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:
It’s not supposed to be easy for Vancouver Energy to build the nation’s largest oil terminal on the banks of the Columbia River. Washington’s environmental regulations guarantee that. But there is a path through the regulatory labyrinth of the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council that the company might be able to follow.
The route through the hedgerows isn’t easy to find, as the council’s history shows. In the 46 years of the council’s existence, just five of 20 energy projects that have undergone the council’s review are now operating. Many of the others either fell short of winning full state approval, missed a narrow window in the market or just gave up trying to get past the regulatory gatekeepers.
So when pondering the fate of the rail-to-marine terminal proposed to handle 360,000 barrels of oil per day at the Port of Vancouver, the council’s past may help predict the project’s future.
See Monday’s Columbian for the next installment of the Oil Town series.
Jeff Waters says Vancouver and Southwest Washington can become a center for film production and a laboratory for vocational and artistic training in filmmaking. He is trying to achieve these goals through Vancouver Filmworks, a nonprofit motion-picture production company he founded here in 2013.
An entrepreneur who has built successful main-street businesses (Achates Security in Salinas, Calif., and Aegis Cleaning Service in Vancouver), Waters also possesses a deeply creative spirit. His colorful, if not bumpy, history as a film writer and director is buttressed by a bachelor’s degree in film from California State University Monterey Bay in Seaside, Calif.
Mostly self-financed, Waters has been working steadily since 2014 to realize his dream that Vancouver Filmworks, funded by local and national investors and assisted by Hollywood professionals and local civic leaders, can put Vancouver on the film map.
If it all works out, St. Paul Lutheran Church will transform into a 12-bed women’s shelter practically overnight at the end of this month. The church in downtown Vancouver hosts 24 men as part of the annual Winter Hospitality Overflow program, which wraps up the morning of March 31.
That evening, as women begin to fill the space, the WHO will become WHAT — that is, Women’s Housing and Transition. It’s been a whirlwind process making the new shelter program a reality since the idea was floated at the end of February.
Four rooms at the church will sleep three women each. There’s a shower and laundry room that they could use, totes for storing belongings, and a hospitality room for hanging out. They won’t be able to cook, though, because there’s no commercial kitchen. Instead, clients will get snacks and coffee, and be sent to nearby Share House for meals.
Being a doctor means hearing stories all day long. Attentive listening and real understanding of your patients’ tales of worry and woe, signs and symptoms is the heart of the matter, according to Rebecca Hoffman.
“In my line of business it’s all about stories,” she said. “Our lives are all about stories.”
Hoffman is a private family-practice physician based in Salmon Creek. But she’s also a longtime devotee of stories. Before she became a doctor, Hoffman worked on “visual storytelling” as a video producer, she said. And long before that — ever since she was a kid — she’s always been involved with theater and acting and storytelling, she said.
On April 1 comes Magenta Theater’s third storytelling series. It’s called “The Edge,” and Hoffman is its director and storytelling coach. Eight or nine storytellers will bare their souls with true tales relating to that infamous date; the unifying theme for this performance will be “foolishness,” Hoffman said.
Angel Miller-Boyko, 7, offered a carrot to Rojo the therapy llama. He greedily ate it and waited for another one. Clearly, he knew the drill. Angel did, too, She’s been attending the Beeping Easter Egg Hunt for the Blind since she was 2.
“It’s a family tradition,” said her mom, Shaleena Miller from Vancouver. “Every year, for weeks she can’t stop talking about Rojo and Smokey. She prepared her own carrots today.”
Meanwhile, Angel was united with her friend, Jasmine Eiland, 7. The girls attend Hough Elementary School together. They held hands and took off to see what fun they could find next. Their parents walked beside them as they headed toward the field.
“Right in front there’s going to be a bar,” warned Angel’s mom.
Both girls reached out their pink canes to feel for the metal railing separating the track from the grassy field. They ducked underneath and stepped onto the soft grass.
“It’s bouncy!” Angel laughed. “Do you want to bounce? Boing! Boing! Boing!”
The Sylvan Ecohouse was supposed to be a modern, angular house using the latest and greatest energy efficiencies, its slanted roof pointed skyward.
“Tomorrow has arrived,” announced a sign outside the home in Vancouver’s Truman neighborhood during construction in 2013 that touted solar panels and a graywater-reuse system in addition to the unusual concrete exterior.
But tomorrow didn’t come.
After the project was abandoned partway through construction, the white foam house surrounded by trees sat vacant. Occasionally, optimistic buyers looked at the house, only to back out after they realized the effort and money it would take to complete the structured concrete insulated panel, or SCIP, house, a rare type of construction in the Pacific Northwest.
