News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
News, views and advertising of the Grand Coulee Dam Area
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Elmer City may test a force main that carries wastewater to Coulee Dam’s treatment plant to see how long the 40-year-old cast iron pipe is likely to last. The town applied for a grant of $30,000 for the test, which would help nail down the cost of a possible switch from using Coulee Dam’s to building Elmer City’s own treatment facility. Engineer Nancy Wetch, of Gray and Osborne, went over the likely cost differences with the town council Thursday night after having completed a cost study of the alternatives. Wetch explained two alter...
A group of people met in Coulee Dam Tuesday to start a discussion about someday replacing the bridge over the Columbia River on SR-155. The current bridge, built in 1935, is half as wide, at 20 feet, as the state Department of Transportation would like - not to mention every truck driver who finds it necessary to wait for traffic before making an illegal wide swing into oncoming lanes to be able to make the narrow, right-angle turns. Discussion ensued about 1 p.m. around a table at the school...
With a hunger for getting out built up among rodeo fans, the first one in the state since pandemic lockdown set attendance records and put Grand Coulee on the national rodeo map. Ridge Riders President George Kohout said Tuesday he'd watched The Cowboy Channel's TV segment on last weekend's Colorama Rodeo twice and "just about teared up a little bit." Friday night's attendance at the Colorama Rodeo "set a record, and Saturday night's blew that all to hell," Kohout said. That took some doing. The...
When Gov. Jay Inslee announced Tuesday that he and state public health leaders had decided to go easy considering a dreaded possible rollback to more restrictive public safety measures, no sighs of relief left his critics’ lips, just more grumbling. After watching case rates rise for weeks, public health quantifiers noted the trend had plateaued, leveled off. Critics of Inslee’s approach in deferring to public health experts and letting science guide the state through the pandemic, might have been expected to be glad they’d finally come down...
With five more dead in Grant County from COVID-19 and vaccine hesitancy apparently on the rise, health officials issued pleas this week for people get use the available “tools to take the fight to the virus.” The five deaths reported by Grant County Health District Monday night bring the county’s total fatalities to 120, and officials noted the ages of those who don’t survive is trending younger than it was early on as seniors were the first non-healthcare group to be allowed to get vaccinated. All Moses Lake residents, they were man in his... Full story
Sunshine is so seductive, which you certainly know if you ever went to a school in springtime with windows in the classroom. It can ruin your focus, draw you out, trash the best of intentions after a long, dark winter just ended. Happened every year for me in grade school. I feel like that now, freshly, fully vaccinated more than a year after entering the battle against the pandemic, everywhere is begging to be a destination. Can’t really blame anybody for wanting to throw caution to the wind. Fortunately, that feels close to the r...
The Grand Coulee Dam School District leadership is taking a good step forward by preparing for the day when funding becomes available to entities who already have plans in place for improvements. In fact, that’s exactly how the district got its new school built, by taking the steps necessary to be ready when fortune, or the state Legislature, or Congress, smiles. When the plans were already in place, the day came that a jobs bill was looking for a place to lay in some green. A sharp state legislator we had working for us knew what to do. S...
Grant PUD’s decision to pursue a partnership in a next-generation nuclear power plant stems from the same circumstance that incented Columbia Basin Hydropower’s interest in its Banks Lake Hydropower project. The factors driving this grip all of us; change is inevitable. Both the PUD and Columbia Basin Hydro figure more power will be needed in the coming years, and that much of it will come from renewable energy developments that need a more stable, fairly permanent source of power to steady their less-than-stable energy flow. Both of those pro...
As public health authorities track cases of COVID-19, they worry that just as vaccines are rolling out faster, spring, sunshine and the yearning to breathe free could undermine progress on the fight against the virus and cause another surge of illness and death. As numbers come down, then stop dropping, they're tending to "plateau" at a level higher than earlier plateaus, Coulee Medical Center CEO Ramona Hicks told her commissioners at a meeting Monday night. She'd been on a weekly health care... Full story
Students at Lake Roosevelt Schools will attend in person more than they have in a year, following the passage by the school board of a new schedule aimed at accomplishing increased face time with teachers and peers, even with masks. The new schedule will get kids in classrooms half a day Monday through Thursday, beginning April 12, nearly doubling their time physically in school but cutting time for those who wish to keep learning online. Fridays will be used to help students who need extra help catching up after a year of mostly online...
Anyone can now either sign up for a vaccination event in Grand Coulee this Friday or get on a list to get vaccinated against COVID-19 through a state website Grant County Health District made live last week. So far (11 a.m. March 17), about 576 appointments are already set up for the drive-through event in Coulee Medical Center's parking lot from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. for first and second doses of the Pfizer vaccine. The website seems improved from an earlier version and is simple to navigate. It... Full story
The town of Coulee Dam still plans on its traditional, spring cleanup help with yard waste despite the fact that the areawide spring cleanup was altered this year. Grant County officials told the Regional Board of Mayors recently that the traditional waving of fees at the transfer station for spring cleanup is not legal, so the mayors agreed on a reduced fee for dumping yard waste, not free. Coulee Dam has its own spot for dumping yard waste, so will continue with that service for its citizens April 3-10. “Since we do not use the landfill to d...
One silver lining of our time in the covid cloud points to a better way of doing some things, a way that should not be abandoned as we shake off what some may think feels like a kind of societal hibernation: better, more-open public meetings. Yeah, that means continuing online options for attending meetings. Don’t shoot! I said “option.” Nothing can replace the dynamics of meeting in person, but at least two situations cry out for keeping the new skills many have learned over the last year of attending meetings online: local government meeti... Full story
The Bureau of Reclamation has canceled a contract to build its new fire station for the second time, it announced, but construction is expected to restart sometime this spring with a new contractor doing the work, perhaps even while lawsuits among the parties persist, if court records are an indication. The government originally awarded the contract in 2016 to build the 22,000-square-foot fire station, with completion expected in April 2018. Innovative Construction and Design (ICD), a small...
The four-town community has long had a tradition of deciding to use common resources to help in a communal spring cleaning, sprucing the community up and lifting spirits after a long winter. Back in the day, the effort even had a mascot cartoon character named Coulee Clem, who encouraged everyone to get out the brooms and rakes. That community spirit led to the decision to encourage that behavior with a free dump day for yard waste at the Delano Landfill, now a transfer station. That’s not a “gifting of public funds,” as some pencil pushe...
A young Wilbur man died last night in a one-car rollover, the Washington State Patrol reports. Steven A. Cooler, 28, had been eastbound on SR-174 at the junction with SR-21, just north of the golf course, when the black Audi he was driving veered into the oncoming lane. Cooler overcorrected and lost control. The car rolled and he was ejected, the Patrol investigation found. Cooler had not been wearing a seatbelt. Cooler died at the scene. The crash happened at about 12:46 a.m. March...
After a lengthy discussion with the city attorney, the city council decided Wednesday on a new course for changing Coulee Dam’s animal control ordinance. City Attorney Mick Howe met online with the council to discuss a proposed animal control ordinance. The council had intended to incorporate new language on dangerous dogs, but also tried to address more minor, but common, grievances about dogs, such as barking. Howe advised the council that several aspects of a draft ordinance “simply, we cannot adopt” legally. The council discussed just...
The top administrator at the organization that has been providing vaccines at Coulee Medical Center said Feb. 10 that existing appointments for a first-round vaccine against Covid-19 are to be canceled due to lack of supply. “We don’t have enough,” said Theresa Sullivan, chief executive officer of Samaritan Healthcare in Moses Lake. Apparently, the local area is not alone in that assessment. The state Dept. of Health state two days later, that second doses would be emphasized across the state this week in light of low supply. “We are monitor... Full story
It all started over a year ago, when residents started complaining to police about a neighbor they said didn’t keep a dangerous dog contained in the yard. That led to scrutiny of the town’s current ordinance on pets, dangerous animals and more, and a decision it all needed to be brought up to modern standards that mesh with state law. The Coulee Dam City Council is getting close but stopped short of a vote Wednesday when they learned the city attorney wanted a chance to talk with them about it first. That should happen at the next scheduled Zoo...
An Omak teenager has died, and a young man is charged with vehicular homicide and driving under the influence after a one-pickup rollover accident on SR-155 in the middle of the night. The name of the 15-year-old girl who died at the scene of crash was not released. According to the Washington State Patrol report, she was not wearing a seatbelt when the northbound 1998 Ford F-150 swerved on the highway at milepost 69, where the driver overcorrected, then rolled over on the right shoulder shortly after 1 a.m. Saturday morning. The driver,...
An apparent weakness in Washington’s coronavirus response efforts bit the governor in his political behind this week, a weakness that has seemed glaring to us for many months. Perhaps it’s this newspaper’s service area at the ends of four counties that makes it more apparent to us than to some others, but we’ve been battling this state’s clumsy and inconsistent data gathering efforts for a long time. This, in the midst of a fight that depends on good data. Trying to report on the efforts of public health officials, hospitals, health care prov... Full story
A man driving a stolen Grant Transit Authority bus out of Moses Lake was pursued by more than two dozen police on the morning of Feb. 3, with the chase ending in a minor crash. The bus had been reported stolen at about 7 a.m., and Moses Lake Police and other agencies were watching for it when a Grant County Sheriff's deputy spotted it about 30 minutes later. The driver, 62-year-old Richard D. Manley of Grand Coulee, was on highway 28 near Stratford. He turned north on Pinto Ridge Road. Lake Roos...
An Omak teenager has died, and a young man is charged with multiple related crimes after a one-pickup rollover on SR-155 in the middle of the night. The name of the 15-year-old girl who died at the scene of crash was not released. According to the Washington State Patrol report, she was not wearing a seatbelt when the northbound 1998 Ford F-150 swerved on the highway at milepost 69, where the driver overcorrected, then rolled over on the right shoulder shortly after 1 a.m. Saturday morning. The driver, Martin T. Stanley, 20, of Omak, is facing...
The top administrator at the organization that has been providing vaccines at Coulee Medical Center said Wednesday that existing appointments for a first-round vaccine against Covid-19 are to be canceled due to lack of supply. "We don't have enough," said Theresa Sullivan, chief executive officer of Samaritan Healthcare in Moses Lake. She told county leaders on a scheduled Zoom call this morning that nearly 2,100 appointments for the first vaccine must be canceled in order to make sure they... Full story
Coulee Dam Federal Credit Union is seeking approval of regulators to merge with Spokane-based STCU, a joining that would rebrand the local institution but retain jobs and offer more services, both credit unions say. The move, approved by both institutions' boards of directors in December, will require the approval of state and federal regulators - and a majority of CDFCU's members. It's a change following dominant industry patterns, as smaller banks and credit unions find it increasingly challen...