Oregon Senator Ron Wyden will hold a town hall next week in The Dalles.  Wyden will be at the Stan and Jean Adams Veterans Community Center in the Oregon Veterans Home in The Dalles next Friday, October 13 at 5 p.m.  Wyden will also hold town halls next week in Malheur, Baker, and Union counties.  It will be the second town hall in Wasco County for Wyden this year.  The four scheduled in the state next week will move the number of town halls he has held in Oregon this year to 73.

Cooler temperatures and increased precipitation have led the Oregon Department of Forestry to end its regulated closure in the Central Oregon District as of Tuesday.  Fire season is still in effect for the district, restricting the use of tracer ammunition and exploding targets as well as other forestry activities.  Campfires are allowed on ODF protected lands in central Oregon, however open burning in The Dalles Unit requires a burn permit.  The Industrial Fire Precaution Level (IFPL) for Hood River and Wasco counties has been reduced to Level 1.  Fire season restrictions are still in place in for the district, including requirements for hand tools, fire watch, equipment standards, and water supply.  Smoking is not allowed while working or traveling in an operation area.

The History Museum of Hood River County has opened a new called “Sharing History, Building Community:  the Latino Experience in Hood River County.”  The museum’s Lynn Orr says the exhibition was designed through a narrative developed by a Latino advisory committee, starting with the path of Hispanic explorations in the 16th to 18th centuries and the various nations Oregon’s Latino community comes from.  The traditional culture is also included in the exhibit.  The exhibit will be on display until the end of the year at the museum in Hood River’s Port Marina Park.  It is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

The Step It Up! Students walk-to-school program for this year will get underway in The Dalles on Wednesday.  The program run by the North Central Public Health District and Wasco County Medical Corps aims to encourage local students, chaperones, and others to incorporate walking as a part of a healthy lifestyle.  The first walk-to-school day for this year will be held in conjunction with National Walk to School Day on Wednesday, and then will take place the first Wednesday of the month throughout the school year.  Chaperones and students gather at the designated gathering locations at 7:15 and the walk to school begins at 7:25 a.m.  Starting locations include Juanita’s Market at 2865 West 7th for Chenowith Elementary School…the parking lot on the corner of West 10th and Trevitt for Colonel Wright Elementary and St. Mary’s Academy….with another Colonel Wright meeting spot at the corner of West 14th and Lincoln…and the parking lot of Gateway Presbyterian Church at 1111 Dry Hollow Road for Dry Hollow Elementary School.

Boys Soccer North Clackamas Christian 5, Horizon Christian 0   Girls Water Polo Hood River Valley 14, Reynolds 4

Firefighters continued to work on fire suppression repair around large parts of the Eagle Creek Fire on Sunday and will likely continue for several more days.   Fire Management Office Darren Kennedy calls it the largest fire suppression repair project in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area since it was established in 1986.  A Burned Area Emergency Response Team assigned to the fire finalized a Soil Burn Severity map.  They identified 15% of the fire area as having high burn severity and 30% with moderate burn severity, with the remaining 55% at low or very low burn severity.  High burn severity is characterized by the burning of all or nearly all of the ground cover and surface organic matter, including fine roots.  Moderate burn severity has consumption of up to 80% of the ground cover.  In areas with low burn severity, much of the organic matter on the surface is not fully burned and roots are generally intact.  The fire containment level remains at 46%, and the acreage at 48,831.

North Wasco County School District 21 is continuing work toward putting together a bond measure to put before voters in the November 2018 election.  D-21 Superintendent Candy Armstrong says the public relations firm hired to do public outreach and education on the district’s building needs will spend two days this month visiting D-21’s facilities.  Armstrong says the district will start in January to take facilities planning done last year one step further, moving into strategies and design for the first proposed new building, probably a high school.  Armstrong confirms the target date to send a bond proposal to the ballot remains November of next year.

The Port of Hood River will be conducting emergency repairs due to vandalism of the control room and north tower of the Hood River/White Salmon Interstate Bridge in late September.  The vandalism included graffiti, cut wires, knobs, and destruction of a navigation light.  Port Executive Director Michael McElwee says it appears the repairs will be relatively easy, but it will lead to increased bridge closure periods during October.  Next Monday and Tuesday the bridge lift span will be fully tested, leading to closures of up to one hour in duration at multiple times during the day and night, and on October 12 there will be a full closure from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. for strain gage testing on the liftspan.  Then previously planned truss and floorbeam repair work will take place from October 11th to the 25th, which will require intermittent single lane closures of the bridge for up to two weeks.

The rescheduled Hops Fest will be this Saturday in downtown Hood River.  It had been planned for September 23, but the Hood River County Chamber of Commerce decided to push it back in the wake of the Eagle Creek Fire.  Chamber events director Ashley Huckaby May says the move will actually increase the number of breweries at Hops Fest, as more breweries had completed their batches of hop beer.  Hops Fest will be open from noon to 8 p.m. Saturday in the parking lot at 5th and Columbia in downtown Hood River.  Tickets are available online at hoodriver.org.  Tickets for the previous festival date of September 23 will be honored.

There were a pair of power outages on Saturday in western Klickitat County.  Klickitat PUD says the first occurred in the morning when the Bonneville Power Administration had a line fault on the transmission line from Bonneville Dam to their Bald Mountain substation just south of Husum.  That transmission line feeds the Bingen, White Salmon, Snowden, Husum, Trout Lake and Glenwood areas.  BPA operators took action and restored power in about 30 minutes.  Then on Saturday night, Skamania PUD requested that BPA take an outage on the same transmission line between Bonneville Dam and Bald Mountain substation because Skamania PUD had a switch that was arcing at the North Bonneville Annex, which is the first tap off the line.  That led to a second outage for that line lasting for about two hours.