Sonnenblick-Eichner Co. has arranged a $58 million sale and $40.6 million of acquisition financing and leasehold interests in the Surfsand Resort, a beachfront resort in Cannon Beach.

The resort was purchased by Vancouver, Washington-based Vesta Hospitality.

The new ownership is planning a $9 million renovation that will enhance the resort and its amenities.

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When it comes to design concepts for structures to handle tsunami-type emergencies, Cannon Beach city officials have pretty much seen the gamut.

This past fall, city councilors were considering as many as eight different alternatives. The front-runner was a new, $4.5 million city hall that would double as a tsunami evacuation building.

The 10,000-square-foot, two-story reinforced concrete structure would be elevated on pretensioned concrete pilings. During a tsunami, as many as 1,500 people would be able to wait out high waves inside the building.

The idea petered out.

“That (idea) is a very difficult one for people to accept,” Cannon Beach Councilman Sam Steidel said. “For the most part, they just don’t trust it.”

Steidel said that any city project to mitigate tsunami danger would need to be financed by a locally supported bond measure, so public buy-in is essential. With support for the city hall idea waning, Steidel said the city is now targeting construction of a new evacuation bridge across Ecola Creek.

The existing bridge represents the only viable escape route for downtown residents to reach safer, higher ground in the event of a tsunami. However, a one-two punch of an earthquake and a tsunami would likely cause the bridge to collapse.

Kevin Boyle, project coordinator for , the company hired to conduct a feasibility study, said that in addition to being founded on shallow wood pilings, the existing bridge is held together by weak, steel pins that connect the concrete slab to its foundation.

“The concern is if they have a big earthquake … those could potentially rip the pile cap apart and cause the bridge to collapse into the creek,” Boyle said. “There is just a very high probability of liquefaction of the soils in that area too.”

It has happened before. The 1964 Alaska earthquake sent a tsunami rippling up Ecola Creek, destroying the bridge and causing $250,000 in damage, according to OBEC’s report.

Part of the solution to ensure that doesn’t happen again, Boyle said, is to conduct a full geo-analysis of the soils and drive concrete pilings to necessary depths. But the city first needs to choose from among seven options, which range in scope from a $796,000 floating pedestrian bridge to a $4.76 million replacement bridge.

The first option, which Boyle said was requested by the city, is a floating timber pontoon bridge with a 6-foot-wide deck. That bridge would withstand a large earthquake, but it would not resist a tsunami wave. Boyle said it had another key drawback too.

“For a 6-foot wide bridge, if there’s a panic situation you really create a lot of chaos trying to get people across that in one way,” he said. “You just can’t pass that many people.”

The second option, a 6-foot-wide fixed timber bridge, faces the same issues.

Other options include constructing a 12-foot-wide, fixed, pre-stressed concrete pedestrian bridge; replacing half of the existing bridge with a concrete section; and building a fixed timber suspension bridge.

While some of those options have more merit than others, all share the same hurdle.

“All of those have fairly significant costs associated with them for a small community,” Boyle said. “Cannon Beach is not a community that necessarily has a lot of money.”

The feasibility study alone cost approximately $10,000.

One potentially affordable concept is for a pyramid-shaped berm near the city center. Yumei Wang, a geotechnical engineer at the , said it would cost between $1 million and $1.5 million.

Wang said the berm represents the second draft of a conceptual platform evacuation structure (like a multistory carport for people). It would essentially be a large, sloped dirt mound that people could run up to escape rising waters.

Steidel said City Council had not reviewed that idea yet.

One thing the city is pushing forward though, Steidel said, is creation of stores of food and water around town that people can access in the event of an emergency.

“If all the roads are down and the Willamette Valley is hit hard, we’re not going to see people for quite a while and so we’ll be dependent upon ourselves,” he said.

But Cannon Beach residents also have in their hands the opportunity to choose an evacuation measure.

“One of the things that is difficult about this is there are many ways to skin a cat and to have the community decide on one is difficult,” Wang said.

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If location, location, location is the golden rule of real estate, Cannon Beach Elementary School is in trouble.

The school, like much of Cannon Beach, lies in a tsunami inundation zone expected to be hit sometime within the next 200 years. Indeed, striking along the Cascadia Subduction Zone – 50 miles off the Oregon coast – within the next 50 years.

If that were to happen, experts say the school would collapse.

A 200-year spread makes planning for capital construction expenditures difficult, especially in such a lean economy. But Seaside School District Superintendent Douglas Dougherty is working on a plan that he feels is essential to ensure safety for the district’s students.

“I am optimistic that the (Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development) will understand not only the potential severity that this is something that is inevitable, but that also, with the new research that is coming out, that we need to move our schools as soon as possible,” he said.

Dougherty’s plan is to move four of the district’s five schools – Cannon Beach Elementary, Gearhart Elementary, Broadway Middle and Seaside High – onto a 50-acre campus southeast of the city of Seaside. Dougherty is working with , the property owner, to identify a price tag for the land.

Four of the district’s schools were listed on a 2007 that identified schools at risk of being destroyed by a tsunami. Cannon Beach Elementary was at the top of the list.

“What would happen (during an earthquake) is, as it’s shaking, that building would tend to twist because there’s one wall that’s really weak compared to the other three walls, and it would tend to rack and twist around on itself,” said Jay Raskin, an architect for and a former Cannon Beach mayor. “And there’s nothing really preventing that from happening.”

About two months ago, city officials contracted Raskin and structural engineer Andy Stricker to assess the structural integrity of the school. Raskin said the old, wood-framed classrooms – built before the 1990s, when seismic building codes were adopted – as well as a large, concrete canopy and a tall, brick chimney at the school all would collapse in a seismic event.

That prompted a discussion about whether the district should close the school and move its approximately 80 students to Seaside Heights Elementary nearby.

On Tuesday, Cannon Beach City Council was set to vote on a referendum recommending the school’s closure to the district’s school board, but community members concerned about losing their longtime school persuaded the council to postpone the vote.

“Obviously there was a lot of interest and a lot of discussion needed,” councilor Sam Steidel said.

Steidel said the Cannon Beach Elementary issue was just a small piece of the pie in terms of the measures the city is considering to prepare for an earthquake and tsunami. So far the council has entertained the idea of building vertical evacuation structures, rebuilding the city hall as a tsunami shelter, and constructing a new evacuation bridge across Ecola Creek. Steidel said the council has not yet decided on any one way forward.

Yumei Wang, a geotechnical engineer at the , has been working on earthquake preparedness issues for the state for the past 18 years. She thinks Cannon Beach residents should take a lesson from the earthquake and tsunami that ravaged Japan last year.

“What happened in Japan is the threat that we have here – a very powerful and destructive tsunami in low-lying areas along the coast,” she said.

Wang visited Japan shortly after the tsunami to assess the damage. She said she came across one site in particular that reminded her of Cannon Beach Elementary. It was a school about 2 kilometers upriver in which 70 percent of students and teachers were killed.

“There were little stuffed animals and candy, like little pieces of starburst-type things, as offerings to the people that didn’t make it; little flowers and stuff – it was very sad,” she said.

Cannon Beach Elementary, which sits about a mile up Ecola Creek, is almost a mirror image of that Japanese school, she said.

Wang said that in a seismic event, about 300,000 students would be exposed to life-threatening conditions in approximately 600 Oregon schools. She has narrowed that list down to the 80 most at-risk schools. She said she was not yet ready to release that list, but added that Cannon Beach Elementary was on it.

And while Raskin said that improvements could be made to the elementary school to make it seismically sound, he and Wang feel the best solution is relocation.

“The best way to really address lowering your risk is to move the school out of the tsunami zone,” Wang said. “I’ve seen plenty of buildings that duck and cover and hold means you’re dead under your desk under lots of bricks.”

Dougherty said the school board was waiting for a decision from the city council before deciding whether to close Cannon Beach Elementary. That decision will likely be pushed back now. In the meantime, he’s pushing for the campus idea, which comes with its own hurdles.

A couple of years ago he tried to pass legislation to get $10 million for the project; however, with earmarks in disfavor, the request didn’t even make it out of committee. He said he has not landed money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency either. School construction likely would require voters to approve a major bond.

Dougherty said campus development also would require the DLCD to expand the urban growth boundary to include the land. That could take from six months to six years, but he remains optimistic.

“This is one of those situations where we need to do this sooner than later,” he said. “It is a situation that we’re basically running out of time. We have not experienced this type of natural disaster in our country and so we need proactive assistance with this.”

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The Cannon Beach City Council will consider a resolution tonight to permanently close Cannon Beach Elementary due to the high likelihood that it would collapse in the event of an earthquake.

The resolution points at scientists’ predictions that an earthquake with a magnitude of between 8.7 and 9.2 on the Richter scale will likely occur along the Cascadia subduction zone within the next 50 years.

A 2007 report by the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral industries found that if and when an earthquake happens, Cannon Beach Elementary would have a “high potential for collapse.” The resolution further pointed to the fact that each of the school’s classrooms have just one exit, which upon collapsing, would block students and staff from evacuating the building.

That would “significantly decrease the likelihood for survival” considering that a resulting tsunami would reach the school within 15 to 30 minutes from the time of the earthquake.

If the council decides to close the school, students and staff will transfer to Seaside Heights Elementary School, which has the capacity to absorb them, according to the Seaside School District. That move would take place by the beginning of the 2012 school year.

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The city of Cannon Beach and have worked to develop the concept for an innovative, tsunami-resistant tower that would replace the existing city hall and provide an evacuation area for the Oregon coastal community. The city had hoped to land federal funding so that the project, expected to cost more than $4 million, would be affordable for a community of fewer than 2,000 people.

Then politicians in Washington, D.C., called for an end to earmarks, a federal budget crunch occurred, and new studies and information revealed that the planned evacuation site would be within the inundation zone for a tsunami.

Now the city of Cannon Beach is resigned to paying for its preparedness by itself. City officials and designers have developed alternatives to the structure. Public comments are being received over the next few months, and a referendum process could start as early as next year.

Ecola Architects principal and former Cannon Beach Mayor Jay Raskin has been a driving force behind efforts to prepare the city for a tsunami. He worked on the design of the original tower.

However, Raskin said, over time officials realized that the expensive plan would have to be reconsidered. Construction costs for a tsunami-resistant tower are double those for a “normal” building.

“We came to the realization that whatever we did in Cannon Beach was going to have to be funded locally,” Raskin said. “We aren’t very optimistic about state or federal funding.”

In addition, new research showed that Cannon Beach needed a different option than the downtown city hall replacement proposed originally.

The city commissioned a report from independent researcher Jonathan Karon and Harry Yeh, a coastal and ocean engineering professor in Oregon State University’s School of Civil and Construction Engineering, on the evacuation model for Cannon Beach.

That report, along with others that raised the possibility of a larger tsunami than the city had anticipated, noted that the proposed tower site was not ideal.

“The site is not high enough for the 100 percent possible tsunami – the worst-case scenario,” Cannon Beach Mayor Mike Morgan said. “Plus, the soils are terrible there.”

The report by Karon and Yeh also noted that a critical bridge that connects the city’s low-lying downtown to higher ground – an essential connection for evacuation – would likely not stand up to the earthquake that would precede a tsunami.

Raskin and an ad hoc committee of community design professionals worked pro bono with the city to compile a list of eight alternatives to address the city’s tsunami preparedness.

The city will at least start to cache supplies, Morgan said. That alternative is the least expensive, with a cost between $250,000 and $500,000.

More substantial options include construction of a sturdy tsunami evacuation tower on higher ground than planned originally, construction of a new city hall that could aid recovery efforts and replacement of the city’s bridge.

The city is hosting a series of community meetings to discuss options. Public input will be important because the city is expected to need a referendum to pay for any projects, according to City Manager Richard Mays. Morgan said he expects big projects to be included on a ballot measure next year.

The least expensive tsunami evacuation tower would cost between $1.5 million and $2 million, according to a public presentation. The most expensive, depending on location and size, could cost up to $4.7 million. A bridge replacement also would cost $4.7 million.

Cannon Beach residents are “sobered” by the cost of a solution, Morgan said, but they are dedicated to making something happen.

About half of Cannon Beach’s permanent residents live in an area that could be completely wiped out by a tsunami, and all of the city’s tourist facilities are near the beach. The community swells to between 8,000 and 10,000 people in summer months, and all of them would need to evacuate downtown if a tsunami was to occur.

“Every year we let this thing go by is a year we might have been one year too late,” Raskin said. “This has to have been done yesterday.”

The eight alternatives have trade-offs. While a downtown evacuation tower would be less ideal to handle a larger tsunami, it also would be easier to access. A larger tower would be more expensive, but it also could serve as a city hall and hold supplies and facilities needed to aid recovery. Replacement of the city’s bridge would allow for evacuation before a tsunami, but maybe would not be useful thereafter if lower ground was flooded.

Yeh, an expert in tsunami evacuation, said there isn’t a clear-cut choice. Yeh said he was surprised by the amount of devastation that resulted from the March earthquake and tsunami in Japan, a country that had engineered and prepared for a seismic event. People were educated and performed frequent drills; however, many residents didn’t leave their homes in the first 10 minutes after feeling the earthquake and hearing alarms, Yeh said.

“It is very complex,” he said. “Before the Japan earthquake I had a much clearer idea of what to do. That tsunami was so much larger than we anticipated – as engineers, what can we do?”

Ultimately, Yeh said, the decision should be made by the Cannon Beach community.

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The small beach town of Cannon Beach just got 805 acres bigger. But don’t expect the population to grow along with it.

The city of Cannon Beach acquired the Ecola Forest Reserve, located just to the east of the town, on Tuesday in a land swap with the Oregon Department of Forestry. The parcel houses Cannon Beach’s watershed and will be preserved by the town in its natural state – forests and wetlands.

According to the state staff analysis of the land swap, Cannon Beach will protect the land to maintain the health of the watershed while also providing a natural area for recreational use close to the city center.

To acquire the land, the city had to have land to trade. So it bought eight parcels of land, totaling 720 acres, from the land manager Agency Creek Management Company. The eight parcels are located around various parts of Clatsop County. Once purchased, the land was transferred from the city to the department of forestry in exchange for the Ecola property.

The Ecola parcel is valued at $2.57 million, while the eight other parcels are valued at $2.52 million, according to the staff analysis. The state will use the eight parcels to continue its forest management program. The city will make up the different in a cash payment to the state.

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