The Choice of Evils: Portland Oregon’s Sacrifice Zone
Wtf is Zenith, the CEI Hub and the Cascadia Subduction Zone — and why should Portlander’s care about any of it?
If you enter Portland’s city center from the Broadway Bridge, you’ll notice that Forest Park is the backdrop for the northwest corner of the city, where Pearl District condos tower in apparent competition over one other as the Willamette River rolls toward the Columbia in the foreground. Reaching across more than 5,000 acres of wildland, it is the largest protected natural area within city limits in the entire United States. Its eastern border runs nearly 8 miles long — from the southern point at Lower Macleay Field, the most common trailhead, it runs north to the southern tip of Sauvie Island, and covers an area a mile deep to the west. According to Portland Parks and Recreation, the bureau responsible for managing the reserve, the park boasts over 100 species of birds and more than 50 different mammals. Forest Park is an integral part of the wildlife corridor that connects the Portland Metropolitan area to the Coast Range.
The park disappears once you lower into the city, obstructed by countless commercial buildings, half-empty condos, brick-and-mortar retail spaces and cafés. Workers and students exit busses and trains and crisscross streets around tent cities that bourgeon in times of crisis. On a recent chilly winter morning, I made a cup of coffee, filled a water bottle, and headed through town to get into the quiet of Forest Park at the Lower Macleay Trailhead.
Lower Macleay Field interfaces with a neighborhood of large, expensive homes that were built on the outer edge of what is now Portland’s busy shopping district, known colloquially as “Northwest 23rd.” At the entrance to the park, a blanket of grass welcomes visitors, stretching wide with open arms as if to hug them into a chest of Douglas Firs. The main trail makes for an easy hike along Balch Creek, elevates toward the peaceful Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary and the stunning view of the city from Pittock Mansion on the one side, and intersects on the other with the Wildwood Trail. Like sponges at your feet, above and beyond, below and behind you, yellow mustard, milk chocolate, and pumpkin-colored leaves flank the trail that leads up a steady incline into the winter woods. A few inches above the ground, lime-green moss hangs off the banks of the trail, holding the earth in place while the earth returns the favor. The infamous “Witch’s Castle,” covered in moss and graffiti, marks the switchback to Wildwood — which runs 30-miles up the Tualatin Mountains through Forest Park.
Here, the pervasive greenery of the trees, shrubs, and small plants create an oasis away from the pavement, and sounds from birds, insects and the creek offer a whole-note rest from the beating metropolitan noise. Clichés abound here because they are true: Forest Park is a breath of fresh air, meditative, peaceful, a gift. Coffee and water in hand on a crisp morning, I parked my car and approached the trailhead in anticipation of the calm this place has to offer.
Temporarily closed for construction. I suppose it could be worse.
Roughly 1,300 feet from Forest Park, Portland’s Critical Energy Infrastructure Hub (CEI Hub) — or depending on who you talk to, the “Industrial Sanctuary,” or “Sacrifice Zone” — runs six miles parallel to the park and along the Willamette River. The CEI Hub is responsible for holding and transporting 90% of fuels used in the northwest region, including jet fuel used by Portland International Airport. One of the central infrastructure businesses there is Zenith Energy, a company that transports oil through Portland by train from the Bakken oil region in Montana, North Dakota, and Southern Canada. Zenith stores the oil in the former asphalt refinery at the hub, then distributes it primarily to California, Washington, and Alaska.
I recently drove up Germantown Road to hike Forest Park with my friend and geology-enthusiast, Ryan Lynch. I wanted to get Ryan’s perspective on how the rupture of the Cascadia Subduction Zone is expected to affect the region if and when it happens.
“All of this here has, time and time again been subjected to mega-thrust earthquakes, and when Portland was built, there really wasn’t any knowledge that these things had occurred,” he told me. He held a camper cup of coffee and wore an olive-green beanie over his long dark hair. His beard grew a bit of gray that complimented his light, thick-rimmed glasses. A hip black front-pack hung across the chest of his light, boysenberry-blue rain jacket. We hiked along the trail and talked about what is at stake when “The Big One” finally hits.
Some 140 miles from Forest Park, a 600-mile fault line called the Cascadia Subduction Zone quietly builds pressure beneath the ocean floor. The massive fault line sits 70 to 100 miles off of the Pacific Coastline of Northern California, and stretches to its northernmost point in the waters off of British Columbia.
The Oregon Office of Emergency Management recommends preparing for at least two weeks’ worth of food, water, and critical supplies in the instance of a megathrust earthquake and subsequent tsunami off the Pacific Coast. Everyone’s needs are different, but experts recommend knowing what you need to do 2 hours, 2 days, and 2 weeks after a natural disaster, and keeping a kit in your car, house, and at work.
It is also important to develop a plan to reconvene with family in the instance where members are separated from one another during an earthquake. A friend or relative who lives out of state can serve as a “family contact,” so that any party can call them to relay information back to all parties attempting to navigate the disaster.
On January 26 of the year 1700, a giant tsunami crashed without a harbinger onto the shores of Japan. Generally speaking, tsunamis most often occur as a result of an earthquake. Shaking tectonic plates (the earthquake) aggravate and displace the sea floor — the intense shaking of the earthquake itself moves large amounts of sea floor, which then displaces a similarly large volume of water. Waves then travel outward from that displaced sea floor in all directions (the tsunami), and as they approach the shore, they lose speed but gain in height as the waves behind begin to catch up.
Across the ocean from Japan in 1700, Indigenous people living in what is now known as the Pacific Northwest of the United States, passed down stories to younger generations through oral history. Chinook, Clatsop, Tillamook, Siletz, Yaquina, Alsea, Suislaw, Lower Umpqua, Hanis and Miluk Coos, Tututni, and Chetco tribes had lived along the coastline for thousands of years prior to the arrival of white settlers. Oregon carries a heavy colonial history with regard to these Indigenous lands. Before settlers arrived in the area, various dialects of more than 14 families of languages were spoken amongst the tribes. While there was no written language, a story is commonly told by elders of the Hoh Tribe — the Indigenous people whose land rests near the northern tip of the Cascadia Subduction Zone — of a thunderbird who lives in a glacier at the headwaters of the Olympic Mountains that span the northwest, and a whale who lives in the Pacific Ocean. When the thunderbird comes out from the mountain, thunder, and lightning alert the tribe to what is coming. As the thunderbird gets to the water, he flaps his wings, which causes the water to come up, resulting in a tsunami. The faster the thunderbird dives in and lifts his wings, and the closer he is to the land, the bigger the wave will be.
Once they were compared with Japanese historical records, these Indigenous oral histories brought new understanding for scientists in the late 1990’s with regard to the destructive tsunami that had occurred in Japan, and the earthquake across the Pacific that had created the waves. After nearly 300 years, the orphan’s parent had been found.
“Certainly, when all those terminals and all the gasworks and everything were being built, there was no consideration for what the local geology was. What is also of concern is, what is it built on? So, it’s right next to a river? A lot of times next to a river, you’re building on river deposits.”
“It’s soft, right?” I said.
“It’s soft, and that stuff turns into, you know, it basically turns into a liquid,” Ryan said. “They call it liquefaction. Let’s say, you put sand on speaker. If you put sand on a speaker, it ripples, it waves, it acts like a liquid. It will actually start moving the ground, and start moving as liquid moves, with waves propagating through it. So, essentially it liquefies the land, and it acts like — I wouldn’t say the word quicksand, but it’s no longer solid.”
Ryan and I continued up the Wildwood Trail, some couple of thousand feet from where the CEI Hub sits at the edge of the Willamette River. According to Oregon Public Broadcasting, Zenith has 84 above-ground tanks that hold an estimated 1.5 million barrels (63 million gallons) of oil. Many of these tanks were built over 100 years ago, and none of them have been built within the last 30.
“I don’t know what this hillside is made out of, right?” Ryan said. “I’m assuming it’s the coastal mélange, which is not the spice [a reference to Frank Herbert’s Dune], but it’s kind of the coastal mélange; metamorphic rocks, probably some sedimentary, maybe some pillow lavas, some basalt — that was kind of dredged up out of the various trenches that propagated along the west coast throughout history, the latest one being the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Other than the compression and the volcanics, you don’t have a physical trench out there, where a lot of subduction zones, there’s a trench that is an indicator you have something happening at depth.”
“So, there’s no way to gain anything off of that either; to gain any understanding from it?” I said.
“You don’t have any earthquakes; you don’t have a trench. I think that savvy geologists are gonna know it’s a is a subduction zone anyway, it’s probably going to be subjected to something. But it took a while to also find all the evidence for all the quakes too — because it happened in 1700.”
“You can only put so many things together, right?” I said.
“Well, it’s not like we did the Native Americans and Indigenous peoples a solid when we moved into the area. There might be a story told about it, but there probably wasn’t even a cultural awareness that these things had happened — nobody would have thought it — Indigenous or otherwise.”
I asked Ryan about the steps we could take to mitigate harm, knowing what we know now.
“We are usually not a precautionary people; we’re typically reactionary,” he said. “So, Portland, and arguably most of the Northwest, is gonna be absolutely toast. You know, plenty of people are raising the alarm about it. I think if we didn’t already have a number of crises already to attend to, you might be hearing more about it. We’re just hoping it doesn’t happen on our watch.”
“It’s going to happen on someone’s watch.”
“It is, and it’s going to be like, ‘we didn’t see this coming’ or — ? The train was coming; it was just a really fucking slow train.”
According to City of Portland records, on December 15, 1991, the city granted a franchise permit to oil giant Chevron to “construct, operate, and maintain pipeline facility under city streets for a period of thirteen years.” The summary of the ordinance and extensions thereafter show a small web of sales and acquisitions by various corporate veils over the course of the next 27 years, leading to the most recent transfer to the current franchise owner. On November 21, 2018, four-fifths of Portland City Council consented to the transfer a franchise called LCP Oregon Holdings to a Houston-based fossil fuel company, Zenith Energy, who had been operating the terminals since 2014. Zenith ultimately acquired all assets from LCP, including the pipeline system that runs underneath NW Front and Doane Avenues, sandwiched between the Willamette River and Forest Park. Over the course of the next 3 years, Zenith attempted to acquire the necessary city and state permits to expand their pipelines, but due to pressure from Portland activists, the city was not eager to rubber stamp their requests.
On Earth Day in April of 2019, activists from the Extinction Rebellion (XR) in Portland planted a small garden on the railroad tracks at Zenith Energy, then continued their demonstration by sitting on the tracks to demand immediate climate action from Portland leadership. Seven people were arrested, including a 61-year-old, retired public school teacher, Jan Zuckerman. She is one of the founders of Sunnyside Environmental Middle School, now a K-8 school in southeast Portland. Zuckerman tells me she first got her start in climate activism around 1981, and became more active at the time the school was founded in 1994.
“At the middle school we did a lot of a lot of service learning,” she says. “You learn about the subject and then you do something about it. That’s the way it was with a lot of the curriculum; we had the year of the river, the mountain, the year of the forest.”
Zuckerman is as humble as she is knowledgeable. A self-proclaimed “lifelong learner,” she is always willing to listen to different perspectives and learn from them before speaking her piece, which is essential within a movement mostly led by young people with diverse backgrounds. She often speaks with a twinge of sarcastic incredulity, and endearing bits of fury and disgust come out whenever she attempts to paraphrase arguments made by fossil fuel companies and lawmakers.
“The whole industrial hub there has been declared a sanctuary, meaning that it is reserved or protected for industry. The idea that we just keep eating more land for industry — polluting industry — is just ridiculous,” she says. “We know there’s an impending earthquake, and all of this industry just sits right on the Portland Hills fault line, which is — I mean, we’ve just built right on this fault line in an infill. It’s all liquefaction. It’s right near Forest Park. There are folks who live up there, too. And they say if something happens, ‘run towards the river.’ Run towards the river? It’s just the most ridiculous things they’ve been told.”
One week after their first action at Zenith, activists showed up again, and another fourteen people were arrested for “criminal trespass,” including Zuckerman for a second time. Again, they wanted to call on local leaders to do something about fossil fuels — the industry most responsible for contributing to global climate change — operating right in their own back yard. In addition to the more than 30 related actions since, that protest drew attention to the dangers of a fossil fuel terminal, built on a riverbank at the edge of a metropolitan area of 2.5 million people, all within reach of one of the largest potential natural disasters that could reasonably span some 140 miles from the Pacific Coast to Interstate 5.
The garden direct action at Zenith has far-reaching implications for climate protestor’s legal defense if they are arrested while taking a stand against fossil fuel companies. After they were arrested, Jan and four of her comrades went to trial, where they argued that their decision to block the oil trains was “by reason of necessity.” In other words, theirs was a choice between two evils; they simply chose the lesser of the two.
(ORS 161.200)
Choice of Evils
(1) Unless inconsistent with other provisions of chapter 743, Oregon Laws 1971, defining justifiable use of physical force, or with some other provision of law, conduct which would otherwise constitute an offense is justifiable and not criminal when:
(a) That conduct is necessary as an emergency measure to avoid an imminent public or private injury; and
(b) the urgency of avoiding the injury clearly outweighs the desirability of avoiding the injury sought to be prevented”
“Basically, trespassing was a lesser evil than the harm that they were bringing. It was necessary for us to do this, to protect — you know, because there was harm being done,” Zuckerman says.
The case ended with a hung jury, with five jurors voting to acquit and one to convict. While an acquittal would have been ideal, having their charges dismissed based on the “choice of evil” defense was a massive victory for the climate movement moving forward.
“It was the first time in the state of Oregon, with a jury trial, where that was able to be argued, which is a huge win,” Zuckerman tells me.
Climate action depends on piling up small victories like the case won by XR activists in their protest against Zenith. It is always an uphill battle, because oil companies enjoy loose regulations in the first place, reporting requirements are nearly non-existent, and ultimately, enforcement of any regulations are often toothless anyway.
Melanie Plaut, a local climate activist with 350PDX told me that these oil companies have to do some reporting to emergency responders in the state of Oregon, but that information is not generally available to the public.
“We really have no helpful reporting either from the state of Washington or the State of Oregon on the oil that’s coming by rail,” she says. “We can follow the ships to some degree, we know which ships come to that Chevron dock, we don’t really know for sure what’s in them.”
In 2019, after the XR garden action, Plaut and activists with 350.org, Columbia River Keeper, and others started monitoring oil by rail trains in at the CEI Hub in order to crowdsource information on how Zenith’s operation works and what type of fuel the trains were transporting. Trainspotting, for oil rigs. They started by doing routine monitoring, once a week, but it was difficult to parse out since each event was just a single snapshot of the full operation.
In September of that year, they decided to hold a “vigil” outside of Zenith so they could document railcars and get a better idea of how the railyard operates over a longer stretch. Activists took shifts, and stayed a total of 60 straight hours. It was not an illegal action, because they did not cross over the fence that Zenith had erected in response to the garden.
“The only information we have is from directly looking at the rail yards. We can look at the trains at the Zenith site, and we can see what placards they’re carrying — whether they’re carrying the 1267 and the inhalation hazard placard, which would indicate tar sands, or just 1267 alone, which would indicate the lighter crude oil from the Bakken region.”
I asked Melanie what her biggest fear is as oil trains continue to make their way through the city. Her response was similar to Jan Zuckerman’s; a familiar refrain among of climate justice activists who are working collectively to integrate truth about the region’s history and how that history converges with current dangers.
“I would say that the biggest danger is to the communities that the oil trains come through,” she says. “Because if the oil trains derail, burst into flames or release their toxic fumes, they will directly impact those communities, which tend to be lower income, frontline communities.”
The fear that marginalized people will bear the brunt of business choices is rooted in the region’s history. Predating its founding in 1859 and beyond, Oregon systemically or forcibly displaced not only Indigenous people, but later worked to expel Chinese and Japanese immigrants as well. In the early 20th century, Guild’s Lake was nestled between the Willamette River and what is now Forest Park — the same location that now hosts Portland’s CEI Hub. The surrounding 220-acre area was home to a Chinese immigrant community who farmed the nearby land and worked the sawmills. By 1910, Guild’s Lake was filled in to make room for industry, which displaced the Chinese people whose farms depended on both the land and the lake.
Between 1917 and 1923, four separate “alien land bills” were introduced in the Oregon legislature with the intention of prohibiting land ownership and leasing by Japanese immigrants throughout the state. While these bills ultimately failed, their major endorsers — the Ku Klux Klan, the Oregon American Legion, and the Anti-Asiatic Association — did not go down without a fight. The 1923 “Alien Business Restriction” and “Alien Land” laws hamstrung immigrant businesses, and in 1925 a violent mob of local whites drove Japanese sawmill laborers out of the coastal town of Toledo. Through explicit and implicit acts and omissions, local and federal policies have consistently and most acutely affected lower income, frontline communities.
In October 2019, the City of Portland denied Zenith’s plan renovate and transport other fossil fuel products through the pipeline at Front Ave. The oil company continued to operate and transport fossil fuels, while simultaneously threatening the City of Portland with a costly legal battle. On August 27, 2021, however, the city dealt a major blow by denying Zenith their land-use compatibility request, and less than a week later Oregon Department of Environmental Quality voted to deny the renewal of their air quality permit. As expected, Zenith sued the city. During oral arguments on November 16, 2021, the Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA) asked Zenith’s attorneys from Stole Rives to which part of the permit denial they objected.
“We disagree with every single one of the city’s conclusions,” the attorney replied.
On February 3, 2022, the Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA) ruled in favor of the City of Portland’s denial of the permit, provided that the city can present additional evidence that approving it would interfere with Portland’s environmental goals. From the Willamette River to Forest Park, the Pacific Ocean and the people of all types who find a connection to the nature in between, averting a preventable catastrophe at any cost is undoubtedly the highest environmental priority of all.
