In Our View: Cheers & Jeers

Cheers: To the Seattle Sounders. OK, OK, plenty of readers won’t feel cheerful about the Sounders winning the championship in Major League Soccer; this is, after all, Portland Timbers country. But congratulations are due to the Sounders for last week’s victory in a penalty-kick shootout.

We could poke fun at a sport in which a team wins a title despite having no shots on goal during 120 minutes of scoreless play, but that would be unsporting of us. Instead, we shall revel in the intense rivalry that exists between the Sounders and the Timbers — the same Timbers that won the league championship in 2015. Seattle star Clint Dempsey used an expletive to poke fun at Portland during the Sounders’ celebration, echoing a slur issued a year before by one of the Timbers toward Seattle. With both cities owning recent championships, the rivalry is certain to intensify, and that only makes it all the more fun.

Jeers: To a nightmarish commute. Wednesday’s snowstorm in the Vancouver-Portland area was significant by the standards of the Northwest, bringing traffic to a standstill throughout the region. There were plenty of tales about 15-minute commutes taking two hours, or one-hour commutes taking seven. In Beaverton, Ore., hundreds of students were still waiting for school buses at 8 p.m.

We are happy for those who made it home safely, but the situation pointed out the need for a little more common sense on the part of commuters and local governments. It is easy to ignore weather forecasts because, well, sometimes they are wrong; but they often are correct, and we all had plenty of warning prior to this storm. And officials, particularly in Portland, have too few contingency plans for assisting drivers and addressing icy conditions when things get tough.

Cheers: To Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler. President Obama this week signed into law a measure introduced by Herrera Beutler, R-Camas. The new law, dubbed the Safe Medications for Moms and Babies Act, aims to increase protections for pregnant or nursing women who are taking medication.

Herrera Beutler long has made issues relating to mothers and children a priority of her work in Congress. Upon Obama’s signing of the bill, she said, “A mother shouldn’t have to choose between taking medication with an unknown effect on her and her child, or not taking it at all.”

Jeers: To toxic armories. An investigation by The Oregonian recently found alarming levels of lead at National Guard armories, where dust from shooting ranges permeates entire facilities. The report said the U.S. Department of Defense and state National Guard officials were alerted to the danger decades ago, but little had been done to mitigate it.

Armories are public places that often host family gatherings, placing civilians in danger from the poisonous lead. In the report, information was unavailable for an armory in Camas or the Vancouver Barracks, but several Washington facilities were shown to contain toxic levels of lead. The National Guard has halted all public events at the armories, but the situation has endangered thousands for several decades.

Cheers: To quick thinking. When a fire erupted in a Ridgefield barn, Garrett Elmer of North Fork Landscaping went into action. Elmer, who was next door spraying a slurry of seeds, water and mulch on a project, pulled his truck up to the barn and started spraying.

The action helped knock down the flames and save the barn. “It’s the darnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Tim Dawdy of Clark County Fire & Rescue.