When you put all your eggs in one basket.......

This isn't surprising since Intel has already reused the site once. I believe that Fab 20 used to be known as D1A - the development fab for the 200mm processes. When they build D1D next door (at the cost of around a billion dollars and an additional thousand or so jobs) and moved the development work there with the new 300mm lithography machines, D1A was renamed "Fab 20" and assigned to a regular production tooling.

It's also not the first time they've spun down a fab here in Oregon and left it to mothball. Fab 4 still exists on the Intel Aloha campus off TV Highway; but I doubt they would ever want to ramp up productions of 386 microprocessors again, since that's the last thing Fab 4 ever produced (in my recollection).

Does anyone have the most recent figure on the Portland metro unemployment rate?

The latest data for the city are for November and are not seasonally adjusted. The unemployment rates for November, NSA:

Portland metro area 7.2%
City of Portland 7.2%
State of Oregon 7.8%
United States 7.1%

In the last ten years, Portland's unemployment rate has been less than the national average only about 9 months. However, Portland pretty consistently has a lower unemployment rate than the state.

NSA's statistical area for "Portland" incorporates Portland/Vancouver/Beaverton. The city with the lowest unemployment rate as of November 2008 is Logan, Utah at 2.4%. The highest is the El Centro, California area at 23.4%. In fact, much of Southern California makes us look like we're on easy street.