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Officer Eli Arnold was hiding on Nov. 1, watching a man in a black rain jacket, khakis and a fanny pack hand out what he thought was fentanyl to people in exchange for cash.

Many of the people who interacted with the man in the black rain jacket then immediately lit up “an unknown substance on a piece of tinfoil.”

Officers moved in and arrested the man in the rain jacket, finding about 9 grams of fentanyl on him — far more fentanyl than is usual for one person to have, police and court documents state.

That man, Eric Hurtado, was not the first suspected drug dealer to be arrested near Southwest 13th Avenue and Yamhill Street, a relatively new drug-dealing and drug-using hotspot in Portland.

Dozens of people have been gathering at or within a few blocks of the intersection for weeks. It’s among the most popular open-air places for drug users and dealers to congregate since downtown Portland’s boarded-up Washington Center was raided last year, police said.

The Portland Police Bureau has arrested at least seven people in the area for suspected drug dealing in less than a month, court records show. The Portland Clinic on Southwest 13th Avenue and Yamhill Street recently announced it would close to patient care, citing safety concerns.

Drug dealers and police are aware of each other and have been playing a cat-and-mouse game in the area.

On Oct. 25, for example, Officer Daniel Hall was at the intersection when he saw a man “surrounded by a large population of transient individuals who had cash in their hands,” according to court records. As Hall approached, people whistled and shouted “Six up,” meaning police were coming.

The man surrounded by people with cash in their hands looked up, spotted Hall, then leaned over some planter boxes and walked off, court records state. Hall checked inside the planter boxes and found clear baggies with white powder inside that later tested positive for fentanyl. Police arrested the man and found about $76.50 of “loose disorganized bills” in the man’s pockets.

That same night, Hall was approaching a parking lot near Southwest 14th Avenue and Yamhill Street when someone yelled “Six up,” and Hall caught sight of a man whose right pants pocket appeared to be filled to the brim with cash. Searching the man, police found $1,895 in cash and 17 grams of fentanyl pills. They also came up with a phone, coated in a white powder, that continuously pinged while police searched him.

“Hey can I come see you I only got 140 so not to much this time,” one message read, according to court records.

The arrests in the area have continued.

One week later, Arnold, who lost a run for Portland City Council this year, was watching people gathered near Southwest 13th Avenue and Taylor Street. After seeing a man repeatedly make what appeared to be drug transactions, he radioed to another officer on the Portland Police Bureau’s Bike Squad that there was probable cause to make an arrest. Two officers arrested the man, finding white powder in baggies, cash and pills.

At least three other arrests since then, including an arrest Friday, followed a similar pattern.

In the approximately three years since the Bike Squad has been surveilling drug-dealing groupings and making arrests, Arnold has seen a pattern emerge, he said.

Something about a particular spot will draw in drug dealers and users. There might be a convenience store nearby, or benches and rain cover, or light from a nearby building or a MAX stop. Then, Arnold said, “the efficiency gains of grouping up will start to drag everybody more toward that one spot,” and a drug hotspot comes into being.

Police then focus their enforcement on the space, until the dealers and users disperse for good.

A new hotspot will then pop up a few blocks or more away, and the police again start targeting the dealers, Arnold said. The cycle pushes the groupings around the city.

For years, Portland’s drug dealing was centered in Chinatown, near the Greyhound Station. When police started aggressively “picking off” dealers there around 2021, the dealers moved to Northwest 2nd Avenue and Glisan Street, then to Northwest 5th Avenue and Davis Street, and eventually to Southwest 4th Avenue and Washington Street in front of the Washington Center. The one on Washington Street got so big, it was shut down in a widely publicized raid.

Arnold first saw people gathered at 13th and Yamhill around Oct. 30, and it quickly became clear to him that something had to be done.

The large open-air drug markets began appearing in Portland soon after Measure 110, decriminalizing possession and use of drugs in Oregon, went into effect in 2021, Arnold said. When users understood they could use drugs openly without fear of arrest, he said, they started gathering near the source of the drugs — the dealers. The dealers, in turn, often benefited from the cover provided by having more people around them.

Soon there was a backlash to Measure 110, and lawmakers repealed the decriminalization of drug possession during a short session earlier this year. Beginning Sept. 1, possessing drugs was again a misdemeanor crime.

Arnold said he has found that the places where people buy fentanyl are usually south of West Burnside Street, where he believes the dealing is likely connected to the Mexican cartels, selling primarily fentanyl, Arnold said. Those dealers rarely, if ever, go north of Burnside, where dealers associated with local gangs sell crack cocaine, meth, Xanax and smaller quantities of fentanyl.

It takes concentrated enforcement and multiple arrests of drug dealers for people to give up on an illegal drug market.

Now a critical mass has gathered at 13th and Yamhill, an area that has some particular disadvantages for police, chiefly because it’s harder for them to observe suspected drug dealers, Arnold said.

“I can just tell you that this is a harder spot to use our surveillance techniques on, the way we normally do it,” Arnold said, adding that he didn’t want to say too much for fear of giving drug dealers and users information that could be useful for them.

The place where the bulk of people gather is lined with tall trees, and there are no buildings to the east of The Portland Clinic from which officers could easily monitor the scene without detection. It’s unclear, though, if those are the reasons police say surveillance in that area is more challenging.

Despite the difficulties, Arnold is confident the police will be able to pressure the users and dealers enough in the coming weeks to make them stay away and find another place.

“I wouldn’t expect it to last too much longer there,” Arnold said. “At least, it’s my goal to kill that spot here shortly.”

©2024 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit oregonlive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Trained weather spotters spotted some weather Wednesday afternoon when they saw “a well-defined waterspout just west of the Long Beach peninsula in Washington," according to the National Weather Service in Portland.

A waterspout is a swirling column of water. If it comes ashore, it becomes a tornado.

Tornados and waterspouts aren’t especially common in Oregon and Washington, though officials confirmed an EF-0 tornado hit Rockaway Beach on the Oregon coast earlier this month.

On Tuesday, the coast began to experience a “bomb cyclone,” which brought high waves and wind.

Wednesday’s waterspout was observed between 3:16 p.m. and 3:30 p.m.

The National Weather Service, in a post on Facebook, said the current storm is “still capable of producing waterspouts,” noting that a tornado warning was in effect for the area until 4:30 p.m. Wednesday.

©2024 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit oregonlive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

SEATTLE — Hours after a massive windstorm howled with gusts up to 74 mph in the lowlands, crews in Western Washington were working Wednesday to restore electricity for over 640,000 customers who lost power overnight.

At least two people have died.

One died when wind toppled a tree at a Lynnwood homeless encampment Tuesday night. And another woman was killed Tuesday evening by a tree that fell on a home in the Bridle Trails area, according to Bellevue fire.

A rotating rapidly intensifying system of storms, known as a bomb cyclone, skirted the West Coast and churned about 300 miles west of the Olympic Peninsula. Its strength appeared to be waning Wednesday, though a sequel system could move in Thursday or Friday, according to the National Weather Service.

Over 400,000 people of those without power were Puget Sound Energy customers, outside the city of Seattle. Heavy snow, fallen trees and — on Interstate 90 near Snoqualmie Pass — a jackknifed semitruck blocked routes in the immediate aftermath of the storm. Some flights at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport were also rerouted when the storm was near its peak.

Seattle-area residents reported widespread cellular service outages for three of the major telecommunications companies — Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T — according to Downdetector.

A Verizon spokesperson confirmed the windstorm that swept through Western Washington on Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning interrupted service for customers.

"Verizon crews and vendors deployed as soon as it was safe to do so and will be working around the clock to restore service as quickly as possible," the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. 

Five people were treated for storm-related injuries Wednesday at Harborview Medical Center, according to hospital spokesperson Susan Gregg. One person remains in critical condition.

Five people were also treated at the University of Washington Medical Center Northwest and another three at the hospital’s Montlake building, all of whom are in satisfactory condition.

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©2024 The Seattle Times. Visit seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

SEATTLE — In the early hours of Nov. 6, as it became clear that Donald Trump was poised to win his reelection bid for the presidency, the LGBTQ+ youth chat and text line for crisis line operator Volunteers of America began lighting up with calls and texts from teenagers.

The chat line saw nearly double the number of messages it normally gets during an eight-hour shift.

"The queue was backed up, people were waiting on hold," said Stacie Simmons, a shift lead. "It pretty much started immediately, even in the graveyard hours. Kids were feeling a lot of uncertainty about what does this look like for the community, how will they be treated at school."

Though Trump doesn't take office for two months, election night clearly raised anxieties and fears for many Americans. In Washington, operators of some regional crisis lines say they saw a spike in calls in the days after Nov. 5, with the majority of callers expressing worry about the potential impacts of the election.

While an increase in calls can't explicitly be tied to any one event, operators say many of the calls they're taking are related to Trump's promises to roll back rights for transgender Americans and conduct mass deportations of large numbers of undocumented immigrants.

Crisis Connections, which operates hotlines including 988 in King County, saw a 9% increase in calls the week after the election, compared to call volume in the month before.

Volunteers of America, which also has crisis line centers across Washington, didn't see a major increase in call volume. But the number of people calling with election-related concerns spiked right after the election, operators said.

Izzy Engberg, a clinician who answers calls for Volunteers of America, said nearly every single call on Nov. 6 was related to the election.

"A lot of people were calling in crisis about that. They were overwhelmed, having anxiety about their families, how this will relate to them in the future," Engberg said.

Nationally, crisis lines have seen even larger spikes in calls from LGBTQ+ youth with concerns about the new administration. The Trevor Project, a national suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ+ youth, reported a 700% increase in calls to the hotline the day after the election. Zach Eisenstein, a spokesperson for the Trevor Project, said an estimated 30% of those callers were youth from communities of color, and more than 40% were transgender and nonbinary youth. Nov. 6, the day after the election, also marked the largest surge in daily calls since the Trevor Project began providing around-the-clock services in 2019, Eisenstein said.

"I think what (the election) did was create an increase in anxiety overall," said Alice Nichols, the senior director of clinical operations for Crisis Connections. "Some are anxious for personal situations, and some are anxious just in this global sense — what will this election mean for our country?"

Both Volunteers of America and Crisis Connections increased their staff levels in anticipation of the election, and expect they may need to do so again as the inauguration approaches.

Crisis line responders do not share their political views with callers. Instead, their role is to listen, empathize with people and validate what they're feeling.

Reid Johnson, a program manager for Volunteers of America, said many people who call may be from a family or a region that holds different political beliefs than they do, and they may not have another outlet to talk about their concerns.

"That's a large part of what 988 call takers have experienced," he said. "Finding a way to give people space to express what they're feeling in a way that's nonjudgmental, because they might not have that in the area they're in."

Johnson said the organization also makes sure it's supporting its crisis line operators, as many may be going through the same things as the people they're helping. That can mean letting people take mental breaks when they need to, or increasing staff to share the work.

Nichols said crisis line responders can also help people identify tools to get them through a difficult time — often things that may already be at their disposal.

"A lot of times when we're in distress we forget the resources we already have available to us," Nichols said.

That can include reminding them of skills they've already developed in the past, or encouraging someone to be politically active with whatever group they feel called to in order to find a productive outlet for their anxiety or distress. It can also include finding ways to de-stress like listening to music, playing a game, or taking a walk. Crisis line workers also help connect people to therapy and support groups.

Engman also urged people to remember that they can call 988 for any mental health concern — not just for emergency situations.

"I'd get a lot of people on election night who would start off their call saying, 'I think a lot of people have bigger things going on than me,'" Engman said. "You don't have to be escalated. Every crisis is valid."

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