, rural expanse in southeastern Oklahoma where poverty and unemployment are rampant and the teen pregnancy rate is nearly double the national average.

While the teen birth rate has fallen drastically among all racial groups over the last two decades, the pregnancy rate for American Indian teens between 15 and 19 years old is 36.2 per 1,000, 15 points higher than their white counterparts and about 5 points higher than the national average, according to the Center for Disease Control. American Indian teens also lead all other groups in the rate of repeat births.

With so many young parents in the Choctaw Nation— an area larger than the state of Massachusetts— tribal leaders have made outreach to teen parents a priority. Those efforts were given a boost recently when the Obama administration designated the Choctaw Nation one of its first five Promise Zones, a program aimed at strengthening the relationship between impoverished communities and the federal government.

The tribe hopes to use the designation to access grants they’ll use to bolster some of the work they’ve already been doing, particularly around youth and families.

“What we’re doing isn’t just about changing today’s parents,” said Angela Dancer, senior director of the Better Beginnings Program, which serves at-risk and high-needs families. “It’s about changing the parents of the future.”

Dancer’s program helps ease the burdens many of these families face, including food insecurity and access to adequate medical care. The outreach workers, all of whom are Choctaw, do at-home visits and try to walk young mothers through the uncertainty of new parenthood.

They give away free diapers and car seats. And they help overwhelmed teen parents deal with stress management, create a healthy environment and teach them skills to build stronger attachments to their babies, all of which are challenges in the small impoverished communities that dot the Nation.

“They’ve had people come in and out of their lives and tell them all of the negative things about their weaknesses. But we help them understand their strengths,” Dancer said. “If we didn’t go out and touch them where they are, there’s no way we could touch as many as we do.”

But the challenges of reaching this demographic, many of whom are high-school dropouts without much financial or emotional support from their families, can often seem unsurmountable.

They’re geographically spread across very isolated communities within the nearly 11 counties that comprise the Nation’s service area. And emotionally, many are saddled with feelings of shame, guilt and the generational curse of teen pregnancy. Others are victims of domestic abuse.

“So many of them just close themselves off because they’re already worried about being judged – judged for getting pregnant in the first place,” said Hanna Wood, 29, an outreach worker who has worked with Sisco and her family.

The Nation also offers sex-education courses to schools within the Nation’s boundary, an effort that remains somewhat controversial in an area of the state dominated by conservative politics and where abstinence-only education is the preferred model. Outreach workers have found navigating the politics of teaching teens and pre-teens about safe sex and personal boundaries a delicate endeavor.

Nearly all Choctaw Indian students attend public schools where the majority of students are non-Native. And despite high rates of teen-pregnancy and a rate of sexually transmitted disease that is four times the national average, many public school districts within the Nation won’t allow the sex-ed courses taught in their schools.

For More on the Choctaw Nation see our photo essay: Hope on the Horizon for Choctaw Nation

Some schools will allow parts of the curriculum to be taught in their classrooms but won’t allow others, like condom demonstrations. On a recent evening nearly two dozen eighth graders whose school forbade such a demonstration gathered at Choctaw Nation outreach services headquarters, giggling and guffawing as an instructor urged them to slide a latex condom down their fore and middle fingers.

“We’re dealing with some pushback,” said Dancer. “But the statistics don’t lie.”

National politics have also become intertwined with the Nation’s efforts, as much of the funding for Better Beginnings is tied to the hotly-contested Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Last year, sequestration cuts and a shrinking number of grants, stripped funding from many of the tribe’s critical, government-funded programs. Better Beginnings was no different.

“I don’t care about the politics of it. I’m not a political person,” Dancer said. “But that’s what my funds are tied to. If that means it gets reinstated over and over, that’s just fine by me. “

While programs to help at-risk youth in the Nation have grown from just a few 20 years ago to dozens today, there still are major gaps. The nearest substance abuse treatment facility for juveniles is nearly 300 miles away, and there’s no in-patient mental health facility or homeless shelter. And there’s still a stigma around many of the issues these young people face, a hurdle outreach workers must handle with care.

“It’s the cycle. Their mothers went through the same thing,” said Shonda Shomo, an outreach worker with the Better Beginning program. “I was a teen mom. I was 18, so I know what they’re going through. I just keep encouraging them. And that’s something they don’t always hear from their mother figures.”

READ REST OF STORY HERE.

Tulalip man known for helping others needs help

Randy Ervin and family. , Photo by Alyson Pennant

Randy Ervin’s GoFundMe campaign opened to help deal with life changing stroke

By Niki Cleary, Tulalip News

Randy Ervin is a guy who loves life. Ask his many friends who have enjoyed, or lovingly suffered, his bizarrely funny bitstrips and constant Christmas countdowns. He’s also a friend, a mentor, a beloved co-worker and leader. He’s a beacon of hope for those in recovery, and a poster child for living better sober than addicted. Since February 25, Randy has been completely incapacitated after suffering a massive stroke. He is looking at returning to a two-story home and full time caregiving, with no prospects of returning to a normal life anytime soon.

Randy’s wife of 23 years, Tina Ervin, painted the picture.

“I left the house on February 25, I was only gone for about half an hour,” she explained. “I came home and he was sitting in the chair and he was just sitting there. He was non-responsive. I pulled up on his face, and I said, he’s having a stroke.”

Randy was in a medically induced coma for a week and a half. Doctors kept him breathing with a ventilator while they monitored the swelling in his brain. It took another two weeks to slowly bring him out of the coma.

“His right side is paralyzed,” Ervin said, describing her husband’s symptoms. “He’s learning how to speak all over again. He lost the ability to form words when he tries to talk and he’s learning to write with his left hand.

“If you write ‘apple, banana’ and leave an open space, he’s trying to figure out what to put in that open space, but he can’t tell you that the line of words means fruit. His brain is still not firing the way it should. Three hours a day he’s in physical and speech therapy, they’re teaching him how to use the other side of his brain.”

Family and friends aren’t the same for Randy either, many of his memories are missing because of the stroke.

“He didn’t recognize his brother, his best friend,” said Ervin. “Our anniversary is the 23^rd of this month [March], and he didn’t even remember that. But he did recognize Pete Warbus from the casino. He loves his crew and his job. Other than his family, that’s his life.”

A family friend, Mike Pablo, helped Ervin set up a GoFundMe account to help raise money for Randy’s expenses, which are numerous. The stroke is the most recent in a cascade of medical complications. In 2013 Randy was diagnosed with a tumor in his colon. Because colon cancer runs in his family, the best option was to remove it surgically. After the surgery, things went downhill quickly.

“He was eating dinner and he coughed,” said Ervin. “His shirt started filling up with blood. By the end of the night it turned brown and started to smell really bad. He stood up and it just gushed out of his belly. I rushed him to the hospital and the surgeon said, ‘Why did you wait so long!’

“They said his small intestine blew out like an inner tube blows out if you fill it too much. From there, his kidneys shut down. He spent more than 48 days in the hospital. It was a long road, but he finally went back to work December 23^rd. The aneurysm came out of nowhere.”

Because of his ongoing medical care Randy has no paid time off remaining, leaving his family deprived of the primary breadwinner. Because his leave has been exhausted he will likely lose his job at the Tulalip Resort, a job that currently provides the medical insurance paying for his care. Ervin said they’re doing what they can, but she’s concerned about how to pay for ongoing medical expenses and the necessary remodel of their home.

“I talked to Jay Napeahi in housing because my house is not set up for a wheelchair and I don’t have a full-sized bathroom downstairs. In the meantime they’re going to put us up in a duplex. We’re trying to raise some funds, we’re going to have to buy a wheelchair and some other equipment and I’m not sure how much his insurance will cover.”

His co-workers are doing what they can.

“We are definitely feeling the loss of him not being here,” said friend and co-worker Ashley Hammons. “It was a mess here, and everyone was trying to hold it together. ”

Resort employee Aliana Diaz agreed.

“It was pretty bad to the point where we approached the Employee Assistance Program and let them know that several of our team members were affected by it. I was giving them a heads up that people might need them.”

Slot Assistant Director James Ham, who has known Randy for years, described the outpouring of support, “Randy did a lot to give back. He would talk to anyone in addiction and recovery, he was reaching out constantly. I’ve seen a lot of people donate hours, there’s definitely been an outreach here.”

Coping with medical bills, the trauma of becoming a full time caregiver and the unknown challenges of the future might seem overwhelming, but Ervin’s been too busy to dwell on it.

“Ever since this happened it’s been, ‘What’s the worst case scenario?’ I’ve just tried to get everything going rather than sitting around and crying all the time. Right now we need a different bed, probably just a full size, because our water bed is too big [for the duplex].”

If you would like to help Randy’s family, check out www.gofundme.com and search Randy Ervin. The family is hoping to raise $15,000 to remodel the family’s home and get Randy set up for full time caregiving. As of March 25, $1,270 has been raised towards that goal. Ervin said every bit helps.

—–

Crowdfunding is becoming the new hand up

At the Tulalip 2014 Annual General Council, Tulalip Tribal citizen Mike Pablo made a motion to create an emergency relief fund for tribal members who are in need, either due to emergent medical situations, or because of natural disasters, fire or other catastrophes beyond their control. When he made the motion he was thinking about Tulalip citizen Randy Ervin who recently suffered a life-altering stroke. The motion was tabled, so instead, Mike helped the Ervin family to set up a crowdfunding site.

Increasingly, crowdfunding has become a way for people to directly support their causes. Whether it’s Matika Wilbur’s use of Kickstarter to launch Project 562, a photo project documenting contemporary Native America, or Randy Ervin’s GoFundMe campaign, citizens are turning to their peers, rather than a government agency, for assistance.

Crowdfunding isn’t new, in 1884 the American Committee for the Statue of Liberty ran short on money and Joseph Pulitzer launched an enormously popular fundraising effort. More than 125,000 people donated (mostly donations of less than $1) ultimately bringing in over $100,000. According to the website measuringworth.com, $1 in 1884 is equivalent to $24.50 today. So, a similar donation by modern citizens would mean about $25 each to raise around $2.5 million. This example is clear evidence that financial support for a cause doesn’t have to be a financial burden in order to be effective.

Crowdfunding quickly becoming a way for tiny businesses, broke inventors, and unknown musicians to launch a career. Unlike traditional investing, crowdsource funding doesn’t promise a return on investment, just the knowledge that your money is directly funding a cause that you support. According to the 2013 Massolution Crowdfunding Industry Report (http://www.crowdsourcing.org/research) crowdfunding is anticipated to bring in $5.1 billion in total global funding for the year.