What’s on tap for this week’s weather? Check our local weather coverage.
In case you missed them, here are some of the top stories of the weekend:
We don’t need a federal researcher to tell us that Clark County is a pretty good place to live.
Still, the Department of Agriculture has made it official. USDA data has determined that — by one scale, at least — Clark ranks among the top 6 percent of counties in the United States.
It’s perfectly natural.
Actually, that’s what the data is all about: natural amenities.
According to an analysis of scenery and climate, Clark County ranks 181st among 3,111 counties in the lower 48 states. Research by the USDA generated a natural amenities index, which it says is a measurement of “the physical characteristics of a county area that enhance the location as a place to live.”
Between November and the end of March, 478 homeless people were sheltered through the Winter Hospitality Overflow program. The two host churches, St. Andrew Lutheran in Orchards and St. Paul Lutheran in downtown Vancouver, provided a combined 9,423 bed nights for those without a stable place to sleep.
Historical data suggest fewer people are using WHO. The Council for the Homeless says that means people are having a harder time getting out of homelessness and are using emergency shelter services, such as WHO, for longer. Executive director Andy Silver said it all results in fewer people being served and more people having to live outside.
“People are staying at the WHO longer because it’s harder for us to get them into housing,” Silver said. Whether it’s bed nights or clients, he said data generated by the winter shelter program don’t reflect the county’s growing homeless population.
BATTLE GROUND — Nine-year-old Maya Elwell was the first to tip her plastic bucket and slide about a dozen coho salmon into upper Salmon Creek on Saturday. Northwest Wild Fish Rescue released about 2,000 to 3,000 young salmon as part of their ongoing efforts to improve ailing wild fish runs in area waterways once busting with them.
Ed Miller stood in the creek in waders as people came to the water’s edge with buckets of fish, either smolt or pre-smolt.
“Tell them we’ll see them in two years,” he quipped.
Northwest Wild Fish Rescue is a one-of-a-kind operation that captures young coho salmon and steelhead from waterways where they would otherwise become stranded and die when the water drops or dries up. Dave Brown stores the fish and raises them in several pens on his property — fed by an elaborate system of pipes tapping natural spring water — before releasing them back into the Salmon Creek watershed when water is higher. This year, they’ve raised about 30,000 fish.
When the 155-voice Camas High School Choir joins a six-piece band featuring some of Portland’s most accomplished singers and players on April 15 — following opening acts including their own extracurricular musical projects and special guests — it’s going to be nothing short of “explosive” and “earth shattering” and “astonishing brilliance.”
Those fitting terms were chosen by Maddie Bertalot and Andrew Henson, two members of the choir, who wrote what The Columbian finds an explosively earth-shatteringly brilliant press release.
Marketing is key to the music business, Camas High School choir leader Ethan Chessin said, but students don’t usually learn much about it in his class. A couple of grants from the Camas Educational Foundation and Young Audiences of Oregon and Southwest Washington helped change that.
From the deck of his home in the Washougal hills, Bill Campbell has a sweeping view of the Columbia River and Mount Hood. But a less picturesque element of the vista is the Bonneville Power Administration’s high-voltage power lines standing above the neighborhood and running downhill to parallel the river below.
More troubling for Campbell are the new and much larger transmission lines BPA might build in place of the originals.
After six years of project development by BPA and two months after the release of the final environmental impact statement of the proposed I-5 Corridor Reinforcement Project, some people living in the project’s potential corridor are still worried about what the future holds.
Construction is underway on Vancouver’s first Chick-fil-A restaurant, at the intersection of Southeast 164th Avenue and Mill Plain Boulevard.
The 4,500-square-foot fast-food restaurant, which will be the company’s third in the metro area, is expected to open in the fall.
Chick-fil-A’s three Washington restaurants are in Bellevue, Lynnwood and Tacoma.
