Derelict Dock Or A Piece Of History

I got an e-mail this morning from Rebecca Marshall.  It was titled "Lucky Jim".  Before opening I thought to myself, "COOL!!  What did I win?", but in the back of my mind I was thinking, "Great!  What did I screw up now?"  Turns out Lucky Jim meant it was my turn to grace the pages of KXL.com with a blog entry.  

Immediately I started thinking, what can I blog about?  What matters to our listeners?  Can I make it through the blog without a spelling mistake?  All good questions, now for the answers.

All four local TV news stations made a run for the Oregon Coast last week when a giant dock landed on the beach just north of Newport.  We now know it's a piece of history from the Japan Tsunami, but I get the feeling that it will not be treated as a piece of history.  Crews quickly descended on it and removed all the "invasive species" and then used blow torches to sanitize what was left on the dock.  A giant hole was dug in the sand above the tide line and all those "invasive species" were dumped in and buried.  Now the question is, what to do with the dock.  There have been a couple of ideas floated around.  Of course the typical take it out to see and sink it idea came up.  But what about the "invasive species" that are on the bottom of the dock?  I am pretty sure they were not able to remove them as it sat on the beach.  It also floated thousands of miles across the ocean, makes me wonder how it would be sent to the bottom of the ocean.  The other idea making the rounds, dismantle it right there on the beach.  When I heard that, for some strange reason it thought of The New Carissa.  Of course the dock, which is 66-feet long and 7-feet tall, is not nearly the size of that ship, but stranger things have happened.  Now I am not saying there is an impending disaster like The New Carissa but why sink it or destroy it?  Why not treat it like a piece of history?  Don't you think the whole thing or even pieces of it would make an interesting exhibit at the coastal museums up and down the Oregon coast?  After all this is the first major piece of history from the Japan Tsunami to make land fall in the United States.  The question remains, what do you do with a 66-foot long dock that traveled thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean? ~ Jim

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