When the U.S. entered World War II in December 1941, the Portland area — and Vancouver--quickly became a U.S. shipbuilding leader. Entrepreneur Henry J. Kaiser established three shipyards — Oregon Ship, Swan Island, and Vancouver Ship - where the Kaiser Corporation built 455 Liberty ships and Baby Flat Tops during the course of the war.

Special “Kaiser Trains” recruited workers nationwide for the shipyards and by the end of 1942, Portland and Vancouver experienced a severe housing crunch. By war’s end, nearly 160,000 people had come to the region, with Vancouver growing from 18,788 to 95,000 people. Meanwhile, Henry Kaiser purchased 650 acres of marshy pasture, slough, and truck farm near the Columbia. Kaiser quickly obtained federal funding to construct housing, and thousands of men and women went to work building the nation’s largest public housing project and Oregon’s second largest city. Where Portland International Raceway and Heron Lakes Golf Course now stand, it arose--nearly overnight. Vanport City, bordered from the Columbia River by Swift Boulevard, a railroad dike, and Denver Avenue — its main entrance — opened in December of 1942. By November 1943, the city became home to approximately 40,000 people, nearly 15,000 of them African American. Vanport had nearly 10,000 housing units, while across the Columbia, McLoughlin Heights was the nation’s fourth largest housing project and had over 6,086 housing units.

Vanport had 718 two story frame apartments built in groups of four, nearly 200 service buildings, a post office, five grade schools, six nursery schools, three fire stations, a movie theater, five recreation halls, a library, a hospital, a police station, and ten ice houses. Each building housed 14 families in tight quarters. Vanport had over 2,000 single room apartments, 5,300 two-room apartments, 2,062 three-room apartments, and 254 four-room apartments, available for $7.00 to $11.55 a week. Vanport was loud. The shipyards operated continually and round the clock noise made sleep difficult. Vanport had 24-hour daycare, recreation centers, grade schools, and a library, but no high school. Some complained that gangs of unattended children ran the streets. Each apartment was equipped with a “rangette” that had two electric plates and a small oven, rather than a real cook stove — a major complaint. Nor was there refrigeration, only a cupboard for ice. Vanport was meant to be temporary. No alterations were allowed and only one window per apartment opened. The Resident Handbook began with this statement:

“The apartment in which you live is very simple in its design. It is constructed of material that will not stand up unless you take care of it.”

When WWII ended in 1945, Vanport’s population plummeted to around 18,500. Many Portland residents disliked the post-war community, home to low-income people, veterans, and African Americans. In 1946 the Housing Authority of Portland attempted to fill Vanport’s buildings. It opened a college and a “veteran’s village,” turning the recreation centers into classrooms and the shopping center into a library. Vanport College enrolled 1,924 students its first year, established a school newspaper, and drew national attention for its veteran-college partnership.

Vanport’s post-war survival efforts came to a rapid halt in 1948 when warm May temperatures rapidly melted snow in the mountains that feed the Columbia. The river’s waters rose, passing the 15-foot flood stage early in the month. By the 25th, the Columbia and Willamette Rivers reached nearly 23 feet. That day, patrols began checking Vanport’s dikes for boils or blisters.
Memorial Day morning, May 30, 1948, was calm. Picnics and family outings took many away from Vanport City. At approximately 4:17 p.m. the railroad dike on the west gave way, and water suddenly burst through it. Within moments a ten-foot high wall of water crashed into the city near Vanport College, while residents near Denver Avenue attempted to save their belongings.

One Multnomah County Sheriff described the scene:

“The apartments would hit abandoned automobiles and push them ahead of them. The apartments would also knock down telephone and light poles. Writing officer observed an apartment strike the guy wires to the radio tower and in so doing the guy wire started to cut the apartment in half. When another apartment came floating by and struck the apartment that had hit the radio tower first, the radio tower went down. The electricity in the wires crackled and when the radio tower fell it fell very close to another apartment where some people were riding on the roof.”

As the sloughs absorbed the waters and an emergency siren sounded, buses and cars headed up Denver Avenue to escape the flood. While some salvaged belongings, others canoed between the floating buildings rescuing stranded men, women, children, dogs, cats, and even birds. Thanks to the holiday, rescue efforts, and the absorbency of the sloughs, rather than hundreds, there were between sixteen and twenty lives lost at Vanport that Sunday afternoon.
The following day, when the Denver Avenue dike also broke, another officer reported: “It was only a matter of two or three minutes [later] that the break was large enough to carry whole apartments through the hole in the roadway. The apartments which first passed through the break disintegrated like match books and the water rushed through with terrific force into the Portland Meadows area.” Luckily, the race horses had already been evacuated. More than a hundred cows had also been herded across the Interstate Bridge to Vancouver.

The Vanport Flood was not the first, nor would it be the last, Columbia River flood. The river gauge at Vancouver read 28.3 feet the day Vanport flooded. The 1894 “flood of record” reached 36 feet at Vancouver. Other large floods took place in 1862, 1876, and 1880. Together, the Army Corps of Engineers and local drainage districts constructed 61 flood control projects in the early twentieth century, from the mouth of the Sandy River to the sea. The Vanport Flood occurred after the largest population increase in the region, with comprehensive development of the Columbia River already underway. The Vanport flood provided further justification for dam building and development along the river.

Columbia River flooding is still a fact of life. The 1964-65 Christmas floods reached 30 feet at Vancouver, and in 1996, warm rains on snow, a “pineapple express,” brought the river level to approximately 29 feet. The Multnomah Drainage District scrambled to prevent property damage along the same dikes that burst almost fifty years earlier. In Vancouver, the newly built waterfront walk was damaged, commercial buildings flooded, and river water seeped under the railroad on Highway-14.
Vanport City is now invisible, and unless you talk to someone who remembers, most of the century’s floods are forgotten. One would never know by looking that where today there are billions of dollars worth of real estate, just 61 years ago an entire city was swept away.

The Center for Columbia River History (CCRH) is a consortium of the Washington State Historical Society, Portland State University and Washington State University Vancouver. The CCRH mission is to promote study of the history of the Columbia River Basin and to present the results publicly. CCRH is dedicated to examining the hidden histories of the Basin and to helping people think about the historical record from different perspectives. CCRH offers free public programs and has an extensive historical website at www.ccrh.org.