By The
Associated Press
Edited by Michelle Garner
Oregon swamped by massive flood
PORTLAND, Ore. — A
mountainside moaned, then gave
way in a rush of mud. Highways
vanished beneath stinking, caramel
colored flood waters swirling with
uprooted trees and raw sewage. Two
people were dead, a woman was
missing, and thousands of Orego
nians were driven from their homes.
And the rain kept falling.
As the state’s worst flooding in
more than three decades threatened
to swamp downtown Portland, sand
bags and concrete highway divid
ers formed a thin defense Thursday
against the wide and rising
Willamette River.
“Water’s going everywhere,”
said Trase Myers, as he and others
hurried to stack 40-pound sand
bags against a building downtown.
“I can’t believe the destruction the
water has caused.”
In the nation’s latest extreme
weather in a winter of extremes,
hundreds of roads—including both
of Oregon’s cross-state freeways,
interstates 5 and 84—were closed
by high water or mudslides. Amtrak
trains were halted. Gov. John
Kitzhaber declared 16 of Oregon’s
3 6 counties disaster areas and asked
President Clinton for federal emer
gency aid.
Amid the deluge, there were
water shortages. As muddy flood
waters contaminated water supplies,
Portland and Salem officials urged
people to conserve water. Smaller
towns shut down their water plants
completely and told residents to
buy bottled water.
The flooding is the result of a
series of storms that marched in
from the Pacific beginning two
weeks ago. The first were cold,
piling up snow in the mountains
that form a scenic backdrop to Port
land—the Cascades to the east, the
rolling Coast Range to the west.
On Monday, a warmer storm
stalled over the state, and the snow
started melting, adding to the record
rains—more than 5 inches a day in
some areas.
Sparkling mountain streams, nar
row enough to jump across two
weeks ago, turned monstrous. They
tore through the forest, ripping small
bridges apart.
As the swollen streams con
verged in the Willamette River val
‘ i-Wr . ■■ '
-Water's going
everywhere. I can't
believe the destruction
the water has caused."
TRASE MYERS
Portland resident
ley, evergreen trees were yanked
out by their roots, bobbing and lung
ingdownstream like huge battering
rams.
At least 15,000Oregonians were
forced from their homes, including
about 12,000 in the Salem area,
where a parade of U-Hauls, horse
trailers and pickup trucks streamed
through the rain.
Bill and Connie Mellin grabbed
a few valuables from their home in
Keizer, near Salem, and headed for
higher ground.
“We’ve stacked our furniture up
on books that we don’t like,” Bill
Mellin said. “We’re going to grab
some photos, kids’ toys and clothes
an<’ t out of here.”
! gathering waters barreled
toward Portland, Oregon’s biggest
city, which sits astride the
Willamette near its confluence with
the Columbia River.
The Willamette was expected to
breach Portland’s sea wall late
Thursday night and crest Friday
morning at 30 feet, 1.2 feet above
the sea wall’s lowest point.
That would equal the level of
Portland’s last big flood, around
Christmas 1964, which killed 47
people and left 17,000people home
less throughout the Northwest.
A 9-year-old girl drowned in a
culvert Wednesday when she went
to get the mail near the small
Willamette Valley town of Scio.
An 84-year-old Corvallis woman
died Wednesday night after her car
plunged into runoff from the swol
len Luckiamute River.
The rocks and mud swept one
Multnomah County sheriffs office
cruiser, lights flashing, into the Co
lumbia River. The deputy driving it
escaped unharmed.
ACLU battles
new anti-porn
law in court
PHILADELPHIA — The
government’s ban on sending
“indecent” and sexually explicit
material to minors over com
puter networks was challenged
in court the moment President
Clinton signed it into law Thurs
day.
The Justice Department
pledged not to initiate prosecu
tions for a week, and a federal
judge declined to temporarily
block the Decency Act, giving
prosecutors until Wednesday to
submit written legal arguments.
The American Civil Liber
ties Union and 19 other groups
said the law violates privacy
rights and strangles free speech
by authorizing die government
to prosecute people even for the
private messages they send about
AIDS, abortion, politics and sci
ence — any subject involving
sex.
The law defines indecency as
“any comment, request, sugges
tion, proposal, image or other
communication that, in context,
depicts or describes, in terms
patently offensive as measured
by contemporary community
standards, sexual or excretory
activities or organs.”
Thanks to a last-minute addi
tion by Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill.,
it also extends a rarely enforced,
123-year-old law into
cyberspace, making it a viola
tion of obscenity laws to use
computers to provide informa
tion about how to obtain an abor
tion.
Christopher Hansen, the na
tional ACLU senior staff coun
sel, said the law prohibits all
“socially useful,
nonpomographic speech that
happens to be about sex.”
He noted parents already can
limit their children’s access to
adult material by using safe
guards on computer services or
by buying inexpensive software
that limits the Internet sites chil
dren may reach.
Clinton ‘eager’ for campaign,
dismisses talk of recession
DES MOINES, Iowa—President
Clinton said Thursday he’s eager for
the opening of the presidential cam
paign and predicted that voters will
give him a “clear yes” after he makes
his case.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Clinton
told The Associated Press in a tele
phone interview from the White House.
He dismissed suggestions he could
face an election-year recession, as he
sounded upbeat themes likely to be
come staples on the campaign trail.
“When you judge a president, you
ought to ask * Did he do what he said
he’d do, or at least try .were the results
good ... does he have a good plan for
the future?”’ Clinton said. “I think the
answer to all these questions will be a
clear 'yes.’”
Clinton spoke with the AP just two
days before he travels to Iowa where
Republican presidential candidates are
spread across the state campaigning
for Monday’s precinct caucuses.
While Clinton is stealing some of
thunder from the Republicans in the
closing days of their caucus campaign,
he declined to contrast himself with
any of the GOP contenders.
“I’m not overconfident. I
trust the judgment of the
American people. ”
BILL CLINTON
President ♦
“I will talk about that when they
take a nominee,” Clinton said. ‘To
me, the most important thing is to
make my case to the American people
about the challenges I see facing us.
“To me that overshadows whoever
the opponent might be, and whatever
might be said that I would have to
respond to.”
Though Clinton does not face op
position from within his own party,
some strategists have worried that
Democrats would suffer from the con
tinuous pounding he’s taking during
the Republican campaign.
Clinton left little doubt he’s ready
tojoin the fray. “I am eager to do that,”
he said.
As the GOP presidential campaign
has unfolded, Clinton’s standing in the
polls has grown, and while Clinton
said he had a solid case to make to
voters, he was careful to add “I’m not
overconfident. I trust the judgment of
the American people.”
And Clinton said he had a simple
message that he would take to voters,
beginning with this weekend’s cam
paign-style swing: “The economy is in
a lot better shape today than it was
three years ago.”
Clinton won the White House
largely by capitalizing on economic
nervousness and the economy has been
relatively solid during his term. De
spite the issues that come and go dur
ingapresidential campaign, economic
weakness is one of the forces that can
work against an incumbent president.
There have been some signs of eco
nomic softening in recent weeks, how
ever. Clinton is not worried about an
election-year recession.
“We don’t expect there to be a
recession,” he said. “There has been a
little bit of a slowdown, as we thought
there might be. I basically believe that
the economy is not going into a reces
Thousands go on-line to be included
in ‘24 Hours In Cyberspace’ project .
SAN FRANCISCO—Thousands
of computer users Thursday logged
into “24 Hours In Cyberspace,” an on
line exhibition of the people usingand
cruising the Internet. As of late after
noon, computers running the 24 Hours
project on the World Wide Web had
registered 3 million “hits” from people
viewing pictures and reading stories
posted on the site.
Although it is difficult to translate
hits into the number of people access
ing the site, the site was undeniably
popular.
Many web pages get only a few
dozen hits in a month; the 24 Hours
file servers were jammed with people
logging in all day long. “We have
just been deluged with e-mails,” said
Tom Melcher, chief operating officer
and technical coordinator. “This ex
ceeds our expectations.”
Melcher said 25,000 people from
“We have just been
deluged with e-mails.
This exceeds our
expectations. ”
TOM MELCHER
Internet technical coordinator
around the world had signed the
project’s guest book since it went on
line at 12:01 a.m. Thousands more
were expected to log in by the time the
project stopped at midnight.
Photographers, videographers, ra
dio reporters and writers from around
the world contributed to the project,
which was based at a “control room”
near downtown San Francisco.
The project was led by Rick
Smolan, who organized the popular
“Day in the Life” series of photogra
phy books.
The cyberspace project set out to
capture the human face of the on-line
revolution using first-person accounts
and pictures from journalists, profes
sional photographers and thousands
of volunteers.
For example, one story was about a
couple from Yokohama, Japan, who
met while corresponding via Internet
e-mail and eventually married.
Melcher said even with all the traf
fic on the 24 Hours file servers, there
were no major technical problems.
At the end of the night, the editors and
programmers were going to stop up
dating the site and leave it as is until
Sunday, when it will be taken offline.
Smolan and his crew planned to
edit the images and stories into a book
and CD-ROM to be published in Oc
tober. The Internet location can be
found at http://www.cyber24.com.
FCC OKs
Disney,
ABC deal
WASHINGTON—Federal regu
lators cleared the way Thursday for
The Walt Disney Co. to take over
Capital Cities/ABC Inc., creating the
world’s largest media company. But
the company will have to shed some
properties.
The Federal Communications
Commission voted 5-0 to remove the
last hurdle to the $19 billion deal.
Disney said it would complete the
acquisition by the end of the week.
The commission won’t let Disney
permanently own, as it had requested,
radio stations and a newspaper in Fort
Worth, Texas, and in Pontiac-Detroit,
Mich.
Instead, the commission would pro
vide the company with a temporary
waiver of one year from cross-owner
ship rules to give Disney time to sell or
swap either the radio or the newspaper
properties in each city. The choice
would be Disney’s.
Still, Disney might be able to keep
the Fort Worth and Pontiac-Detroit
properties. The FCC said it would re
examine its newspaper-broadcast
cross-ownership rules within the year.
“We are hopeful that it will ulti
mately allow us to retain the proper
ties in the two cities,” said Disney
chief Michael Eisner, who otherwise
applauded the FCC’s action.
even mougn an nve commission
ers voted to clear the deal, two of them
—James Quello and Rachelle Chong
—opposed the FCC’s decision not to
let Disney permanently own the prop
erties in Fort Worth and Pontiac-De
troit. Both said there is amply media
competition in the two markets. Each
market has more than 50 separately
owned broadcast outlets, they said.
Quello said the FCC’s newspaper
broadcast rules “no longer reflect the
realities of the marketplace.”
Federal regulations prohibit one
company from owning a newspaper
and a radio station in the same market.
Legislation overhauling the nation’s
telecommunications laws, which
President Clinton signed Thursday,
would not change that.
For Disney to win a permanent
waiver, it would have to prove that the
combined ownership is in the public
interest, the FCC says.
In 20 years, the FCC has granted
only two waivers to its newspaper
broadcast cross-ownership rules. And
the standard has been tough—in both
cases, owners had to show the news
papers would otherwise go out of busi
ness, FCC attorneys said.
r
Nebraskan
Editor
Managing Editor
Assoc. News Editors
Opinion Page Editor
Wore Editor
Copy Desk Editor
Sports Editor
Arts & Entertainment
, Editor
Photo Director
Night News Editors
J. Christopher Hain
472-1766
Doug Kouma
Matt Waite
Sarah Sea let
Doug Peters
Michelle Gamer
Tim Pearson
Mitch Sherman
Jeff Randall
Staci McKee
Rebecca Oltmans
Melanie Brandert
Anne Hjersman
Beth Narans
http://www.unl.edu/DailyNeb/
FAX NUMBER 472-1761
The Daily NebraskanfUSPS 144-080) is
published by the UNL Publications Board,
Nebraska Union 34,1400 R St., Lincoln, NE
68588-0448, Monday through Friday during
the academic year; weekly during summer
sessions.
Readers are encouraged to submit story
ideas and comments to the Daily Nebraskan
by phoning 472-1763 between 9 a.m. and 5
p.m. Monday through Friday. The public also
has access to the Publications Board. For
information, contact Tim Hedegaard, 436
9253,9 a.m.-11 p.m.
Subscription price is $50 for one year.
Postmaster: Send address changes to the
Daily Nebraskan, Nebraska Union 34, 1400
R St.,Lincoln, NE 68588-0448. Second-class
postage paid at Lincoln, NE.
ALL MATERIAL COPYRIGHT
1995 DAILY NEBRASKAN