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A healthcare worker in PPE in a hospital room
Salem Health has been operating overcapacity for months. Scott Olson / Getty

Good morning, Portland! While it may be a bit gloomy today, it’s not supposed to rain! Let's get to the headlines.

In local news:

• People whose homes burned down in Southern Oregon’s 2020 Labor Day fires will receive an additional six months of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) housing support. Typically, disaster survivors receive 18 months of housing support from the agency, which would have given fire victims until mid-March to find housing. However, because of southern Oregon’s limited housing inventory, FEMA extended the assistance.

• OPB has a rare look inside a hospital that’s been operating overcapacity for months, yet must still continue to see more and more omicron patients as COVID hospitalizations have yet to peak. Treating patients in hallways and stacking people three to a room—an extraordinary measure before the pandemic—is common at Salem Health, one of the busiest emergency departments on the West Coast.

• Get ready to rumble: Scientists have detected movement within the Three Sisters volcanic complex in the Oregon Cascade mountains. The movement isn’t significant enough to indicate a potential eruption, but does indicate that magma is moving about four miles underground.

• Oregon and Washington transportation departments are partnering to replace the Interstate 5 bridge over the Columbia River, a project that currently includes adding additional lanes to the freeway and then imposing a toll. However, transportation officials in Louisville, Kentucky, did the same exact thing five years ago and the results were terrible—commuters avoided the bridge once a toll was introduced, leaving the additional lanes (and original lanes) empty even during peak commute times, proving the billion dollar project basically useless. Local environmental advocates are urging transportation leaders to learn from Louisville’s mistakes.

• Free N95 masks courtesy of the federal government are now available at several pharmacy chains across Oregon, including CVS, Fred Meyer, Costco, and Walgreens. Masks are limited to three per person while supplies last.

In national and international news:

• A US counterterrorism strike in Syria killed ISIS leader Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi last night, President Joe Biden announced this morning. According to the Syria Civil Defense, a local rescue organization, 13 civilians—six of whom were children—died during the bombings and subsequent clashes.

• New Zealand is ending its 10-day quarantine requirement for incoming travelers this week. The military-supervised quarantine period has created a bottleneck for thousands of citizens abroad who are forced to enter a lottery-style system to secure a quarantine spot and return home. New Zealand has maintained some of the strictest border policies during the pandemic. Notably, the country of 5 million people has only had 53 COVID-19 deaths in total.

• An uncontrolled fire at a North Carolina fertilizer plant has been burning for three days. Officials have evacuated thousands of residents within at least one mile of the fire, fearing the plant could explode. The plant holds an estimated 500 tons of combustible ammonium nitrate—more than what was present at the 2013 Texas fertilizer plant explosion that killed 15 people.

• Mississippi legalized medical marijuana Wednesday, becoming the 37th state to do so. After signing the bill into law, Mississippi's Republican Governor Tate Reeves decided to get on Twitter and add that "there are also those who really want a recreational marijuana program that could lead to more people smoking and less people working, with all the societal and family ills that that brings.” Uhhh, okay, sure dude.

• And finally, imagine having to explain this Tweet to a Victorian-era child: