This has been a good year for disasters: drought, floods, snow, oil leaks, you name it. Anyone who hasn’t had a disaster this year is certainly entitled to some kind of award.

Nearly every day we see the President flying around the country looking at disasters. Then he comes on the news and explains how he’s going to help everyone affected by this unprecedented event. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more devoted person.

I’m in favor of disaster relief, of course, but I think the federal government has gotten a little carried away with the whole thing.
I remember when Mount St. Helens blew her top 30 years ago. I was a county extension agent about 100 miles from St. Helens, and the mountain report soon became the news of the day. The bigwigs in Washington, D.C., would call up Washington State University and ask, “What’s the mountain doing today?”

The university guys would say, “It looks pretty calm now, but we know it could go off again at any time. We’re just taking it day by day.”

Readers may recall that Mount St. Helens dropped several inches of volcanic ash about 200 miles east. Then she spewed small amounts for months after the initial eruption. These little burps of ash would drift north, south, east or west, depending upon the wind of the day.

One evening I got a call from a university administrator. “We just heard that Mount St. Helens erupted again,” he said. “How does it look in your area? I was wondering, is there anything we should do?”

This hit me crosswise for some reason. The mountain is erupting. What should Washington State University and cooperative extension do? All I could think of was, “Unless we’ve got an awfully big cork, I can’t see us doing much of anything.”

Soon after that I read someone found a county in the state of Washington that didn’t have a disaster that year. Wahkiakum County, in the southwestern corner of the state, was forced to refuse federal relief because they couldn’t find a disaster.
Folks were so startled they didn’t know what to do. Every other county in Washington was getting some kind of relief for natural disasters.

Wahkiakum County could still qualify, though. I learned that wildlife agents raided the tavern in Skamokawa (Wahkiakum County) to rescue an owl. It seems researchers in Oregon tagged a few spotted owls and were following them around with a radio antennae when one of the little rascals stopped beeping.

The researchers finally crossed the Columbia River and picked up the owl’s signal at the tavern in Skamokawa. Suspecting the worst disaster (spotted hot wings), law enforcement agents swooped down on the tavern.

They found an electronic dart board sounding just like an owl, with a radio transmitter on its back.

Does that qualify as a disaster? It did for a wildlife agent in Skamokawa.

Readers with questions or comments for Roger Pond may write to him in care of this publication.