'Daily Astorian' Still Pushing Paper Out Despite Storm Setbacks

By: Meg Campbell Employees at The Daily Astorian, Astoria, Oregon, are still jumping through a lot of soggy hoops to get the paper out in a city still under water and without power after a major storm battered the Pacific Northwest earlier this week, bringing flooding rains and wind gusts variously reported as high as 100 and 120 mph.

Things are a little easier now that phone service has been restored, more roads are open and a third electric generator is online, but a truck carrying Astorian files on a disk and preprints is still traveling an hour each morning across the Columbia River to Longview, Wash., where the newspaper has been printed and assembled at The Daily News.

Serving northwesternmost Oregon's Clatsop County, the Astorian is owned by East Oregonian Publishing Co. The Daily News is a Lee Enterprises newspaper.

Back on Monday, the afternoon Astorian was unable to print after torrential rains and high winds on Sunday had left the town without power or telephone service and with unpassable roads. "We couldn't leave town, and had no power to print," says Publisher Stephen Forrester. "It's the first time since 1922 that we haven't printed a paper."

The paper fired up two gas generators to restore power to the building, although the newsroom and ad operations had to take turns using their computer systems. The press, however, could not run with generators, and the disaster plan contingency of taking files to a paper in Salem or Longview was impossible owing to road closures, Forrester says.

The online edition kept publishing, however, as reporters used cell phones to dictate stories to colleagues at sister-paper the East Oregonian, in Pendleton. The generators kept the phones recharged.

On Tuesday, a truck was able to make it to Longview with the files and inserts, but it didn't make it back to Astoria with the printed copies until 8:30 that evening. "By then, the city was completely dark," Forrester says, making it too dangerous to send out the carriers. However, he adds, readers were "lined up" at newsstands waiting for the paper.

Forrester noted another wrinkle: Longview's Daily News has a smaller web size than the Daily Astorian, so production people had to reformat pages to print on the Longview press.

On the same day, the paper's Web editor traveled to Longview, where there was phone service. Phone service was restored in Astoria Wednesday afternoon, and the Web editor returned Thursday morning with a third generator in tow. Now, says Forrester, employees no longer have to work in shifts.

Yesterday, the Longview press also had to make room for the Daily Astorian's weekly paper, the Chinook Observer. Forrester says the paper will continue to print up in Longview until the power is back, which he thinks could still be a few days away.

"We have a disaster manual that's 25 pages long, and we knew the storm was coming as of last Friday," Forrester explains. "It was a typhoon in the Pacific, and we knew it would hit. So on Friday we had a planning session, and we got gas for the generators." However, he adds, "we had not reckoned that we wouldn't be able to get out of here on Monday."