Nine months after Ore. storm, a baby boom

ASTORIA, Ore. — A September baby boom at Providence Seaside and Columbia Memorial hospitals has some wondering just what exactly residents were doing at home nine months earlier when a December storm ripped through parts of the Oregon coast, downing power lines and leaving roads impassable for several days.

"We were having fun," said one September mother, Jennifer Tarabochia of Astoria. "We didn't go out. But no one could get out."

Tarabochia, 26, gave birth to Brooklyn Erhlund at 1:50 p.m. Sept. 24, which put her among the 16 new mothers that month at Seaside Providence. That was double the number from August.

"Every year around the same time we have an outage or a storm," said Tonya Case, obstetrics supervisor at the hospital. "September is a busy month. We have never really planned for it before."

But, she added, "maybe we should plan for a busy September."

The jump was starker at Columbia Memorial Hospital in Astoria. While the average number of babies born in a month is 25 or 30, "we were scheduled for 50," said Steve Buckelew, the hospital's director of marketing. Although the hospital didn't reach quite 50, "we approached that number."

Although Sonora Cameron's baby, Finley, was born at Columbia Memorial on Sept. 12, almost nine months after the storm, she wasn't so sure there was a connection.

"It's more of a Christmas baby," she said.

Cameron was at her parents' house when the storm struck. "We played cards," she said. "We had a wind-up radio; we listened to the news a lot."

Still, Cameron remembers the nurses at Columbia talking about the boom. That conversation was going on at Providence Seaside, too, said Nancy Mazzarella-Tisch, an obstetrics nurse there.

Well, at least the nurses were talking. The moms, she said, were a little distracted. "They weren't in a reflective mood, especially not about what was causing this pain."