CHRSTMAS 1964

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This is Willamette Falls. On the Willamette River with Oregon City of one side and West Linn on the bank. The falls are horseshoe shaped, approximately 1,500 feet wide and forty feet high. It's the largest waterfall by volume in the NW part of the US and the seventeenth widest in the world. This impressive in itself. It's a lead up to what happened around Christmas 1964. 

About December 13, 1964 it got cold. Really, really cold in the Northwest. Ground froze follwed by heavy snow. Then the weather changed. By December 18 a weather system similar to what's hitting right about now, but stronger, moved into Northern California, Oregon and Washington. It rained. Man oh man did it rain. Temperatures increased from below freezing by thirty to forty degrees. The snow melted but the ground didn't get a chance to thaw. 

Many areas in Oregon received almost double the usual December rain in just a few days. Rivers burst their banks. Hillsides slid. Bridges were either destroyed or severly damaged. Livestock was lost almost twenty people lost their lives. That shot is Willamette Falls on a good day. 

This is a shot from the Oregonian newspaper. The falls are unrecognizable and Oregon City was under several feet of water. Oakridge is on the Middle Fork of the Willamette. The river was always there. The highway runs along side it when you drive north west to Springfield. Runs into the reservoir behind Look Out Point Dam and then into the lake behind Fall Creek Dam. Lucky for us that the dam on thetributary Hills Creek was finished in 1961. Ironically one of the engineers who worked on Hills Creek lived behind us. Dad got to talking to him and asked how they'd managed to get the dam built without the weather getting in the way. They'd studied the weather data and it looked like there would be enough years of fairly dry weather to get the dam completed. That was in 1961. BTW it's a nice drive around the lake. Some good camp grounds. Watch out for the poison oak. 

Then 1964 came along three years later. The Middle Fork of the Willamette took out Hwy 58 above town and the bridge at Deception Creek below town. Lucky for us Oakridge itself is high enough above the river that we were inconvenienced. We got really wet but not flooded.  We got sent home early a couple of days before Christmas Break. Didn't even have time to clean out the refrigerators in the Home Ec room. That was our first job in January and the Christmas concert was held in January. 

It was called a one hundred year flood. It broke all the records that had been kept since the late 1800's. Some folks down in Northern California called it a thousand year flood when mother nature staged a refun in January. All the planned flood control dams were in place. 

I'm reminded of this because we are getting some good early snow. More than good in some areas. It's a reminder to not count that snow pack until say, March. Man plans and God or the Universe laughs.