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35: Strategic Investment
- Oregon State University Press
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288 35 Strategic Investment Tom, 2012 The sky above the dark mass of Tillamook Head looked bruised, the slate gray broken here and there with slivers of pale blue and shards of sunlight, as Tom steered the Accord into the ball fields parking lot off Wahanna Road. The stubborn leaves of the blackberry thicket edging the parking lot were only beginning to turn yellow, though the alder trees beyond the brambles were mostly bare. Tucked in the southernmost corner of the parking lot was a large drilling rig on caterpillar tracks, roaring and vibrating and clanging as it pounded a hydraulic ram through a hole in the pavement. Tom, in faded blue jeans and a red hooded Seaside High Football sweatshirt, strode toward the figures gathered around the rig, greeting Sean Dixon, the geologist in charge: a younger, slighter man in yellow waterproof overalls and a gray wool sweater. Conversation, however, was impossible against the din. A drill operator reached toward a switch to power down the rig. “If you could get to twenty-five feet, I’d be happy,” Tom said. “What depth do you want to start sampling?” asked Dixon. “At five feet or so,” Tom replied, “once you know you’re out of fill. When you start getting into black organic stuff, you’ll be in the marsh. I’d like to start at that point.” “We’ll keep an eye on the cuttings.” “Good!” Tom straightened up and smiled. “I don’t know enough about the details of finessing these kinds of things, so whatever you think is best. I really appreciate this.” “I’m interested too,” Dixon said, signaling to the driller to resume pounding. Dixon worked for Geocon, a leading West Coast geotechnical consulting firm hired by the Seaside School District to confirm that the hillside site Superintendent Doug Dougherty was eyeing for his proposed consolidated school-district campus was rock-solid and not prone to landslide in a big earthquake. Dougherty had asked Tom to consult on the project as well. Tom had already spent a day guiding Dixon through the tangle of logging roads in the hills above town, observing as Dixon installed strategic investment 289 inclinometers at the proposed campus site to detect any slope movement over the winter, kibitzing as they probed the bedrock underneath the ball fields parking lot at the base of the hill to assess how well it buttressed the slope. Tom suspected Dougherty had hired him in part out of charity, throwing a little paid work Tom’s way to thank him for hours of free consulting in service of what was shaping up as a monumental and unprecedented project: swapping five schools and their associated campuses in three towns for a single, brand-new, seismically engineered, tsunami-safe school campus. But Tom knew that Dougherty wasn’t just throwing him a bone. No single individual knew more about the geology of Clatsop County and the history of paleoseismology research there than Tom Horning, Seaside High School Class of ’72. The driller, backing the auger out of the hole in the pavement, detached a two-foot-long metal cylinder at the end and handed it to Dixon, who gave it a shake, then unscrewed the top and separated the two halves of the split spoon sampler, laying them face-up on a metal tripod bench and gesturing to Tom to have a look. The two geologists were actually looking for different things: Dixon for evidence that this hill will hold in a quake, and Tom for cobbles, silt and sand layers, or other tracks of past tsunamis. Why not, while they were here drilling anyway, piggyback some science onto an engineering project? Tom—silver-haired, but still a “barrel on stilts,” as his sisters used to tease him—bent over the core sample, half-filled with muddy sediment, peering through tarnished wire-rim glasses with the discernment of a vintner poised for his first sip of Beaujolais nouveau. He poked at the muck with an index finger, then he plucked a folding knife from one pocket of the tan utility vest draping his sweatshirt and began smoothing the face of the core sample with the blade, picking at it with the tip. “Teeny microscopic creek sand,” he narrated to himself. He flicked out a brown sliver. “A piece of wood, what looks like a mud flat. A molten Hershey bar!” he pronounced, succinctly capturing the core’s appearance. With the tip of the blade, he nicked...