A new air terminal building was dedicated at the Pendleton airport in June of 1953, but some rascally rodents were determined to make things tough for air traffic controllers and pilots trying to land at the updated airfield.
Part of the upgrades at the airport was a $48,000 high-intensity lighting system for the runways, complete with wiring shielded with a rubber coating specifically designed to deter the predations of the resident gopher population, which had delighted in sharpening their long teeth on the old lead cables. But the rodents were just as cheerful about gnawing the new rubber insulation. “We’ve had pieces of cable that looked like a cob of corn with bites taken out of it,” said city manager Raymond Botch during a city council meeting on June 17, 1953.
The new lighting system had been limited to medium intensity since the beginning of spring, when the newly awakened gophers’ chewing had left the system susceptible to outages at higher intensities. The airport electrical maintenance supervisor, Herb Wiles, complained that extermination would be next to impossible — poison would be too slow and, with thousands of gopher mounds to contend with, cyanide gas would be ineffective.
But he did have an alternate plan. Wiles suggested pouring a concrete casing around the wires, buried about 18 inches underground. At the same time the casing was being laid, a third wire could be added to the two-wire system to solve the problem of large voltage drops and varying light intensities. The contractor who installed the wiring — but only installed two of the three wires requested — would provide a portion of the necessary funds as part of a settlement with the city.
Botch commented that the Pendleton and Walla Walla areas seemed to have more gophers than most other nearby locales.
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