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Women’s basketball team similar to last season B1
PENINSULA DAILY NEWS January 6 6,, 2016 | 75¢
Port Angeles-Sequim-West End
Nippon arrives at settlement Neither company nor manufacturer admit fault BY PAUL GOTTLIEB PENINSULA DAILY NEWS
PORT ANGELES — In just nine weeks, Nippon Paper Industries USA and biomass-boiler manufacturer FSE Energy had been set to do battle in federal court over $17 million in disputed monetary charges. Instead, Nippon and Covington, La.-based FSE Energy have reached an out-of-court settlement involving Nippon’s $85 million bio-
by FSE lawyer David Bransdorfer of Ada, Mich. “We’re supposed to say only that the case has been settled,” Bransdorfer said in an interview. A 12-day jury trial had been set for March 7 in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, according to court documents. Trial briefs, jury instructions and proposed voir dire, or a set of questions for prospective jurors, was due Feb. 26.
mass cogeneration plant, the companies announced last week. But who gets what in the end is a mystery: The settlement terms are confidential, according to the companies’ joint statement, issued Thursday. In addition, the finger-pointing is no longer being played out FSE lawsuit under the bright lights of easily FSE had sued Nippon in available court documents. November 2014 for breach-of-conKEITH THORPE/PENINSULA DAILY NEWS Neither Nippon nor FSE tract, seeking $6.2 million. admitted liability over the defecThe Nippon Paper Industries USA cogeneration plant in TURN TO NIPPON/A5 Port Angeles, shown in September. tive boiler in the statement issued
Rising use for area food banks Official: Quarter of county residents aided BY CHRIS MCDANIEL PENINSULA DAILY NEWS
KEITH THORPE/PENINSULA DAILY NEWS
Port Angeles Food Bank Executive Director Jessica Hernandez, left, and volunteer Fran Howell of Port Angeles sort through boxes of donated apples Tuesday at the food bank on South Valley Street.
PORT ANGELES — Once food banks in Clallam County began comparing figures last year, they found that nearly one-quarter of those living in the county had used their services in 2014, said the director of the Port Angeles Food Bank. The Clallam County Food Bank Coalition was established last May, Jessica Hernandez, executive director of the Port Angeles Food Bank, told about 15 people at a Port Angeles Business Association meeting Tuesday. “When we put all of our information together, we saw — and this is 2014 because [we] have not put [our] numbers together yet for 2015 — in 2014, our food banks served one in every four people in Clallam County,” she said. TURN
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Thousands of tremors registered in region Experts: Quake activity is unlikely BY CHRIS MCDANIEL PENINSULA DAILY NEWS
PORT ANGELES — The multitude of slow slip tremors geologists have measured over the past few days in the Pacific Northwest are not unusual and probably don’t portend earthquake activity, experts said. Since New Year’s Day, the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network has registered over 2,000 of the low slip and tremor events beneath the Peninsula, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Vancouver Island, according to The Outdoor Society — a online magazine celebrating outdoor recreation based in Olympia. The tremors began registering Dec. 19 on Vancouver Island north of Victoria, eventually expanding south across the Strait and into Washington state.
On Tuesday, most registered tremors occurred in eastern Clallam County. Episodic tremor and slip is a seismological phenomenon observed in some subduction zones, including the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which lies beneath the North Olympic Peninsula, according to geologists. The phenomenon occurs in the Pacific Northwest as part of cyclical 14-month spans and is characterized by non-earthquake seismic rumbling, or tremor, and slow slip along the interface separating the Juan de Fuca and North America plates, they said. The phenomenon also has been observed by geologists globally in Japan, Mexico and New Zealand. The recent activity is not nec-
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essarily indicative of an impending earthquake, said John Vidale, Pacific Northwest Seismic Network director, from Seattle. “We don’t think the ongoing tremors [are] dangerous,” he said. “They might trigger an earthquake, but probably it won’t. If it triggers anything, it probably wouldn’t be anything big.” And while geologists have “learned never to say it is never going to happen . . . it is certainly nothing to get alarmed about,” he said.
Rumblings in the deep Beginning at 12:15 a.m. Monday, the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network — headquartered at the University of Washington in Seattle — plotted more than 400 slow slip and tremor episodes registered by seismology equipment installed throughout the Pacific Northwest.
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