Cannon Beach's first ever Coastal Community Festival is scheduled for May 12 with an outdoor marketplace featuring arts and crafts, food vendors, a farmer's market, live music and a unique Blue Barrel chef's cook-off planned for the daylong event at Cannon Beach City Park. The festival is designed to offer a fun way to build awareness for safety and emergency preparedness. The Blue Barrel Challenge will include celebrity chefs competing on-site to create the best dish from non-perishable food items typically found in emergency preparedness barrels stored in disaster cache sites around town. The chefs will each need to build and maintain a fire and to prepare and cook their meals using the contents in the barrel. Each barrel will contain a mystery ingredient as well as other local fresh foraged foods. The cooking competition begins at 1pm.

"Getting prepared and learning about emergency awareness can be fun for the entire family," says Jason Schermerhorn, Chief of Police. Starting at 9am the festival kicks-off with a Safety Fair lineup that includes the police department, fire and rescue, Lifeflight and Medix. "This is an opportunity for community members of all ages to connect with local officials through fun safety activities such as a Bike Rodeo," Schermerhorn said. Other programs represented include water safety education, pedestrian safety, household safety from Pacific Power and Northwest Natural Gas, and poison safety.

Throughout the day (9am-4pm) the festival will feature a farmers market with art, home and garden vendors. Haystack Rock Awareness Program will be selling their handmade jewelry as part of their "Trash Talk" project. Fashioned from micro-plastic marine debris, the unique jewelry pieces tell a story and inspire HRAP support. Visitors are encouraged to collect beach debris and bring it in to make a necklace for themselves.

While most of the event is focused on preparing for community emergencies, the musical talents of blues guitarists Mary Flower, Mark Shark and Thad Beckman will join forces for an evening concert of lively acoustic music in City Park from 5:30-7:30pm.

The Coastal Community Festival is free, sponsored by the City of Cannon Beach, and will be open to the public from 9am- 7:30 pm at the Cannon Beach City Park (207 N. Spruce Street).

For more information, call the Cannon Beach Chamber of Commerce at (503) 436-2811 or visit Chamber Events website at http://www.cannonbeach.org/events/Entertainment/Coastal-Community-Festival.