Vanport Flood survivors recall the day their community drowned

When the Columbia River swelled with snowmelt in May 1948, rising ominously high, Belva Griffin recalls a neighbor packing up and moving out of Vanport, fearing the water would crest the dikes that surrounded the city.

“Everybody just laughed at her,” said Griffin, recalling the weather was sunny and dry.

The next day, May 30, a dike gave way, unleashing a torrent of water into the Oregon town of 18,500 across the river from west Vancouver. At least 12 people died and at least a dozen people remained unaccounted for. Many residents in Vanport, which was built to house shipyard workers during World War II, lost everything. Vanport’s buildings, temporary structures without foundations, drifted in the water.

Never rebuilt, the city is now the site of Delta Park and the Portland International Raceway.

Saturday, a handful of Vanport flood survivors gathered at Vancouver’s Water Resources Education Center for opening day of a special exhibit about the calamity that uprooted their community. They were asked to share their memories with Vanport Mosaic, an ongoing community oral history project about life in Vanport, not just the flood. (To learn more, go to www.vanportmosaic.org.)

“We’re trying to tell the story and keep the story alive,” said James Harrison, a professor of history and humanities at Portland Community College who is working on a book about Vanport. “It is an incredible saga we should all be proud of.”

Harrison shared the city’s history with dozens of people who attended the Vanport Flood Exhibit’s opening at the water resource center at 4600 S.E. Columbia Way. In the 1940s, he said, Portland didn’t want Japanese people, black people, poor people or outsiders, and the city was reluctant to accept federal money to build public housing for the thousands of people who needed it. But after the Pearl Harbor attacks forced the United States into World War II, the city relented when it needed labor to build supply ships, Harrison said.

The result was Vanport, a temporary town built in four months to house 40,000 workers, making it the second-largest city in Oregon at the time. Covering 1 mile by three-fourths of a mile, it had police and fire departments, a Kaiser hospital and government-sponsored childcare, Harrison said. As the war wound down, veterans and Japanese Americans moved in. Roughly a quarter of the population was black.

In the spring of 1948, said Milo Reed, a historian with Vanport Mosaic, city officials warned residents that the river was rising but that they would have time to evacuate if there were a flood. The dike along the west side of Vanport was actually just a berm meant to elevate the railroad tracks, he said. When the water rose, the berm turned to quicksand, Reed said.

When the dike sprang a leak, residents hurried to pile up sandbags while telling people to evacuate. Salmon Creek resident Dean Popkes, 85, recalled putting sandbags on the dike until noon. The teenager noticed that when sandbag-laden trucks would rumble past him on the dike, “it just got like it was jelly,” he said.

When his boss ordered him back to the dike after lunch, Popkes refused. He’d seen the railroad watchman’s shack atop the dike was teetering and wouldn’t hold much longer. Within minutes, it came tumbling down. Popkes’ family escaped in their car with dishes, photographs, a roast and a pie his mother had just made for Sunday dinner.

“It was hectic,” he said.

Vancouver resident Luanne (Wolfe) Barnes, 79, said she and her younger sister were home alone when people with loudspeakers began alerting the neighborhood that the dike was leaking. Neighbors called her parents, who rushed home and began loading critical items into their 1936 Dodge sedan. After helping neighbors move belongings upstairs, they fled as a police officer on a motorcycle urged them to get moving.

“We could see the water coming down the street,” said Barnes, who was about 12 at the time.

They parked on the upper dike at Denver Avenue and watched a radio tower topple over, nearly smashing into a house with 15 to 20 people crowded onto the roof.

“It was the most horrifying thing,” said Barnes, whose family stayed with her father’s cousin in Portland for a few weeks until they found a new home.

Griffin, now 88, escaped in a neighbor’s car with her children as the water rolled in. When the floodwaters receded, she returned home to find a water line 5 feet high on the second floor wall. Above the high water line, a photo album sat dry on a shelf. That, along with some aluminum pots and pans, was all Griffin was able to salvage. The family moved to Vancouver and started over with a bed and bureau from the Red Cross.

“I think it changed me to know that nothing remains the same forever,” Griffin said. “When something happens, a catastrophe or whatever, it’s a new beginning. So go ahead.”