NEW HORROR DEVELOPED WHEN WATERS SMASHED VANPORT

Wanganui Chronicle, 1 June 1948, Page 5

NEW HORROR DEVELOPED WHEN WATERS SMASHED VANPORT

A new horror was added to the floods devastating vast sections of the North-west Pacific States, when a wall of water burst through a dyke surrounding the low-lying area of Vanport, in Oregon, drowning many persons. As the water burst into the west edge of a sprawling community, which was built as a shipyard city during the war, hundreds of men, women and children were swept off their feet. Mothers saw their children carried away by water. Many slipped from the grasp of their parents as they dashed madly for the upper floors of apartment houses. An Associated Press reporter said “it was a madhouse of people trying to save their lives, their families and their goods.” Three hundred were trapped in the second floors of houses, but they were saved. One survivor said the water was waist deep before the community knew that the water had broken through. His wife swam to higher

ground and he plunged through, carrying their -baby. A woman and a child, and another woman, who was clinging to him, were swept away. He did not see them again. There were hundreds of children playing in the community area in a warm Sunday aftesnoon sunshine. The two exits from the low area of the community to a highway well above the flood level were jammed, blocking the way for pedestrians scrambling to get away from the rising water. The Red Cross, San Francisco, states that 30,000 persons faced possible evacuation in the Portland area of Oregon. Emerency crews, working against time, sandbagged the dyke system protecting the metropolitan area, which has a population of half a million.

At Wenatchee, Washington, 2000 persons were taken to high ground in the expectation of a five-foot rise in the Columbia River.