In Northwest: Flooding Eases, Work Begins

As the Northwest emerged from its worst flooding in decades on Friday, you couldn’t get to Clatskanie: U.S. 30 was buried under landslides on both sides of town. You couldn’t call there: The phones were out. You couldn’t get a drink of tap water: The main feeder lines were knocked out. You could walk downtown, except it was under 2 feet of water.

“We’re expecting another high tide tonight, and there’s rumors there could be another onslaught of rain,” Shannon Valdivia, director of the emergency shelter set up at the high school, said as the region’s crippling floods dealt their havoc in communities all across Oregon and Washington. “It’s been a bad, bad deal.”

As downtown Portland escaped major damage when the Willamette River crested just inches below the top of its sea wall, emergency workers focused their attention on dozens of smaller communities such as Clatskanie, deluged from smaller overflowing rivers and the relentless march of the Columbia River in full flood toward the sea.

The Columbia, thundering along the Washington-Oregon border with a flow 1.5 times the volume of the Mississippi River, crested at 24 feet Friday afternoon in the community of St. Helens in northwest Oregon, 8 feet above flood stage.

The Boise Cascade lumber mill in St. Helens, which was Columbia County’s largest employer, was flooded, part of a swath of destruction that hit communities from Puget Sound in Washington to central Oregon, killed four people and left at least 27,000 evacuated from their homes.

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President Clinton issued a federal disaster declaration for dozens of counties in the two states, clearing the way for providing temporary housing, family grants and low-interest loans for flood victims. Federal Emergency Management Agency Director James Lee Witt scheduled a visit to the region for today.

“This is a very, very damaging flood,” Washington Gov. Mike Lowry told reporters. “It is way too early to make assessments, but I’ve seen numerous comments that this might be the worst in 50 years.”

As sunshine and blue skies broke the siege of four straight days of rain combined with heavy snowmelts, authorities said the Columbia’s crest late Friday was likely the end of the worst flooding--and the beginning of a slow and expensive process of pumping out and cleaning up.

Portland Mayor Vera Katz credited hundreds of volunteers who helped city maintenance crews load more than 4,000 sandbags, tack up 400 sections of plywood and place 900 cubic yards of rock along the city’s waterfront, saving most of downtown from flows that came within 3 inches of the top of the sea wall.

“It was a heroic, heroic public works project,” she said.

Portland now faces another kind of water crisis, with its major supply of drinking water shut off because of flood-flow contamination. Katz issued an order banning all outside water use Friday, but city officials said Portland is cutting sharply into its reserves and may have to start boiling water by Sunday--a move that would force the closure of restaurants and affect hospitals and businesses throughout the city.

“The stark reality is that we either cut back sharply on our water use--and that would be on the order of 30% to 50%--or start boiling water by Sunday. And frankly, conservation isn’t working right now,” City Commissioner Mike Lindberg said.

Dozens of communities across Oregon and Washington already were having to boil their drinking water, as large parts of both states struggled against flooding that is the worst since the historic flood of 1964.

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Large parts of Oregon City, southeast of Portland, were under as much as 10 feet of water. There also was heavy flooding in the rapidly growing suburban community of Tualatin in Washington County, parts of Vancouver, Wash., and many communities along the Columbia River in its 75-mile stretch between Portland and the Pacific Ocean.

Clatskanie was typical of the numerous rural communities that face not only heavy flooding, but potentially serious isolation. City officials were urging Clatskanie residents to stock up on medical supplies because no one knew when there would again be reliable access outside.

Residents pumped water out of businesses and began returning to two still-flooded trailer parks, but the main street downtown remained flooded. Residents said a huge volunteer effort Thursday night to shore up the dikes was simply not enough.

“Everybody was working. There were literally hundreds of volunteers out here filling sandbags. It was really a group effort,” said Clatskanie Police Officer Tom Turk. But then it started to rain again.

“We started working at 2:30 in the morning, and by 4 there were two carloads of people here. I didn’t even know who they were,” said Twila Scott, whose lumber business was flooded when the dike finally gave way late Thursday afternoon.

Evacuated residents gathered at the high school and waited. Luane Mathews, 84, was hauled out of her mobile home in the middle of the night, long after all the other residents had fled and someone realized she was still there.

“They had to lift me and carry me to the car. That part was glory,” Mathews said, sitting alone at a table in the high school cafeteria. “I wasn’t worried about being there alone. I’m perfectly capable. I’ll live there alone till I’m 105. Then I’ll die. I’ve got it all planned.”

On the other side of the Columbia, much of Woodland, Wash., was underwater--pinched in by the Columbia on the west and the raging Lewis River on the north. About 1,000 people were in shelters Friday, a day after the Lewis sent water into houses, shops, businesses and some of the town’s original farm homes.

There were similar, if less severe, scenes elsewhere in southern Washington. And the region was a transportation nightmare as Interstate 5, the north-south artery across Washington and Oregon, was cut off in two places, buried under a landslide and several feet of water. Hundreds of trucks lined the freeway near Chehalis with nowhere to go. Flying was the only option between Portland and Seattle, and Portland airport was briefly threatened by flood waters.

A few trucks were allowed to proceed under escort Friday night.

Nine freight trains were backed up in eastern Oregon, unable to cross to Portland through the Columbia Gorge, where a massive landslide buried the railroad tracks and most lanes of Interstate 84 earlier in the week.

A fourth death was added to the flood’s toll. A 60-year-old Kent, Wash., man was killed when his car plunged more than 20 feet into a sinkhole that opened up on a darkened road Thursday night. A second motorist dropped into the hole moments later, but climbed out with minor injuries. A clogged water culvert was blamed for the hole.

But Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, who checked into a Salem hospital Thursday night with chest pains, was officially out of danger. He was released to spend the day at home Friday after the pains were blamed on muscle or skeletal problems from a heavy workout.

Times researcher Doug Conner in Seattle contributed to this story.