ODOT may be open to allowing lighted warning sign near Yachats fire station — but who pays for it?

 

 

By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews

YACHATS – The board of the Yachats Rural Fire Protection District wants to make another run at getting permission from the Oregon Department of Transportation to put up warning signs near the entrance to its station on U.S. Highway 101 and possibly lower the speed limit.

This time around they may have better luck. Maybe.

The new attempt follows the January fatality when a driver headed north on the highway slammed into the side of a district-staffed ambulance that had pulled onto the highway. The death of Kelsey R. Seibel, 25, and severe injuries to Fokus Simmons, 16, both of Waldport, led to a $6 million lawsuit against the fire district and South Lincoln Ambulance — and competing allegations from lawyers as to who was at fault.

There are no traffic or warning signs at the driveway’s entrance onto the highway and the station sits more than 100 yards east and mostly out of view. Firefighter/paramedics respond to 60-90 calls a month, about 70 percent of them considered medical issues.

District administrator Frankie Petrick said the district was unsuccessful in getting signs along the highway after the station moved from downtown Yachats to the north edge of the city in 2019.

After the January fatality and more questions about warning signs and speed, an ODOT spokeswoman told YachatsNews last spring that while the accident was tragic, there was little history of crashes in the vicinity, the speed at the north edge of Yachats was appropriate, and that the agency “typically would not install” a flashing emergency vehicle warning sign.

On Monday, fire board member Don Tucker said the district should again attempt to persuade ODOT officials that a sign and a lower speed limit might help prevent future accidents.

“I’m still highly concerned that nothing has been done to adjust the speed limit from 55 (mph) to 40,” Tucker said. “We’re setting ourselves up for another problem. It’s a bad situation and damn well needs to be fixed.”

Tucker suggested that the district work with the city of Yachats to approach ODOT about the issues.

But fire board chair Katherine Guenther, who is also the city’s planning director, said Yachats had asked ODOT about lowering the highway’s speed limit through the city to 25 mph. That effort failed, Guenther said.

“ODOT has been a hard and fast ‘No – we can’t do this’,” Guenther said.

But board member Doug Myers, a career Oregon firefighter and volunteer captain for the Sisters-Camp Sherman Rural Fire Protection District, said that another central Oregon department was able to use the Yachats fatality to convince ODOT to pay for installing a larger sign with a flashing warning signal at its station along U.S. Highway 20.

The warning light atop the sign outside the Cloverdale Rural Fire Protection District station is activated by firefighters as they prepare to enter the highway.

Cloverdale fire chief Thad Olsen told YachatsNews that he pushed ODOT officials to come look at their situation — nearly identical to Yachats’ — and even sent them news stories about the fatality. After four months of pressing the district’s case Olsen said ODOT agreed to pay for installing the solar-powered sign at a cost of about $25,000.

“They found the money and installed it,” Olsen told YachatsNews. “It’s all about safety for the public and our firefighters. But it took some work on our part.”

Myers told the Yachats board on Monday that his trips up and down the coast indicates that Yachats is “the only fire district along Highway 101 from Newport to Brookings that doesn’t have a basic 30-inch fire station sign (outside its station).”

“We had an incident,” he said. “The anniversary is coming up. Let’s do something.”

Petrick agreed to work with Guenther to reach out to the city’s Public Works & Streets Commission about their attempts to lower speeds and to contact ODOT to set up a meeting to renew the fire district’s concerns.

Unknown to fire administrators and board, apparently, the city started the process with ODOT this fall to again study lowering the speed limit through all of Yachats from 40 mph to 25 mph. The Yachats fire station sits just outside the north city limits and right where the posted speed limit goes from 40 mph to 55 mph.

In reply to an inquiry from YachatsNews, ODOT spokeswoman Mindy McCartt said Wednesday that the agency would consider allowing a new sign with a flashing light – if the fire district wanted to pay for it and any maintenance.

“Signs with activated flashers would be new infrastructure that ODOT does not typically fund or have the funding to install and maintain,” McCartt said. She encouraged the fire district to contact regional ODOT officials in Corvallis “and work on a request.”

“Although we may not have authority to reduce the speed limit outside the Yachats city limits – ODOT did a speed zone study in the Yachats area U.S. 101 in 2020 – we can look at a new request for the specific location,” McCartt said in an email to YachatsNews.

In other business Monday, the board:

• Voted unanimously to give cost-of-living raises of 2.1 percent to district staff effective this month;
• Voted 4-1 to amend and approve an agreement with the Southwest Lincoln County Water PUD to work with that district to maintain and test its fire hydrants, but not contribute toward replacing them;
• Voted to try to sell an engine it bought in 2021 from the Newport Fire Department for $8,000 that was never put into service because of pump and transmission issues. If there are no takers by the end of January, the board told Petrick to donate it to a fire history museum; and
• Agreed to put a discussion about the fire district’s relationship with South Lincoln Ambulance on its January agenda.