Portland's Volcanoes
Channel: Vincent Colavin
Date: 2021-02-16

Just a little quarantine project, to document Portland's unusual geology. Inspired by Tom Scott, Jay Foreman, and Huell Howser! This took so much work. Maybe it's a pilot episode. We'll see how it goes!

Corrections:
- Apparently “decorational” isn’t really a word. I always thought it was. Oh well.
- Portland doesn’t store all of its drinking water at Powell Butte. It’s just one part of the city’s water storage infrastructure.
- Saying that Tabor’s reservoirs closed because of federal regulation is not the whole story, see the footnote below for more information.
- You could consider Mt Scott to be in Portland. I was pretty arbitrary with whether Scott or Sylvania should make the cut. If I were to reshoot this I would add Mt Scott.

Footnotes and sources:
- Forest Park is one of the largest municipal parks in the country: https://www.webcitation.org/5gLFIgHS6?url=http://www.tpl.org/content_documents/citypark_facts/ccpe_150_LargestParks_08.pdf
- Mill Ends Park is the smallest park in the world: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/66421-smallest-park
- Very few cities in the US have volcanoes in them: https://www.taborfriends.org/the-volcano
- Portland has 6 volcanoes: This is a novel claim but I determined this by looking at this USGS map and the Portland city limits on Google Maps. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Boring_lava_allen_map.png
- Damascus has more volcanoes: ibid. I think it has 8.
- Damascus voted to disincorporate in 2016: I didn’t want to get into the nitty gritty here because this gets a little complicated, but Damascus voted to incorporate in 2004, and then to disincorporate in 2016. The disincorporation vote was retroactively nullified by state courts in 2019 because not enough people voted to clear a legal threshold, but then the state legislature responded by passing special legislation to retroactively validate the 2016 disincorporation vote. The state supreme court affirmed the legislature’s remedy, and declared that Damascus had indeed been disincorporated since 2016, despite the short zombie incorporation period in 2019.
https://law.justia.com/cases/oregon/supreme-court/2020/s066939.html

- Powell Butte is the largest volcano park in Portland: Ok I didn’t feel like finding proper references for this claim but I think it’s self-evident if you look at a map of the parks.
- Portland stores all of its drinking water under Powell Butte: Turns out this isn’t true, Powell Butte’s reservoirs stores only part of Portland’s drinking water. https://www.portland.gov/water/about-water-system#toc-where-does-my-tap-water-come-from-
- East Portland is written off: There’s plenty of evidence of the city’s neglect of East Portland, which is younger, poorer, and more diverse than the central core. https://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/the-forgotten-portland/Content?oid=13629549, https://pamplinmedia.com/component/content/article?id=12638
- Mt Tabor reservoirs are ornamental following federal regulation: Ok this one gets a bit into city politics. There was an EPA rule called LT2 that would have forced Portland to decommission its open air reservoirs, but they walked it back. Portland’s city council decided to decommission the reservoirs anyways, and some people say this is because city officials had close relations to the contractors who would build the new reservoirs: https://www.wweek.com/portland/article-2423-a-friend-in-the-business.html
- There was a proposal to turn Tabor’s reservoirs into geothermal hot springs: https://www.southeastexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/June-2017.pdf
- There are over 80 volcanoes in the Portland area: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Boring_lava_allen_map.png
- Portland was built on Boring Volcanic Field: ibid.
- There is no scientific distinction between dormant and extinct volcanoes: http://volcano.oregonstate.edu/how-volcano-defined-being-active-dormant-or-extinct
- Some volcanoes have come back from extinction with disastrous consequences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pinatubo
- Portland volcanoes are monogenetic: https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/cascades-volcano-observatory/boring-volcanic-field-hills-portland-basin
- Next eruption will be in Washington: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/books/book/885/chapter/3929513/The-Boring-Volcanic-Field-of-the-Portland
- Risk of eruption is low: https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/cascades-volcano-observatory/boring-volcanic-field-hills-portland-basin

Credits and specs:
- Shot on Pixel 3, mostly with the front-facing camera and a selfie stick.
- Audio recorded with a Zoom H1 microphone
- Edited and all that with Final Cut Pro
- Color grading with Ryan Nangle’s Domingo 145 LUT: https://sellfy.com/10154417130356796/p/4rqi/
- Portland Sunshine theme music performed, recorded, and produced by me, Vincent Colavin. I used GarageBand.