[blam]

"Portland is a good hundred miles inland from the ocean. Not much chance of a tsunami hitting there, nomatter how much they need it. :-)"

Boy...I don't know what I was thinking. I actually drove a 10k ton freighter up the Columbia River to Portland in, I guess, about 1966. We were hauling war supplies to Vietnam.

We had to wait for high tide to get over the sand bar at the mouth of the river...I suppose they still do. All I can remember about Portland is (ahem) Mary's Place.

[Ramius]

Yah... I was a Coastie stationed on a Cutter in Astoria. I’ve been up and down the river to portland a couple of times. Once I did it with the Columbia River Pilots, on a big car-carrier. That... was a gas...

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Longview, on the Columbia River, can take deep draft international shipping and will become a huge new coal export facility in the next year or so. The site is a brownfield, former aluminum smelter.

[GATOR NAVY]

I took an LST up the Columbia for the Rose Festival in 1989. Good liberty but I wouldn’t want to do that sea detail on a regular basis.