Bay Street Closed Temporarily Saturday
It was a very busy weekend in Florence despite the cancellation of the annual Rhododendron Festival. On Saturday large groups of motorcycles lined Bay Street filling up almost every available space and then around 3pm the Free Souls Motorcycle Group came through town taking up both lanes of traffic. Chief Tom Turner said that in anticipation of the heavy traffic he requested assistance of the Eugene Police Traffic Enforcement team. 6 Eugene motorcycle officers were there and had to shut down Bay Street for about an hour and a half until the majority of the traffic subsided. Chief Turner says it was the second time that he asked for assistance from Eugene Police. The other time was in 2018 when turner says there was a lot of dangerous misbehavior surrounding motorcycles during the annual Rhododendron Parade. As for Saturday’s traffic one Florence resident likened the parade of motorcycles to the Viking raids as the group filed three abreast along Bay Street.
Rhody Run
It was a smaller than usual Rhody Run on Saturday. According to the Run chair, Mike Harkleroad it was not just the visitors that come for the weekend that were missing, but it was also the Sky-EM championships and the Soccer games that were normally not being played at this time of year. Missing were members of the Viking Cross Country Team as well as the runners from Siuslaw Track. About one hundred people participated in the event. Proceeds from the event benefitted the Florence Habitat for Humanity which will soon begin construction on their first senior home build.
New COVID-19 Numbers
There were two more new COVID-19 case for Florence over the weekend bringing the Florence count to 244. Lane County’s daily rate has also been dropping. The average count is at 42.14 cases and there were 37 cases reported on Saturday. So far today there have been 26 cases added to the Lane County Website. There were 1258 cases statewide over the past two days as reported by the OHA. Vaccination rates continue to fall across the state. Daily averages have slipped from 33,000 plus vaccinations to 29,334. Over the weekend there were only 23,075 doses administered. Current numbers show that about 50% of Oregonians have been vaccinated. Governor Brown says she hopes that the goal of 70% will be reached in the month of June.
Friday Vaccination Clinic Results
Assistant City Manager Megan Messmer says that about 800 vaccines were administered on Friday. Staff stayed until about 8 pm distributing the Pfizer vaccine to ages 12 and up, there were also limited doses of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine available. City Officials say they will have details on yet another vaccination clinic in the coming days.
