By Brent Hunsberger of The Oregonian staff, Monday February 5, 2001
Time stopped for Elizabeth Conrad on Feb. 6, 1996, when a wall of mud and trees barreled into the back of her next-door neighbor's home.
Five years later, the Southwest Portland home is abandoned and boarded up, the slide virtually untouched, the street above it barricaded and cracked.
City officials refuse responsibility for its repair, leaving Conrad fearful that the rest of the hillside will topple her house.
"My home is worthless," said Conrad, 45. "I can't sell it. I can't rent it.
And I can't afford to leave it." Conrad has never recovered from the wet weather that sparked the spectacular floods of February 1996. In one fateful week, a heavy snowpack rapidly melted under pouring rain, sending rivers over their banks throughout the Willamette River valley. In Oregon, eight people died and an estimated $400 million in uninsured property was lost.
Since then, more than $240 million in public money has been spent repairing roads, armoring banks, elevating or buying flood-prone homes and planning for the next disaster.
Most Portland-area cities and counties have revised flood-plain maps and put more controls on development. Salem now requires additional reviews by geologists or engineers before building on slide-prone soils.
But a few people, such as Conrad, have never recovered, having slipped through the cracks of the federal government's disaster-assistance efforts.
Nearly $120 million in requests for flood repair and prevention assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency went unfilled, according to the Oregon Office of Emergency Management. The federal Small Business Administration rejected more than one-third of the 4,153 applications for low-interest disaster-assistance loans because the applicants had low cash reserves or poor credit histories, said Rick Jenkins, a spokesman for the agency.
"My guess is that there are probably a lot of people who never fully recover from it," said Casey Marley, emergency manager for Clackamas County. "But I doubt we can help them recover from it. I think deep in our heart we all believe in a calamity everyone will rally around us and things will be OK.
This was a hard lesson." The flooding was devastating. President Clinton declared disasters in 18 Oregon counties. The Willamette, for once, looked like a rushing river. Its flows in Portland rose to 450,000 cubic feet per second, equaling the mighty Columbia River's clip at Bonneville Dam, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Willamette Falls at Oregon City became a ripple, and muddy water damaged most of 40 downtown businesses. The city of Keizer evacuated 12,000 people.
Some of the worst damage occurred in Tillamook County, where 1,200 dairy cows were swept away and damage to buildings and roads reached $53 million.
The damage in Portland could have been much worse were it not for quick action by federal dam managers and weather forecasters. With mountain snowpacks at 500 percent of average, hydrologists with the Natural Resource Conservation Service began taking hourly snowmelt readings on Feb. 2.
At the same time, Army Corps of Engineers officials gathered in their windowless reservoir control center in downtown Portland. They began asking federal authorities and power providers in Idaho, Washington and Canada to manipulate reservoir levels behind 60 dams along the Columbia, Snake and Willamette rivers drainages to make room for the excess water.
Without those efforts, corps officials say, the Willamette would have crested 6 to 8 feet higher in Portland and spilled over the sandbag-and-plywood sea wall that Mayor Vera Katz rallied volunteers to build along the river.
"We were about 6 inches from testing that temporary sea wall," said Cindy Henriksen, chief of the corps' reservoir control center in Portland. "We didn't have to. The willingness on the part of the other agencies, the other dam operators, was just very positive." For months afterward, federal, state and local officials spent more than $100 million repairing public roads and undertaking flood-prevention projects. The Small Business Administration doled out $71 million in low-interest loans to get 2,600 homeowners, renters and businesses on their feet. Federal engineers and soil conservation officials spent $40 million more replacing dikes and fortifying streambanks.
The results? Albany, which pipes drinking water from the Santiam River, installed a flood-warning system in its water supply canal. Portland and Oregon City bought out low-lying homes along Johnson and Abernethy creeks, creating more capacity to handle future floods.
Soil conservation officials carved out depressions in wheat fields above the Columbia River Gorge to keep runoff from inundating the town of Rufus. About $200,000 was spent in Tillamook creating earthen mounds in dairy fields where cows can be safe during future flooding.
County emergency management officials have set their sights on planning for the next flood, heeding state climatologist George Taylor's warning that the 1996 event was not a 100-year phenomenon but something that probably will happen again within 25 years. Predictions of a 20-year cycle of wetter weather, combined with past development in flood plains, could make flood repairs a common exercise in Oregon.
"This idea that it's going to happen once every 100 years just isn't so," said Matt Spangler, planning director for Lincoln County, where floods along the Siletz in 1998 and 1999 exceeded those of 1996. "In fact, it's going to happen more frequently. At least it has around here." That has Columbia County Commissioner Tony Hyde lobbying the Legislature to create a statewide disaster-relief fund. Hyde said the lack of such reserves left the small towns of Mist and Vernonia without matching grants for many flood-repair projects.
"There were a number of communities, not the least of which was my own, that did not have sufficient funds," said Hyde, the former mayor of Vernonia. "We left literally millions of dollars on the table." Many Oregon homeowners and lenders have taken preventive action on their own. Flood insurance policies in Oregon have nearly tripled since the floods, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In Tillamook County alone, where floodwaters rose again Thanksgiving 1999, more than 900 new policies have been purchased, prompting federal officials to consider reducing rates by 20 percent.
"There's just no substitute for flood insurance," said Abby Kershaw, director of the state Office of Emergency Management's financial and recovery services. "FEMA will never make you whole. Their standard is safe, sanitary and secure. They're not going to recarpet your house." And as dozens of landowners around Portland have discovered, insurance policies don't cover landslides.
More than 700 slides pounded the Portland area, causing $30 million in damage, according to a study led by Scott Burns, a Portland State University geology professor. Human activity and poor storm-water controls played a part in most of the slides.
In the city, property damage from landslides nearly equaled that caused by flooding. City officials paid out more than $100,000 in claims for the city's role in the slides and are still battling one lawsuit in the state Court of Appeals.
"The focus during those four days was Vera's wall," Burns said. "I always say when the rivers rise, the slopes will slide. The rivers went back down.
But where the landslides were, people were having to do detours for months." In Elizabeth Conrad's Southwest Portland neighborhood, they still are.
Cullen Boulevard, which snakes above Conrad's home, remains blocked with "Street Closed" signs. The ivy-filled slope beneath it still leans against the back wall of Conrad's neighbor.
City officials plan to tear down the home this summer, but they have no plans to fix Cullen Boulevard. They cite a city code requiring adjacent landowners to control streets without curbs, sidewalks and gutters.
"We don't maintain unimproved streets," said Calvin Lee, supervising engineer for the city's Office of Transportation.
Conrad, still fearful of a slide, sleeps in her front room when it rains.
Multnomah County now estimates that her three-bedroom home is worth $5,300.
"I'm starting over like a teen-ager," she said.
You can reach Brent Hunsberger at 503-221-8359 or by e-mail at brenthunsberger@news.oregonian.com.
This page created and maintained by Chehalis River Council
Send comments or questions to the: Chehalis River Council