The Vanport Flood Tour

About a month ago, I mentioned the Vanport Flood. For those who aren't in the know, Vanport was at one time the second largest city in Oregon and, with 40,000 residents at its peak, the largest housing development in the US, built by Henry Kaiser to house shipbuilders and their families during World War II. Estimates hold that over 100,000 people lived in Vanport between construction in 1942 and its final days, but on May 30th, 1948, after weeks of high water, the levee was breached at 4:17 in the afternoon, and Vanport flooded. 

Official records state that only 15 lives were lost, but some oldtimers report pulling many more bodies than that out of the water. It stands to be said that the City of Portland has been known to rewrite its own history from time to time, particularly when it comes to Vanport, so while I certainly can't say the official death toll has been fudged, it seems like a matter for research an enterprising history student might consider undertaking - I'm a biologist, not an historian, so I won't delve too deeply into the historical stuff, but if you want more information about Vanport, check out The Oregon History Project, History Link's essay on the flood, Columbia River Images' page on Vanport, this excellent article by the Portland Tribune, and not least, the history pages at Portland State University, which was born from the integrated Vanport Extension Center.

Rose gall

For the last ten years, the Columbia Slough Watershed Council has been offering a flood anniversary tour of the area that had been Vanport, and this year I joined about 40 other people for a four-stop jaunt around the West end to hear Susan Barthel, a local Columbia Slough expert, along with survivors of the flood, tell its story. We gathered at the Delta Park/Vanport light rail station, which is located near the east end of where West Vanport had been.

Mosaic map of Vanport

The first thing I noticed was completely unrelated to Vanport history; these rose bushes seem to be infected with some kind of gall-forming parasite that causes them to grow these beautiful, if bizarre, tumors. I've never seen anything like them before and had no idea what they were, but a quick search after I got home revealed that they're caused by a tiny wasp. Gross, and yet charming at the same time.

Railing made from bronzed items recovered from flood debris

The tour began, and we trekked up to the top of the light rail platform to look at some of the commemorative art; a mosaic map of Vanport City, a railing made of bronzed items recovered from the flood debris, and three large metal plates commemorating the high water marks in the days leading up to the flood.

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We moved from the light rail station to the next stop on the tour, Portland International Raceway. PIR sits smack on the area of the floodplain that was once West Vanport, covered with apartment buildings, and we learned that not only are there still old foundations to be found on the raceway grounds, but that they still find flood debris from time to time.

The crowd gathered on the top of the Slough levee (the former floodplains are now completely encircled with levees, protecting them from flooding both by the Columbia River and by the Columbia Slough... I'll come back to that) to hear more about events the day of the flood, and also to hear stories of childhood in Vanport.

The Columbia Slough

One gentleman, Frank, was utterly captivating as he reminisced about swimming in the slough, days spent waging war with the kids across the channel, and even about fishing with the charnel from the slaughterhouses as blood and offal was dumped directly into the water, rendering the slough thick, red, and fouled. He made us laugh when he told us about kids swimming among the turds in the slough, because of course back then the city was still flushing its sewage directly into the waterway. "We just pushed 'em aside," he said with a wry chuckle, "it didn't bother us none." (I'd like everyone who yearns for "a simpler time" to dwell on that image for a few minutes).

One question that came up several times was "Why did it flood?" People wanted to know what caused the flood, and whether it would happen again. It was certainly not the Columbia River's first flood, nor was it its last, and it will flood again... of that we can be certain. Like most things in Nature, the causes of the flooding in this area are manyfold and complex, but contributors include the convergence of several cyclical occurrences. One was an especially heavy snowpack in mountains that contribute to both the Columbia and Willamette rivers, which converge at the West end of the Slough. Another was an unusually warm Spring, not terribly unlike the one we are enjoying right now, melting that large snowpack at a rapid rate. Yet another contributor were heavy seasonal rains. We may have any of these events in any given Spring, but when they all come together, the result is high water like we saw in 1896, 1948, and 1996. We will certainly see high water like this again.

Vanport informational kiosk at Force Lake

But will it flood? That's certainly the relevant question, and whether the industry and housing in the old floodplain stays intact depends entirely on whether the levees are high enough, and hold. We, as humans, tend to think of our constructions and our designs to hold back the forces of Nature as being strong and durable, but the disasters that we have seen in just the last couple of decades, including the flooding in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the devastation of the tsunami in Japan, illustrate very well how transient human engineering is in the face of the imperturbable, vast weight of natural forces. This planet is our home, but it's a home that really doesn't care one way or another about wiping us out if we happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or happen to be working at odds with its geological processes. I'm kind of hoping that, assuming we survive another few millennia, we eventually get to a point where instead of trying to control nature, we try to figure out how we can best fit into it.

The third stop on our tour was Force Lake, the site my first post on this blog was written about. It was nice to see, a month later, the young trees I'd helped plant and the native plants we had cleared space for thriving. Of course, many of the invasive species are also thriving, and they will continue to thrive; there's no unringing the bell. The tour guide talked a little more about the breach in the levee, and the group was off to see the railway embankment that sprung the initial, unstoppable leak. The levees are much better now, of course, higher and stronger. The City of Portland is, as many cities which have developed on floodplains, seeking FEMA certification. There is an air of certainty that the mistakes of the past will stay in the past, never to be repeated.

A beautiful shrub I don't recognize, also at Force Lake