After a 14-month investigation into the Crestline Elementary School fire, investigators said Tuesday that a 17-year-old boy set the blaze, and a second boy may have been involved.
Dylan Mork, 17, was issued a criminal summons to appear in court on allegations of second-degree arson. His court hearing is scheduled for 9 a.m. May 21 in Clark County Juvenile Court. No charges have been filed against the second boy, whose name was not released.
According to Mork’s Facebook page, he is a junior at Mountain View High School, also in Evergreen Public Schools.
The three-alarm fire destroyed the school, at 13003 S.E. Seventh St., on Feb. 3, 2013. It displaced more than 500 students and staff and caused an estimated $8 million in damage, including the building, its contents, the cost of demolition and replacement.
“I’m sure a lot of people are wondering why the investigation took so long,” said Deputy Prosecutor Dan Gasperino. “We wanted to be certain with a serious charge like arson. We had the ATF (federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) lab in Maryland conduct a test burn where they built a model. They essentially replicated where they thought the fire started. It’s not something they can do overnight.”
It’s been six years since Mount St. Helens returned to relative slumber after its last eruptive phase, but the notorious volcano is quietly recharging for the next one, scientists said Wednesday.
There are no signs of an impending eruption, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. But ongoing analysis has confirmed that magma underneath the volcano is re-pressurizing — and has been for years. The buildup is likely caused by a surge of new magma several miles below the surface, according to the USGS.
That doesn’t mean Mount St. Helens is going to erupt again any time soon. It does, however, underscore the need to keep constant watch on it and other volcanoes in the region, said Seth Moran, a seismologist with the USGS’s Cascades Volcano Observatory in Vancouver.
“The message to us as an observatory is, we need to be ready,” Moran said.
Mount St. Helens has been the Northwest’s most closely monitored volcano since its catastrophic 1980 eruption. Additional eruptions continued through 1986, and another dome-building eruption occurred from 2004 to 2008.
A retail rearrangement is in store for Westfield Vancouver mall, which is adding four new tenants, while shuffling an existing tenant to a larger slot in the floor plan.
But mall officials say they’ve not yet found a replacement tenant for longtime anchor store Nordstrom, which is vacating the mall early next year. Mall owner Westfield Group is working to fill the 71,000-square-foot space where the Seattle-based retailer has operated since 1977, said Chris Yates, the mall’s marketing manager.
For now, new tenants coming into the mall this summer include: QE Home, a luxury bedding store; Vivo, which offers an array of clothing from designers such as Silver Jeans, Madden Girl and Rampage; 100% Pure, which sells natural skin care products; and Locker Room by LIDS, which carries team sportswear and accessories.
In December, the mall welcomed an Aveda shop offering beauty products and a salon. As part of the new lineup, the salon Sassy Nails will undergo a complete remodel and women’s clothier Christopher and Banks will move into a larger space.
“They are expanding and adding close to 2,000 square feet,” Yates said about Christopher and Banks, which is based in Minneapolis.
Southwestern Washington lawmakers have invited their Oregon counterparts to form a new coalition to discuss an Interstate 5 Bridge replacement project.
The two Republican lawmakers leading the charge, Rep. Liz Pike, R-Camas, and Sen. Ann Rivers, R-La Center, recently sent a letter, along with Rep. Ed Orcutt, R-Kalama, to a handful of Oregon and Washington lawmakers, asking them to be part of the “bipartisan, Bi-State Bridge Coalition,” or BBC.
The letter invites lawmakers to a June 4 meeting, closed to the public and press, to “address transportation corridors between the states of Oregon and Washington and specific to the regions of Southwest Washington and the Portland metro area.”
“I think the most important thing is to have an open dialogue amongst us to see where we can find commonality,” said Rivers.
“Our goal is to shift the discussion from what we can’t do to what we can do,” she added.
The letter states the goal is to find consensus using a “well-thought-out matrix” and adds “more studies are not the answer.”
“The first meeting will be exploratory,” Pike said. “We’ll find out where everyone is at and gauge the temperature of the water and what they can and can’t support. … A journey of one thousand miles begins with one step. That’s what this first meeting is going to be.”
For Terry Robertson, church administrator at the Columbia Presbyterian Church, the best-case scenario would be to have residents of the Vancouver Heights neighborhood become members of the church’s rapidly growing congregation.
“If they would like to attend church, we would love to have them,” Robertson said.
Right now, however, many who live near the church aren’t thinking of joining the nearly 1,400 people who regularly attend services. Instead, they’re thinking about how to keep them out of their lives.
Or more specifically, how to prevent churchgoers from parking in their yards, blocking their driveways or putting their children at risk when the churchgoers are late to worship.
“We want them to treat our neighborhood as if it were their own,” said Jen Garrett, who lives in the neighborhood and has two children, ages 7 and 9. “I think people forget that; they are late, they are in a hurry. To them, it’s a place they visit for an hour.”
Concrete blocks line the outer edge of yards in the Vancouver Heights neighborhood to keep cars from tearing up green, manicured lawns.
The coming warm, sunny days are filling Clark County farmers with a newfound sense of dread.
Such days are great for growing plants, of course, but they’re also bringing out a rapidly growing threat to the region’s fruit and vegetable crops: brown marmorated stink bugs.
The invasive, fruit-munching pests, which hail from Asia, took out about half of farmer Joe Beaudoin’s Granny Smith apple crop at Joe’s Place Farms last season.
And as spring sets in, the bugs emerge from their winter slumber. They’ll seek out sunny days for mating and egg-laying, and there’s not much that farmers can do to stop them.
“This could be the worst thing that we’ve ever seen here,” Beaudoin said. “We don’t know how to control it.”
The bugs spread up Oregon’s Willamette Valley and into the Columbia River Gorge over the past year.
“They’re in The Dalles, Yakima. The worst, though, is probably the Willamette Valley and Vancouver,” said Peter Shearer, a professor of entomology at Oregon State University.
The brown marmorated stink bug, called Halyomorpha halys in scientific lingo, first appeared in the United States in 1998 in Pennsylvania. The bugs eat pretty much everything, including apples, peaches, grapes, corn and soybeans.
