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Oregon coastal city at ‘double ground zero’ braced for eclipse
By Jane Ross
DEPOE BAY, Ore. (Reuters) – Oregon’s Depoe Bay is preparing for the first total eclipse to traverse the continental United States in a century as if a natural disaster was bearing down on the small coastal city.
The town, home to 1,500 residents and a single traffic light, is near the spot of land where the total eclipse will first appear on Aug. 21 as it begins cutting a path through 14 states to the Atlantic.
That distinction has raised fears that a tidal wave of visitors will descend on Depoe Bay to get a first glimpse at “totality” a week from Monday.
“Totality” is when the moon passes in front of the sun, blotting out its light and exposing the glowing “corona” around its perimeter. After a little more than two minutes, the phenomenon will end in any given location as the eclipse moves to the east on its coast-to-coast journey.
“We’re a double ground zero,” said Pat O’Connell, who owns a small gallery and gift store facing the rocky sea wall, where thousands are expected to gather when the sky darkens and the eclipse comes in to view.
Given Depoe Bay’s proximity to a major geological fault line, Mayor Barbara Leff says earthquake and tsunami preparation is second nature to the town’s residents.
“This community has been practicing for a major catastrophe for years and years, and a lot of the eclipse preparations in some ways mirror those disaster preparations,” she said. “We’ve been doing what we’re used to doing and hopefully we are all prepared.”
One of the major challenges, Leff says, is anticipating how many people will show up.
The spectacle is the first in 99 years to span the entire continental United States, the world’s third most populous nation. It will also be the first total solar eclipse visible from any of the lower 48 states since 1979.
The city’s handful of hotels and campgrounds have been sold out for months and crowd estimates range from thousands to hundreds of thousands.
The city held its first eclipse meeting four years ago at its tiny two-room City Hall, a former wooden schoolhouse.
Since serious planning began eight months ago, the city has rented portable restrooms, bought a hundred additional garbage cans, and ordered thousands of protective glasses to be distributed free at the local fire station.
It also has handed out leaflets advising residents to stock up on food, medicine, cash and gas, and prepare for traffic gridlock.
The only way into and out of Depoe Bay is Highway 101, which has only one lane in each direction in the area. Even a minor traffic accident can completely stop traffic, said Depoe Bay Fire Chief Joshua Williams.
“Our worst case scenario is everybody on the road, stopping, parking on side of roads and not having enough access for a fire engine or an ambulance to get down the road to somebody’s emergency,” Williams said.
Normally, only one fire station in the area is staffed, but for the four days surrounding the eclipse, firefighters will staff three stations. Williams says he is working with state authorities to keep traffic lanes clear for emergency vehicles.
And it’s not just congestion on the roads the city has to worry about. With what it calls “the world’s smallest harbor,” Depoe Bay is also preparing for hundreds of boaters trying to use the town’s lone boat launch.
The Coast Guard will monitor boating traffic and will have a vessel stationed at the entrance to the harbor, Coast Guard spokesman Andrew Port said. Guardsmen will board boats to make sure boaters are prepared.
At Dockside Charters, Loren Goddard has rented out most of his boats for fishing trips, but there’s still space on a three-hour cruise for visitors with $1,000 hankering to see the eclipse from the ocean.
“You’re first on the scene. It’s going to happen there before it makes landfall,” said Goddard, who plans to be 30 miles offshore fishing for tuna when the time comes.
(Editing By Frank McGurty)
America’s total eclipse floods market with fake sunglasses
By Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – When millions of Americans turn their faces skyward to witness the nation’s first coast-to-coast total solar eclipse in a century, many will reach for specially designed sunglasses, but experts caution the public to stay clear of unsafe counterfeits.
Even as makers of certified, safety-tested solar eye ware rushed to meet surging demand before the Aug. 21 eclipse, they have joined astronomers and optometrists in warning of defective knockoffs flooding the U.S. market.
“It’s a bunch of unscrupulous people cashing in on the eclipse and putting public safety at risk,” said Richard Fienberg, press officer for the American Astronomical Society (AAS).
Staring at the sun without proper filtration, even when it is partially obscured by the moon during an eclipse, can damage or destroy photo-receptor cells of the eye’s retina, leaving blind spots in a person’s field of vision, experts said.
Special eyeglasses made with proper solar filters allow viewers to safely gaze at the sun any time for unlimited duration, the AAS said.
Although the advent of solar-safe sunglasses dates back more than three decades, they have never been so widely available to the public as for the 2017 event, which Fienberg said may rank as the most watched total solar eclipse in human history.
That is largely because this year’s spectacle will be the first in 99 years to span the entire continental United States – the world’s third most populous nation – across a 70-mile-wide (113-km) path over 14 states, from the Pacific coast of Oregon to the Atlantic shore of South Carolina.
It will also be the first total solar eclipse visible from any of the Lower 48 states since 1979.
SHADY DISTRIBUTORS
As a measure of excitement surrounding the event, a leading supplier of solar lenses, Arizona-based Thousand Oaks Optical, has sold enough of its filters this year alone to produce roughly 100 million pairs of glasses, company owner Pat Steele-Gaishin told Reuters.
While no data exists for how many made-for-eclipse eyeglasses are in circulation overall, shady distributors of purportedly solar-safe shades abound on the Internet, Fienberg said.
The lenses of some obvious fakes allow the penetration of light from such relatively faint sources as fluorescent lamps, while the only thing one should see through authentic solar-safe filters when looking at objects fainter than the sun is pitch blackness.
Other bogus glasses have come stamped with forged logos of reputable manufacturers or with phony safety labels.
Peru State College in Nebraska, which lies in the path of the eclipse, ordered 7,500 pairs for students but discovered the shipment from a Chinese distributor was defective and came with safety certificates for ordinary sunglasses.
Peru marketing director Jason Hogue said the college has since reordered from a legitimate supplier.
The AAS and NASA have posted a list of reputable solar filter brands, retail distributors and online dealers. (https://eclipse.aas.org/resources/solar-filters)
Prices range from as little as 99 cents for a pair of paper-frame glasses to $20 or $30 for a more stylish plastic set.
While a last-minute rush has left many dealers out of stock two weeks before the big day, the good news is that U.S. astronomy buffs have to wait only seven more years for the next total solar eclipse over North America, in April 2024.
Made from an extremely opaque black polymer film containing fine carbon powder, true solar-safe lenses are designed to screen out 250,000 times more visible light than would otherwise reach the naked eye, said B. Ralph Chou, a Canadian optometrist who led development of global standards for solar optics.
Any filter less opaque than that may cause severe eye damage that would not become evident until hours later, Chou warned.
The legitimate glasses, which offer no views outside the eclipse, carry their own hazards, however.
“When you put the glasses on, you can look at the sun, but don’t try to walk around,” Chou said.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Ben Klayman and Lisa Shumaker)
Small U.S. towns brace for rare solar eclipse, and crowds, in August
By Ann Saphir
DRIGGS, Idaho (Reuters) – Hyrum Johnson, mayor of the tiny city of Driggs, Idaho, expects some craziness in his one-stoplight town next month when the moon passes in front of the sun for the first total solar eclipse in the lower 48 U.S. states since 1979.
The town of 1,600 people in Teton County, just west of the jagged peaks of the Rocky Mountains Teton Range, is getting poised to receive as many as 100,000 visitors on Aug. 21 for the celestial event, said Johnson, who was both excited and worried.
Driggs is one of hundreds of towns and cities along a 70-mile arc, stretching from Oregon to South Carolina, that are in the direct path of the moon’s shadow. The full eclipse and the sun’s corona around the disk of the moon will be visible for a little more than two minutes only to those within this narrow band.
Driggs and other towns like it are scrambling to prepare for the onslaught of curious visitors.
“We expect gridlock,” Johnson, 46, said as he drove his pickup truck through town.
Tucked amid seed potato and quinoa farms, Driggs normally enjoys a more languid pace of life, with highlights including $5 lime shakes sold on balmy summer days at the corner drug store. But with the impending eclipse, planning has kicked into high gear.
To make sure nothing more than the roads will be clogged, Johnson took shipment this month of two massive generators that can be deployed at key spots along the city’s sewage system to keep it flowing in case of a power outage.
“We are telling our residents to hunker down,” Johnson said.
And while Johnson would have preferred to have taken his family backpacking during the time of the eclipse, he’s planning to stay in town in case anything goes wrong.
‘ALL HANDS ON DECK’
Over on the east side of the Teton Range, authorities are preparing for the day “kind of like a fire,” said Denise Germann, a public information officer at Grand Teton National Park. Estimating crowds is nearly impossible, she said, but “it is an ‘all hands on deck’ event.”
The 480-square-mile park’s campsites are completely booked, and it expects visitors to pour in from all over, including the bigger Yellowstone National Park, just north of the path of totality. Grand Teton will waive its $30 entry fee to keep traffic from backing up.
Many of the park’s 465 summer staff will be posted at trailheads and along roads to warn visitors to brace themselves for failed cellphone service, jammed roads and scarce parking, and to urge them to carry plenty of food and water, as well as bear spray to ward off wildlife.
In nearby Moose, Huntley Dornan said the county had warned business owners like him to expect four times the usual number of customers in the days leading up to the eclipse.
“I find that hard to believe, but I’m not going to be the guy who has his head in the sand and didn’t plan for it,” said Dornan, who runs a restaurant, deli, gas station and wine shop, the last place to get supplies before entering the park from the south.
Dornan plans to park a 48-foot refrigerated trailer stocked with a couple of thousand pounds of pizza cheese, 150 pounds of ground buffalo meat, a few hundred tomatoes, and gallons of ice cream, among other provisions for the expected hordes of tourists.
On eclipse day, only people who paid as much as $100 each to attend his viewing parties will be allowed access to the narrow road on his property that offers a clear view. Security will keep others out.
About 14 miles down the highway, in Jackson, Wyoming, Bobbie Reppa expects the family business to be flush with demand. She and her husband run Macy’s Services, the only purveyor of portable toilets for miles. The 50 she normally has on hand simply aren’t enough.
“We’ll be bringing them in from as far as Ogden, Utah,” she said.
(Editing by Ben Klayman and Bernadette Baum)
