Columbia Insight

05/30/2026

Save the date! The Oregon Hanford Cleanup Board meets next Mon, June 1st from 1:30pm-5:30pm. Attend the meeting at Cousins Country Inn in The Dalles or virtually on Microsoft Teams to hear updates on Hanford cleanup from Hanford Site, Washington Department of Ecology - Hanford, U.S. EPA Northwest Region & Oregon Department of Energy. Meeting info: https://tinyurl.com/2sd629wj

05/30/2026

Salmon, energy plans and cultural identity are all being impacted by the corporate drive for AI By K.C. Mehaffey/Video by Deborah Bloom. May 28, 2026. Hundreds of people are gathered on a windy

05/28/2026

Around tribal lands the effects of the proliferation of water- and energy-sucking data centers take on a unique dimension—the desecration of cultural sites, potential harm to traditional food sources and a painful continuation of government policies that ignore the needs and voices of Tribes.

Hundreds of people are gathered on a windy plateau near Goldendale, Wash. Almost 2,000 feet below, the John Day River flows into the Columbia River. With the snow-covered prominence of Mount Adams looming in the distance, wildflowers, native grasses, junipers and the blades of the Tuolumne Wind Farm dot the landscape.

Members of the Rock Creek Band, one of 14 American Indian Tribes and Bands that make up the Yakama Nation, convened here in April to hold a ceremony, dance and pray for the land.

On May 8, they invited others to the area—a site of deep ancestral significance—to bring awareness to a proposed pumped hydroelectricity storage project on this land that is in the final stages of permitting.

“Pumped hydro” refers to a system that generates and stores electricity by moving large amounts of water between reservoirs located at different elevations. If completed, the Goldendale Energy Storage Project would release 2.3 billion gallons of water from a man-made reservoir downhill almost 2,000 feet through a tunnel drilled into the mountainside, spinning power turbines near the bottom. Collected in a reservoir at the bottom of the slope, the water would then be pumped back uphill, and released again.

The Yakama call this site Pushpum. About 110 miles east of Portland, it overlooks a stretch of river where their ancestors lost fishing sites to the inundating waters of John Day Dam, which was completed in 1971.
Full story Columbia Insight.

Salmon, energy plans and cultural identity are all being impacted by the corporate drive for AI By K.C. Mehaffey/Video by Deborah Bloom. May 28, 2026. Hundreds of people are gathered on a windy

05/22/2026

For all of the study of there’s still a lot we don’t know about these remarkable creatures. A case in point is a recent discovery by fisheries biologist John Hagan, who works with the Makah, Quinault, Quileute and Hoh Tribes on the western . Using technology (pretty remarkable itself), Hagan and his team have found evidence that salmon are migrating to some of the higher elevations on the Peninsula, which ranges from sea level to the top of Mount Olympus at nearly 8,000 feet. What’s driving salmon into remote, high streams?

Whether chinook have always used remote headwaters or are moving higher due to climate change isn’t clear Higher and higher: Young chinook

05/15/2026

May is globally recognized Lyme Disease Awareness Month, dedicated to educational efforts about Lyme disease, its symptoms and the importance of tick bite prevention.

There’s nothing like firsthand experience to bring home how devastating tick borne diseases can be. Nathan Gilles shares his experience …

In the summer of 2007, I took a walk with my dad on the Appalachian Trail near my parents’ home in upstate New York. Two days later, I developed a rash on my left arm in the shape of a bull’s-eye.

The rash was a telltale sign that I had been infected with Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria responsible for causing Lyme disease.

In March, Pfizer published the results of its clinical trials for the company’s new Lyme disease vaccine.

Transmitted to humans by ticks, roughly 89,000 cases of Lyme disease were reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2023. The disease, however, is easy to misdiagnose and hard to test for. According to the health agency, the actual number of infected individuals could be closer to half a million annually.

If Pfizer’s vaccine is approved by the FDA, it will be the first vaccine for Lyme disease since SmithKline Beecham released its Lyme vaccine in 1998, only to pull it a few years later due to a lack of sales tied to unsubstantiated safety concerns.

Having a Lyme vaccine again will no doubt help hundreds of thousands if not millions of people enjoy spending time in the natural world while also avoiding contracting what for many can be a debilitating illness if left untreated for too long.

Pfizer’s vaccine is designed to target B. burgdorferi infections. What the vaccine won’t do, however, is stop other disease-causing microbes carried by ticks from infecting us. We also need vaccines to stop these microbes.

What many doctors now recognize but the public largely doesn’t, is that ticks carry multiple disease-causing microbes, including bacteria, viruses and blood parasites.

Go to Columbia Insight for full story.

05/14/2026

Our latest op-ed story explores the years-long struggle with and other tick-borne illnesses by contrbuting editor, Nathan Gilles. Nathan argues from personal experience and the available evidence that we need vaccines for Lyme disease and these other "coinfections."
Read story at Columbia Insight

The tick-borne illness isn’t confined to other parts of the country. It’s an issue in the Pacific Northwest Adult deer tick: Most cases of Lyme

05/13/2026

Students at Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham, Ore., need to look no further than their own campus to study riparian restoration in the Sandy River watershed.

The vision is to turn Kelly Creek, which winds through campus before joining Beaver Creek and later the Sandy River, into a living laboratory for the college.

“This work represents our commitment to creating breakthroughs for both our students and our community,” Mt. Hood Community College President Dr. Lisa Skari said in a statement. “Transforming Kelly Creek into a living laboratory allows us to support hands-on learning while caring for the environment we all share.”

But first, an old dam on the campus needs to be removed.

Dam removal is just one piece of a larger project spearheaded by Mt. Hood Community College and the East Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District to improve water quality and restore fish habitat in Kelly Creek.

The project is moving forward after a $227,000 award from Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The award is part of the state’s Private Forest Accord mitigation grant program, which funds projects focused on aquatic habitat restoration and conservation.

The Sandy River watershed is considered an important bastion for salmon in the Columbia River Basin. It’s seen a significant push in recent years to restore habitat for federally listed coho salmon, winter steelhead, fall chinook salmon and eulachon, also known as Columbia River smelt. Two dams have already been removed on Beaver Creek.

The Kelly Creek dam was built in 1968 using dirt fill from other campus development projects to create a 50-70 foot earthen dam and a two-acre fishing pond, with a pedestrian walkway along the top of the dam to connect two sides of campus.

But the structure completely blocks fish passage up and down the creek.

In summer, the reservoir itself acts like a hot tub, warming temperatures by up to 9 degrees and impacting water temperatures as far as five miles downstream in Beaver Creek.

Project leaders, who have been working on the project for over a decade, say that removing the dam will restore access to critical habitat for salmon and other native fish in the Sandy River watershed, creating a project for hands-on learning and research. The project will reopen four miles of upstream habitat to salmon for spawning and rearing, and will reduce water temperatures downstream. It will also help restore natural stream and floodplain functions, and will include treating polluted stormwater runoff from nearby Kane Road.

“It’s a rewarding opportunity to help advance a restoration project like this one that is so clearly aligned with the ongoing objective of the Private Forest Accord,” said Chad Washington, chair of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s PFA Mitigation Advisory Committee. “It brought together prominent environmental groups and the forest sector in Oregon to find agreement on how to practice modern forestry in a way that keeps water cold and clean for fish and leaves the timber wars of the past behind us.”

The ODFW grant will help pay for the project’s final design and permitting, but more money needs to be raised before construction can begin.

With a $227,000 grant, the project will benefit students, salmon and Oregon’s Sandy River watershed Study impediment: Kelly Creek has been dammed since 1968. Students will learn

05/10/2026

Dear Residents,

As part of our commitment to community resilience, we are inviting local EV drivers to participate in a vital safety study conducted by the University of Washington.

Do you drive an EV?
Researchers are seeking input from EV drivers who live, work, or own property in Central and Eastern Washington—specifically within Skamania, Klickitat, Spokane, Stevens, Douglas, Grant, Lincoln, Ferry, Benton, Yakima, Kittitas, Okanogan, and Chelan counties.

Your feedback will directly influence future policies on charging infrastructure and emergency response, ensuring that our rural communities remain resilient during wildfire events.

Official Survey Link: https://uwashington.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_e3QtLbUuPaTdDmu
Completion Time: Approximately 25 minutes.
Deadline: May 31, 2026.
Incentive: Complete the survey to enter a drawing for ten $20 or four $50 gift cards.
Thank you for helping us improve wildfire safety and community stewardship in our region.

Best,
Yu-Chen Chu
PhD Student, University of Washington
Email: [email protected]

05/08/2026

Coal exports from Longview? Here we go again.

An obscure port company is seeking to resurrect an old scheme along the Columbia River.

When Michael Klein looks at the Columbia River, he sees an ideal place from which to export coal.

The Port of Longview on the Columbia in southwestern Washington has access to the deep waters that Pacific-bound vessels need, Klein told local elected officials from Utah intent on finding new markets for the state’s coal.

“You don’t need to partially load a vessel and then top it off somewhere else,” he said.

The Rural Utah Infrastructure Coalition, a group of officials from eastern Utah counties formerly called the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, had invited Klein to talk about coal at its January meeting.

Klein, who represents Pacific Port Group LLC, focused on Longview, which the coal industry sees as a potential gateway to overseas markets.

“As a landlocked state, Utah has long been interested in deep water port access for our goods and products,” Keith Heaton, executive director of the Rural Utah Infrastructure Coalition told Columbia Insight via email. “We are open to potential opportunities, including Longview.”

Longview’s geography and access to railroads make it ideal for an export terminal, according to Klein. A potential new terminal might eventually handle a variety of products, but in the short term the most obvious one is coal.

Coal “gives the best chance to have a product that has sufficient margins and a long-term demand,” Klein said in his presentation. “There is a demand and need for this today.”

If some of this sounds familiar, that’s not surprising.

In 2010, a subsidiary of Australia-based mining giant Ambre Energy proposed building a similar coal terminal at Longview. Environmental groups fiercely opposed it, and in 2017 Washington’s Department of Ecology denied a key permit for the project. The developer, Millennium Bulk Logistics, abandoned it in 2021.

By then, opposition to coal exports had become a unifying issue for environmental groups in the Pacific Northwest, who defeated not just the Longview project but six other proposed coal terminals in Washington and Oregon. Hundreds of people turned out to public hearings to speak against coal.

None of this seems to bother Klein.

“We are not building from scratch, because of the history of work that’s been done,” Klein told participants at the Utah meeting. He said this “should result in a quicker path” for coal exports in Longview this time around.

Not everyone thinks it will be so easy.

Read story at Columbia Insight.

An obscure port company is seeking to resurrect an old scheme along the Columbia River Business opening: The Port of Longview has eight marine terminals and waterfront industrial

05/07/2026

An obscure port company is seeking to resurrect an old scheme along the Columbia River.
When Michael Klein looks at the Columbia River, he sees an ideal place from which to export coal.
The Port of Longview on the Columbia in southwestern Washington has access to the deep waters that Pacific-bound vessels need, Klein told local elected officials from Utah intent on finding new markets for the state’s coal.

“You don’t need to partially load a vessel and then top it off somewhere else,” he said.

The Rural Utah Infrastructure Coalition, a group of officials from eastern Utah counties formerly called the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, had invited Klein to talk about coal at its January meeting.
Klein, who represents Pacific Port Group LLC, focused on Longview, which the coal industry sees as a potential gateway to overseas markets.

“As a landlocked state, Utah has long been interested in deep water port access for our goods and products,” Keith Heaton, executive director of the Rural Utah Infrastructure Coalition told Columbia Insight via email. “We are open to potential opportunities, including Longview.”

Longview’s geography and access to railroads make it ideal for an export terminal, according to Klein. A potential new terminal might eventually handle a variety of products, but in the short term the most obvious one is coal.

Coal “gives the best chance to have a product that has sufficient margins and a long-term demand,” Klein said in his presentation. “There is a demand and need for this today.”

If some of this sounds familiar, that’s not surprising.

In 2010, a subsidiary of Australia-based mining giant Ambre Energy proposed building a similar coal terminal at Longview. Environmental groups fiercely opposed it, and in 2017 Washington’s Department of Ecology denied a key permit for the project. The developer, Millennium Bulk Logistics, abandoned it in 2021.

Go to ColumbiaInsight.org for full story.