An interesting project in St. Paul, Minnesota emerged in this Star Tribune article “Work could begin soon to bring St. Paul’s Phalen Creek back to the surface,” which highlights the mix of ecological and cultural benefits of urban stream daylighting. Through a focus on both the benefits to wildlife habitat and ecosystem function and the connection of cultural heritage for native people and early immigrants to the area, it shows a rich story that is told through multiple lenses to provide solid rationale for daylighting projects.
One major idea of daylighting is visibility. As mentioned in the Star Tribune article, this is a typical case of burial of creeks for development, but like many other areas, the perceptions have shifted and the value of historical waterways are being restored. A big part of that is pointed out by Ramsey-Washington Metro district watershed project manager Paige Ahlborg, watershed project: “Another benefit is just restoring a community’s connection to the water,” Ahlborg said. “Seeing it makes it harder to do things that harm it. We still have a number of people who think that ‘if I put something down the [storm]sewer drain, it will be treated.'”
The history of places is expressed in place names. From the Capitol Region Watershed District site, some history on the current name: “Swede Hollow on the City of Saint Paul’s East Side is a historic immigrant neighborhood dating back to the 19th century. This lowland valley includes a portion of a stream from Phalen Creek to the Mississippi River. After housing was removed following the turn of the century, the city created Swede Hollow Park and placed some of the stream flow in a storm sewer pipe to complete its path to the river.”
Image of Phalen Creek burial in the 1920s. – via Minnesota Historical Society
As is the case with most places, the story and names is often told in European terms (i.e. Swede Hollow). The creek name as well comes from Edward Phalen, one of Saint Paul’s original colonists, who settled on the banks of the creek in 1838. Prior to this arrival, the history of place stretched far earlier as referenced in the Lower Phalen Creek Project, a native-led project:
“This creek served as a corridor for the Dakota people who lived here, as they made their way up the chain of lakes by canoe to White Bear Lake – one of many areas where they gathered wild rice.”
The daylighting has both ecological and cultural benefits. In the Star Tribune, Lower Phalen Creek Project Executive Direction Maggie Lorenz, who is both Dakota and Ojibwe, mentions: “[Phalen Creek] is an essential part of the community — it will bring more natural habitat and it means more opportunities for recreation and stormwater management. And, from a cultural perspective, we are really interested in restoring the land and taking care of the land according to our traditional teachings.”
While the goal is to extend daylighting all the way to the Mississippi River, one the first legs connects from Lake Phalen and Maryland Avenue as shown in this enlarged plan, highlighting the ecological benefits, including fish passage and enhanced in-stream habitat, establishment not just of the creek but adjacent floodplain wetlands to provide resilience and habitat for amphibians, and upland prairies that provide native riparian habitat supporting birds and pollinators.
“Consultants at Inter-Fluve, Inc. produced this visual to represent the proposed location, general design elements, and predicted habitat benefits of a restored stream channel of Phalen Creek at the Lake Phalen / Maryland Avenue project site.” via Lower Phalen Creek Project
A ton of additional information is at the LPCP site, including graphic summary of the project is found in a brochure that connects the dots between the cultural and ecological.
A project from artist Cristina Iglesias (see a post of some of her previous work here) again dives into the idea of hidden hydrology, this time in New York City. Entitled Landscape and Memory (referencing the title of one of my favorite books by Simon Schama), the work unearths a buried stream in Madison Square Park.
From The Architect’s Newspaper: “Manhattan is crisscrossed by streams and rivers that have since been buried but continue to flow, flooding their banks and the basements above when it rains. For Landscape and Memory, Iglesias will exhume an impression of Cedar Creek, which once flowed beneath where the park now stands today.”
From the Madison Square Park Conservancy, some more info: “Nodding to historian Simon Schama’s major 1995 volume of the same name, which surveyed the history of landscape across time and terrain, Landscape and Memory is informed by Iglesias’ research into the history of the site. For the project, Iglesias located and studied antique maps that documented the water flow beneath Madison Square Park, where the Cedar Creek and Minetta Brook once coursed for two miles before flowing into the Hudson River. With nineteenth-century industrialization, streams like the Cedar and Minetta were buried underground to create additional land for building sites, underground drains, or sewers. Through Landscape and Memory, Iglesias renders this buried history visible again, inviting viewers to contemplate centuries of transformation of urban sites that were once natural.”
Excited to hear more about this and see more images, as the sketch is a bit… sketchy. You can check out the full press release here for more info. Based on some of her previous work it will be wonderful in execution. The work will be installed from May 23, 2022, through December 4, 2022 so those in New York City go check it out and report back.
It’s more of a deep dive into some of the research, but the general thrust is that water intrusion in systems has reduced capacity, and that the intentional encasement of streams and springs in pipes reduces the capacity of infrastructure which has a significant economic, environmental and social implications for the infrastructure, as it reduced the baseflow reduces the overall effectiveness of gray infrastructure.
The typical mechanism for intrusion into pipes is related to cracks, which is assumed to be residual groundwater entering pipes in ‘dry weather’ times, where there should be no flow into the system. Groundwater intrusion should not be discounted, but there are other sources of intrusion that are typically not considered, specifically “capture of streams and springs” that impact combined systems capacity.
The figure below shows the change in baseflow and runoff response due to the intrusion of the additional water from streams and springs.
The paper continues to identify the issue, also highlighting the lack of research on this topic, and answers some fundamental questions about how this capture occurs, how to identify it, what is the magnitude and impacts, and ways to manage it. Always interested in language, one item of interest explores key terminology – culverting, extraneous water, groundwater infiltration, sewer inflows and the key element, stream and spring capture. The wordplay is compelling, with some uniquely evocative terms emerging such as parasite flow, misconnected surface waters, sewer leakage and illicit connections all telling a story of water that is in a sense, ‘out of place’.
The how and why is interesting. The most basic version is to take a free flowing stream and incorporate it into a pipe (Type A in graphic above). “Urban streams were frequently culverted and buried, especially during the period of rapid urban expansion in the 19th century.” It’s not a stretch to show that the literature confirms that “old sewers were frequently the covered channels of brooks”, as early development merely hid the streams, but didn’t generate as much additonal flow to overwhelm the piped streams. This happened with additional development and expansion of cities and impervious zones. Often the buried streams become the names for the sewers themselves, such as those specifically mentioned in the article like Garrison Creek Sewer in Toronto and Minetta Brook Sewer in New York.
The baseflow in the streams, unlike sewage, is clean, so the incorporation into pipes and transportation to wastewater treatment plants means additional strain on purification infrastructure with water that doesn’t need treatment. This relates to the original conceptual idea of the Tibbetts Brook example today, with a clear path to remove ‘clean’ water that is reducing combined capacity and overall resilience to deal with larger storms.
Additional capture happens by interception (Type B in graphic above). The most visible example is the massive interceptor sewers in London developed by Bazalgette in response to the ‘Big Stink’ in the the 1850s, acting as a divertor to sewage entering the Thames. This model was copied around the globe, with numerous examples of streams disconnected from their outfalls and no longer making it to their original destinations in the name of water quality. Portland has a large, expensive example of this called the Big Pipe. Many other cities have similar interceptor systems.
Another mode of is by directly capturing and draining spring and seeps in combined sewers, in this case through leaky pipes with cracks and joint openings. Beyond being shoddy construction, this was intentional, designed as deliberately leaky to provide drainage in areas of perched or high groundwater. The 3 types are summarized graphically above, showing variations of combined sewers and stream capture typologies.
The connection here to lost rivers is outlined in the article: “Not all streams and springs are fully captured by these modes of entry. London’s lost rivers diverted into the High, Mid and Low Level Interceptors to the WwTW, (wastewater treatment works) such as the Walbrook, Fleet, Tyburn and Westbourne, do still discharge to the River Thames during heavy storm events, where the original courses of the rivers serve as CSOs.” This is also a pattern in the United States (New York) and Asia (Tokyo) where many of the piped streams never make it to their original drainage water bodies.
The 19th Century was a historic time for burial of waterways, as the rate of urbanization outpaced the ability of natural streams to remove wastes. Thus: “Urban streams that had become open sewers were frequently culverted and buried to provide more sanitary conditions, and this concept is a popular narrative predominantly explaining the conversion of many smaller watercourses to combined sewers (type A).” Beyond the main drivers of pollution reduction and removal of the streams to create land for development, the introduction of seeps and springs provided some necessary baseflow to ‘flush’ sewers as a method of ‘self-cleansing’, and thus was in common practice in sewer design.
It is obviously difficult to identify these captured streams, as they exist under the surface and the original hydrology has been erased. This is where hidden hydrology methodology, using mapping and other primary sources to show where routes of surface flows used to run. Often these were parts of combined sewers, but in some cases the streams were just dumped into pipes. While still important, it is less impactful to combined systems and wastewater treatment facilities as they are often just draining into the same waterbodies that the original creek flowed in to.
Urban exploration is another method of finding routes of streams mentioned (which I’ve covered in depth here in many cities). Mapping of sewers and streams supplement this work, with many cities having robust sets of maps dating centuries in the past to fill in gaps of knowledge of what was there and what was replaced. More sophistical modeling can be helpful, but simple cues like place and street names and other subtle clues can also be extra data to be used to pinpoint old routes of waterways. As mentioned:
“Relevant information on lost urban watercourses helps to establish the pre-development hydrology, but the usefulness of historic maps depends strongly on spatial and temporal coverage, with many older towns and cities having altered the hydrological landscape before the first available maps. The smallest streams and springs may also not be marked on maps at certain scales, particularly intermittent and ephemeral channels.”
The ability to quantify these captured streams is equally challenging – there is adequate knowledge of the phenomenon but lacking in specific data on volumes, routes and baseflow contributions to the systems. While even knowing the levels would be helpful, measuring current flows will yield radically different results today versus pre-development conditions. When quantities can be estimated, the economic benefits can be modeled to see impacts, but this is not common. How the water is distributed is also variable and depends on unique qualities of each stream.
The major consequences are two-fold. First, the introduction of clean stream water increases the amount of water handled by treatment plants, which has larger infrastructure costs in terms of facility construction and operations. Second, loss of surface streams has impacts to habitat, less ecological connectivity, and overall less ecosystem services, including amenity value. It can even have secondary impacts on urban heat by reduction of linear corridors of riparian vegetation. While the anecdotal benefits of ‘flushing’ using the streams was developed early-on, it’s not understood if there’s actual value of these approaches.
A summary of the impacts on the industry are included:
More land and costs needed for wastewater treatment infrastructure
Additional operational costs and use of chemicals
External impacts, such as public health impacts of CSOs, impacts due to loss of ecosystem services due to diversion of local streams, and economic losses.
There’s a more detailed cast study from Zurich, Switzerland that’s worth exploring more. In summary, the authors mention the city as a pioneer through “innovative management of capture streams and springs in combined sewers,” typically through separation using daylighting. This was driven by understanding the “lost social ad environmental values of watercourses that had become culverted and had historically been used as wastewater sewers.”
The benefits to the public include amenity spaces, and also more efficient infrastructure through additional capacity. This dual benefit is key to the Stream Concept, and became codified into planning policy and laws. The dramatic reducing in streams due to urbanization is similar to other cities, with development displacing larger areas of open space and burial of streams, many of which were converted into combined sewers between 1850 and 1980 as seen in the figure below.
The transformation of streams from this point in 1980 shows the changes in approach used by Zurich in the Stream Concept. This is outline in the existing condition (1) which includes stream capture in a traditional combined sewer system, a severing of the hydrological system and piping; the first transformation (2) consisting of separation of the combined systems to removed capture streams, and eventually the final phase of the Stream Concept (3) “separating captured streams and springs into daylighted urban watercourses.”
An important aspect which reflects my approach allows for hybrids of ‘daylighting’ without and zero-sum outcome of daylight or nothing, but allow for a continuum of potential options – as I’ve discussed, between art and science (abstraction vs. pure restoration) or more specifically, interventions that can be located in a triad of artistic, design, or engineering. The street streams, per the articles:
“Naturalistic stream channels and riparian corridors are used where possible, but where space is limited, engineered “street streams” are installed. The latter may have a lower ecological potential, but nevertheless offer architectural value in urban areas.”
The two different typologies seen above show a ‘naturalistic’ approach in a more suburban location (Albrisrieder Dorfbach), versus the more urban ‘street stream’ in Zurich (Nebelbach). The street streams may mimic green infrastructure solutions like green streets as linear corridors, with the conceptual difference of being able to be hydrologically connected from source to outfall to re-connect the old stream corridor, versus merely being site specific insertions.
The article concludes that there is value in disconnecting streams and springs from combined systems (or if we could spin time back, not connecting them in the first place), with economic, environmental and social benefits. The diversion of clean, constantly flowing water out of combined systems provides capacity, and by daylighting (vs. piping) these streams, we have the additional ecosystem benefits. The need for more research is mentioned: “By using daylighted urban streams to convey the clean water baseflow, highly promising social and environmental benefits have been suggested; an independent peer-reviewed appraisal of this approach would be strongly recommended.” Since this is a 2013 article, I’m curious what additional scholarship has emerged in the last decade.
I also am intrigued by two of the US examples identified in the article were in Portland and Seattle, both of which mention combined sewers with springs running in them. Worthy of more exploration, but both of these do related to a location where a stream was buried and integrated into the pipe infrastructure of the city, which was common in many streams in both cities (for instance Ravenna Creek in Seattle, or Tanner Creek in Portland). Perhaps with the continual increasing impacts of climate change on these systems would drive another look at some daylighting to increase the resilience of the pipes to handle more capacity, while also providing habitat, amenity, recreation, and a range of other essential urban ecosystem services?
Full Citation: A.T. Broadhead, R. Horn, D.N. Lerner, Captured streams and springs in combined sewers: A review of the evidence, consequences and opportunities, Water Research, Volume 47, Issue 13, 2013, Pages 4752-4766, ISSN 0043-1354, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2013.05.020
Header Image: Figure from the article: Historic loss of Zurich’s streams (water in blue) with increasing urbanisation (grey).
I feel like I’ve been overcomplicating my explanations of the connections of climate change and hidden hydrology and Sanderson just nailed the concept in a few words. While the explanation is simple, the complex interactions between that hidden (buried) strata beneath the surface that have been erased from our urban areas and how these areas are poised to re-emerge in the urban sphere in dangerous ways as zones of flooding during extreme weather events is a topic worthy of more examination.
We have plenty of extreme events and flooding here in the Pacific Northwest to see this phenomenon play out in similar ways, causing water levels to rise in creeks or streams, or with high-precipitation rainfall that accumulates faster than it can drain in cities. Hurricanes, however, seem to be a special case in exacerbating issues just by the sheer scale and concentration of impacts in a short duration. These continual, cyclical events along the Eastern Seaboard ad Gulf Coast highlight the danger or urban flooding and as Sanderson points out, offers clear connections with the current flood events in locations of historical, now buried, waterways.
Hurricane Sandy opened many eyes to the risks. At the time there were a number of articles that caught my eye, particularly the idea that inundation and flooding at the margins were related to the idea of land filling and shoreline creation and the margins, replacing natural shorelines with hardened urban edges and bringing development out into these areas. In this June 2013 article in the Daily Mail, “How Hurricane Sandy flooded New York back to its 17th century shape as it inundated 400 years of reclaimed land.” the .
Expanded Shoreline of Manhattan from 1650-1980 – via Daily Mail
Looking at the extent of flooding in Hurricane Sandy (map below) and a number of studies on flood risk, it’s possible to do a quick mental overlay ad show the vulnerability related to the ‘made land’.
This is obviously not unique to New York City, and I’m interested in researching other places where flooding and made land has a similar correlation. In these cases, the conceptual connection started to take shape in the impacts of flooding at the edges, and how filled land can become a marker for shoreline flooding, which will inevitably be impacted more by sea-level rise in cities that have claimed1 this land from their adjacent water bodies.
The most recent events, during Hurricane Ida, Sanderson points out, go even more fine grain to individual inland areas where historic creeks or wetlands intersect with, such as Central Park (where wetlands were removed in construction of the park) and various other areas, including fatal incidents of basement flooding, in areas of where creeks, streams, wetlands and tideflats existed even up the the early 1900s.
A specific example of flash flooding in the subway in Manhattan at 28th Street and 7th Avenue (see video on Twitter post which is bonkers for both the intensity of the flooding and the utter lack of reaction from New Yorkers watching on the platform). As the article mentions the location of the flooding: “Right in the middle of a wetland clearly shown on 18th-century maps, the headwaters for The Old Wreck, a stream that fed Sunfish Pond, on the south side of Murray Hill, before reaching the sea at Kip’s Bay.”
18th Century Map showing location of wetland in area of 28th Street Station – via NY Times
The takeaway of cause and effect is summed up by Sanderson:
“The city even has a map where the extreme flooding happens, compiled from 311 reports and official observations. It is, for all intents and purposes, a map of the old streams.”
The action here is simple – avoid damage and loss of life from these events, because they are not going to stop any time soon. Increase resilience (both social and eco/hydrological) helps, and as the OpEd mentions, there are many other socio-economic factors involved that increase risk. But Sanderson looks for solutions (the old ways of knowledge) and points out “The losses are mainly the result of our inability to read the landscape where we live and conceive fully what it means to live there. We need to see the landscape in new, by which I mean old, terms.”
Where we location development must respect the hydrological history, as we’ve seen time and time again our inability to overpower nature, and ultimately the failure of forgetting what we buried. Worth a read for the article is a great explication of a terribly absent land consciousness and ethic, but at a practical level, there are some hints that allow us to connect historical ecology to solutions such as making room for water and using Nature based solutions such as wetland restoration and tree planting, many of which are continuing to take a rightful place in climate and resilience plans.
Perhaps the ending, again, for all of our complex machinations, allows us to think more simply about the solution and find opportunities for this simple action:
“Let’s let the streams run free.”
Endnotes
Maybe my own rant, but there’s a whole series of posts and discuss related to the concept of ‘reclaiming’ land from the sea, which is the common parlance in this case. I do prefer ‘claiming’ and the idea of ‘made land’, as it’s really impossible to reclaim something you never possessed in the first place.
Header image – NY Times – photo by Anthony Behar/Sipa – Associated Press
After bit of a break I’m hoping to write more frequently on all things Hidden Hydrology. For some context, in this time away I have been researching more deeply Portland’s Hidden Hydrology, delving into archives for stories of my local disappeared streams, buried creeks, and filled wetlands around the metropolitan area. I’ve also compiled a composite map of Portland spanning the 1850s through the 1900s to piece together the most complete version of the hidden hydrological layers that existed pre-settlement. I’ve kept up doing research more informally in the broader and mostly sharing on Twitter and Instagram, which are both simpler media for messaging, but also seem lacking in depth that more expansive writing can capture. While it may be true that blogging is no longer a viable medium, I feel a need to write more deeply, and more often, and more personally about my home, my history, and my places. This will hopefully lead to writing more broadly as well in journals, and culminate in my ultimate goal — to write a book (or more than one) on hidden hydrology.
A few recent thoughts, ideas that I take with me into the next journey.
Every story has a uniquely human interface and the phenomena of hidden hydrology is no different, with a variety of actors involved in the discovery, use, manipulation, destruction, protection, and restoration that are all story arcs of urban streams, wetlands and other water bodies. I have always seen the people involved in more broad strokes, as populations and groups acting against nature and natural processes, or conversely communities and coalitions being often negatively acted upon and attempting to preserve and protect systems. Rarely did I connect people to places in a meaningful way beyond faceless groups, only rarely placing individuals and their stories and essential ingredients to unlocking the true history of place.
Sketch of Indians Fishing by Willamette Falls – 1841 by Joseph Drayton (Oregon History Project)
As origin stories, the native Chinookan people have occupied and shaped the waters of Portland for centuries. There are specific narratives of leaders, like Concomly as part of the larger Chinook territory in the late 1700s and early 1800s and Kiesno (aka Cassino) who was located near Portland on Wapato Island, who was also an important figure through the early to mid 1800s , The native stories and start to take shape via early explorers, whereby they drift into settler narratives told about those indigenous people and never told by them. Thus we remember ‘discovery’ and the snapshots of what written narratives and maps were documented, but know less about the life and the interaction with many of the places in the region beyond a few major areas of significance that were spiritual centers and places of food gathering and trade. I challenged myself to weave these stories into the narratives, and although I feel more informed, I’ve barely scratched the surface, so the next steps are to engage and learn from descendants and hear stories of places that were of significance to Chinook people in the past, and those that are still resonant today.
In Seattle, I walked and wrote about Licton Springs, which explored the deep indigenous connections to place in a remnant urban stream – weaving together the long and contentious history, which was recently given protection as a landmark of cultural significance to Coast Salish people. Many of these stories need to be told, and the opportunity to connect our diverse history to water places – the water stories and human stories, continues to intrigue me.
Licton Springs (Photo by Author)
Broadening the cultural lens, I’ve written about Tanner Creek and the Chinese farmers who cultivated lands adjacent to the creek using the amazing resource by Marie Rose-Wong on early Chinese residents of Portland, documenting the erasure of the creek and the Chinese farms in tandem, both slowly disappearing from Portland in the wake of ‘progress’ that wanted neither the Chinese people, nor the messiness of flooding, steep gulches that stood in the way of a modern metropolis.
View of Chinese Farms in Tanner Creek Gulch – circa 1892 (Portland Archives)
The narratives feature places like Guild’s Lake, a contested area with a variety of actors working to destroy, displace and erase historic waterways to pave the way for development and industrialization, with little thought to the impacts ecologically and socially to these actions. As you map out the timeline of erasure for many waterways, it’s never one person or one big move, but a variety of consistent, incremental actions, driven by the need for progress and growth, that privileged the needs of few over the impacts to many. The missing piece of this is again the human dimension, the root of all of these stories were the people who occupied these places, and how they, and their actions, gave life to the unique water places in the community. And as other forces removed the waterways, how they were impacted by the places are lost. The places are not coming back, but but hopefully through the stories some idea of that experience can re-emerge and remain.
Chinese man fishing in Guild’s Lake – circa 1890 (Oregon Historical Society – OHS-bb016278)
Another significant narrative in Portland’s water history is the intersection with the African American story, told through the emergence and eventual destruction of Vanport City. There are many narratives as to the cause of the flooding and destruction of in the1940s worth exploring, and the eventual displacement and segregation that happened after the city was destroyed continues to shape the city today.
As my post documenting the amazing OPB documentary “Vanport” shows, these, too are human stories, with interviews and first person accounts of the development and occupation of this novel community, and the lead up to the destruction and displacement of larger populations of people that had lasting impacts and left an indelible mark on the racial history and social structure of Portland.
CLIMATE CONNECTIONS
While Vanport was not a result of climate change per se, this larger narrative of catastrophic flood events also provides a hint at more extreme future scenarios that intersect with my research on hidden hydrology: the connections between the lost and buried streams, wetlands, ponds and water bodies, along with made-land through filling and manipulating shorelines, and how these ultimately give clues to and exacerbate our present impacts related to climate change.
Stories in the mainstream media are reinforcing these connections, and through recent research, and continues to gain prominence and momentum as a dimensions of climate change evolve and the impacts are played out in communities more frequently and in more extreme forms.
There are a number of drivers for the ‘creative destruction’ of water systems in cities. Making land for development by piping creeks, filling gulches, ponds, wetlands and shorelines to make developable land offers the chance to grow and continue to build. Much of this was also an element of the modern safety movement that was concerned with life and property damage from flooding creeks, and the related sanitary movement was driven by public health concerns, often by removing access to polluted waterways. In short term and in earlier times, these efforts may have seemed good approaches but come with some unfortunate baggage in loss of ecosystem function, and lack of resilience.
Flooding is obviously not a new thing, and is not always the result of removal of waterways not of climate change. However it is not difficult to make general connections that flooding often follows the historical shape of water in cities, and that removal, filling, and piping of creeks, streams, wetlands and ponds has lasting impacts to the hydrology and that the impacts will be more evident as climate change raises sea levels, increases extreme precipitation and storms, and increases urban heat.
A recent NY Times editorial by Eric Sanderson makes this case, unpacking impacts of recent extreme weather and hurricanes and tracing that to lost streams that wove through New York City. The simple statement of “Water will go where water has always gone.” sums up the phenomenon, while giving us an interesting new (old?) methodology for predicting impacts by using historical hydrological systems in new ways. Beyond that in the past year, my Twitter feed is filled with stories of flooding in Europe, UK, and around the US, a global climate change induced impact all traced back to the link between historical waterways and current, human-caused climate change. Lots more on this topic to come.
EVOLUTION
As I researched more from the archives of local newspapers and uncovered more unique, human stories, the narratives became less about places and the lost waterways, but how these created a tableau of life. Rarely were stories these idyllic and utopian, but painted a picture of daily life and the struggle to build a city carved out of the forest at the confluence of two rivers. Often they were narratives of greed, racism, and exploitation, focusing on power and money which were allowed to run rampant in a time of very little environmental policy and awareness of impacts.
The water stories become stories of native people who developed thriving communities that were in a short span of time decimated by disease, violence and displacement from their lands and waters. The stories of Chinese farmers who lived on the margins of gulches and ponds in Portland, who contributed to the building of the community and were rewarded with racism and erasure from their places of productivity and community. The devastation of a flooded African American community of Vanport left ship workers and their families, engaged in supporting the war effort while building a life in Portland left many without a place live and led to a continuing and marginalization that continues today.
These historical water stories connect people to place and add a human dimension to an ecological history. When woven together with more contemporary climate stories, it also provide a solid foundation for why this work matters in design and planning for the future. It is far from a nostalgic looking back of what’s lost, but rather an opportunity to think about lessons learned related to how we can live and thrive together while growing a diverse community. It is also a blueprint for action on climate resilience, a future-focused approach to planning for urban heat, flooding, and other key resilience measures to make our communities more livable. Call the preliminary phases of this project a good information gathering, understanding what hidden hydrology is. The evolution becomes how to use this information to shape our communities in positive ways. Look forward to exploring and continuing to evolve.
Dublin is another city with a rich history of lost waterways, so as a quick follow-up to the previous post about Belfast, let’s keep the focus on Ireland for a bit longer. The best source for this is a great article by Arron Henderson, “The Poddle and Dublin’s Hidden Rivers“, which mentions that there were over 60 watercourses flowing at one time. While a few remain such as the Liffey, Dodder, Santry, and Tolka – most are either completely gone or mostly underground. Henderson focuses on the Poddle, “…which runs underground for the majority of its course.”
The Poddle flows under Bridge and over a Weir at Mount Argus (via Dublin)
He points of the importance of these hidden streams, and how learning about them can connect with the history of places, sometimes in the margins, and often long erased from memory.
“It’s clear the Poddle played a crucial role in shaping Dublin’s history over so many hundreds of years. Providing our drinking water, powering mills, providing water for brewing, tanning, distilling and market gardens. This explains why, once they learn about it, people tend to treat this modest little river with interest and affection. An affection which is, after all, no more than it deserves.”
The River Tymon/Poddle near its source, as it flows out from Tymon Park – (via Dublin)
As mentioned in the article, there are many other hidden rivers, including the Swan, and place names emerge, with stories about the shopping center named after Rathmines, one of the tributaries of the Swan. Also some etymology, like the suffix “-iken” which means small, and one of Dublin’s rivers named in homage of another larger river named the Nanny, becoming it’s smaller namesake, the Naniken River.
For some exploration, there’s a map that I found, but can’t figure out the author, showing “dublin river past present and culverted“. A snapshot of the map is here, but it’s explorable via the Google map. Many of the waterways are untitled (and perhaps unnamed), but some are identified. Let me know if anyone knows the creator of this one.
Similarly, this leads to opportunities for students to explore and learn about these hidden local waterways, as shown in this story from Dublin People, “Students explore hidden Northside waterways” and The National Neighborhood efforts to connect school kids to this hidden hydrological history. ” Led by artist Claire Halpin, the students are investigating the hidden rivers of Finglas and the Tolka river valley, and with the help of the National Museum of Ireland Collins’ Barracks Education team, are getting a chance to see first hand how their ancestors got around on the waters of north-west Dublin. “
“Already they have been learning about the secret underground river, Finglas Wood Stream, which flows right beneath their school. “
For further exploration and information, this video from Urban Tales RTÉ One has a good story about Dublin’s Hidden Rivers, covering the history of the rivers, mapping, and even a little subterranean exploration. Worth a watch.
MAPS
There’s great resources via the Ordnance Survey Ireland and a great collection of 19th Century Historical Maps – check out the link to find more like these for areas all over Ireland.
A recent article on Belfast’s River Farset jogged my memory that I’ve got a ton of great info the hidden rivers in many cities around the world, so figured I’d start writing about them. For this post, I’ll focus on Belfast, and return shortly to discuss Dublin to round out Ireland, then move on to other locales. As mentioned in the most recent article, “For 170 years, the river that gave Belfast its name has been buried underground in a hidden tunnel.” It goes on to discuss how, similar to many stories of cities worldwide, the river was slowly changed from vital aquatic resource that fueled manufacturing such as linen mills, to it’s transformation as dumping ground, leading to the eventual encasement: “One million bricks and 40 years later, the last section of the Farset that flowed through the city centre was buried underground in 1848, and it has remained hidden from sight ever since.“
In the 1800s, the Farset helped to power Belfast’s textile mills, factories and distilleries PHOTO: De Luan/Alamy (via Daily Trust)
From the article:
“Belfast, or Béal Feirste (‘the sandy ford at the mouth of the Farset’, in Irish) not only owes its existence to this river, but also its growth and early prosperity. Yet, for the last 170 years, this ancient waterway has been sealed off from the outside world by a series of tunnels, and is largely forgotten by those walking just above it.”
The desire to open up the Farset is a common theme, with plans “…to redevelop land around an exposed part of the river and also produce a full heritage package – including an exhibition, Farset app, public information signs, and tours with trained guides – that will highlight the heritage to local people and also attract tourism.”
Another article echoing this sentiment in the Belfast Telegraph traces “The lost river that gave Belfast its name” and offers an exploration as well: “Old drawings show a bustling river which powered Belfast’s industrial development and ferried traders into what is now High Street. But most locals would be hard-pressed to pinpoint exactly where the Farset flows before it reaches the city centre – because almost the entire route is now hidden beneath our feet in the form of culverts. The Greater Shankill Partnership recently revealed it wants to transform one of the few open stretches of the Farset into a public amenity as part of its long-term Shankill Greenway plan.”
Tracing the source of the Farset river in Belfast from the hills over looking Belfast to its end at the Lagan Weir Shankill cemetery where the river behind – image via Belfast TelegraphTracing the source of the River Farset in Belfast: river ends at the Big Fish at Customs House Square –
This similar theme is expressed in stories from 2015 from the BBC, “Hidden History of Belfast’s lesser-know rivers brought to the surface”, which includes the Farset, as well as the Blackstaff rivers, both of which “determined the shape of the city that grew up around the narrowest bridging point of the Farset, where High Street is today.”
A computer image showing the original course of the rivers Farset and Lagan in Belfast – via BBC
Additionally, the Connswater, which was featured in Van Morrison’s song “Brown-Eyed Girl“, but also has a larger history as a locus of whiskey production, ” In Victorian times, two-thirds of whiskey exported from Ireland came from Belfast, and around half of that came from two distilleries – the Connswater distillery and the Avoneil distillery. “ Today, remnants run under the 400-year old bridge in east Belfast. Portions of the river runs through Orangefield park and supports wildlife, “The river used to run along fences at the back of the houses, which were susceptible to flooding. Instead of building floodwalls, here the river has been ‘moved’ to become a central feature of the park.”
The 400-year-old Connswater Bridge in east Belfast – via BBC
HEADER: Partially hidden view of River Farset in Belfast – via Belfast Telegraph
Building on my recent post about the anniversary of the catastrophic flooding of Vanport, I had the opportunity to visit some of the events at the Vanport Mosaic Festival from May 25-June 5. One highlight was a series of tours being offered as part of the events on Memorial Day weekend. The tour started at the Portland Expo Center and looped through key areas of the site, and it was exciting to get access to a few areas that are typically off-limits to people on a regular basis. It was also available as a self-guided walking tour, so they had maps for referencing key Vanport locations overlaid with current conditions
Vanport Tour Map (via Vanport Mosaic)
The back side of the map is supplemented with imagery of sites along the route, giving a feel for what it was like during the height of Vanport. It’s interesting to see these spaces and activities from 70 years ago, and for the most part discover that few traces of this still exist on-site.
Vanport Tour Map (via Vanport Mosaic)
The tour took a bit over an hour, and was led by Clark College professor of geography Heather McAfee, who layered stories and facts onto the tour, and demonstrated a passion for the need to tell the stories of Vanport more widely. While I wished we were able to hop out and explore a bit more, there were a few stops along the way, including this kiosk at one of the parking areas.
A Place in Time Called Vanport – Kiosk
The trail adjacent to the site led Force Lake, one of the amenities of the original Vanport community that was formerly adjacent to the original Recreation Center, and had beaches at the margins. The perimeter is now overgrown and a large wetland zone that is mostly inaccessible except from some narrow paths or to golfers on the west side.
Force Lake
Those other uses are a part of the story. South of the kiosk is a good orientation to the current land use of the majority of the Vanport site today with the western portions occupied by Heron Lakes Golf Course and portions of the east side of the site occupied by Portland International Raceway (PIR), making most of the site not publicly accessible.
Heron Lakes Golf CourseTrack at Portland International Raceway (PIR)
Both of these uses contribute to the lack of remnants that remain from the original Vanport site. As our tour wove between the two atop short levees, we struggled to look from map to site and make any meaningful connections, so disconnected these areas were from their original site, with staring golfers wondering why a seemingly lost tour bus was lumbering around in the middle of nothingness as they went about their rounds.
One area that was protected, through the advocacy of groups wanting to preserve some remnant, the old foundation of the original Theater is still visible on a small margin adjacent to one of the sloughs, protected from construction of PIR (Another remnant area of roadway, a portion of North Cottonwood Street) was incorporated into the straighaway of the racetrack). While indistinct, even this tracery of crumbling foundation serves as a powerful marker, even more so due to the almost complete erasure. Many on our group walked on the surface, paused in a moment of silence, and then moved on. It seems odd, but it had a power, and seemed almost sacred, becoming a tangible touchstone for the past.
Remnant foundation of original Vanport Theater building
McAfee (here pictured) used this location, pointing up at the top of a tree to show the relative height of the floodwaters, which were between 22-28′ high depending on where on the site one stood. As McAfee mentioned, people came into the theater to warn of the breach, shouting:
“The Dike has Broke!”
Seeing this and imagining a water line many feet above your head, coupled with the fact that there was a direct sightline here to the original railroad embankment breach point along the western edge of the site, it hammered home the immensity of the event. It also left me in amazement that even more people hadn’t perished.
Tree marking the height of flood waters
The southern apex of the tour swung by Drainage Pump No. 1, which was built in 1917 and worked to remove water from the interior of the levee bottoms. While it helped slow the flood a bit, the fact that it pumped water outside into already swollen creeks meant that it was fighting a losing battle. The pumps still work to dewater the interior the areas today as part of the larger drainage system.
Original Drainage Pump Station
The tour looped to the southeast and a second breach point, then wove back by the original site entrance along Denver Court before returning to the EXPO center. One stop adjacent was a larger wetland area, with another public sign adjacent to the dogpark that also tells the story of Vanport.
Informational signage adjacent to dog parkAdditional information marker from Oregon Travel Information Council
The Vanport Wetlands were adjacent to the site, nestled between PIR and the original Vanport site, and the EXPO center to the north. These and are protected today and support a range of wildlife, according to the Travel Oregon site: “This is an excellent site for waterfowl in winter, and southbound shorebirds in late summer, including Pectoral Sandpiper. Summering ducks include Cinnamon and Blue-winged Teal. Many swallows forage over the water in season. Check the wooded edges for warblers, vireos, and tanagers. Yellow-headed Blackbird has nested here. Red-shouldered Hawk appears occasionally, while American Kestrel, Red-tail Hawk, Osprey, and Bald Eagle are expected. Another 0.5 mi NW on Broadacre is Force Lake, a good place to view migrant grebes, ducks, and shorebirds.”
At the EXPO center post-tour, there were a number of exhibits and groups showcasing topics related to Vanport, social & environmental justice, arts, and culture. The Vanport exhibit was a chance to explore many of the themes around Vanport flood, not just as a historical retrospective but as a way to use this to have new conversations around race. From the site:
“Join us for two weeks of memory activism opportunities, to explore and confront our local past and recent history of “othering” and its tragic consequences. Through exhibits, documentary screenings, tours, theater, and dialogues we will celebrate the lessons of resilience and resistance as defined and told by historically oppressed communities.”
“…it’s important to remember because I feel like we are experiencing yet another wave of collective historical and cultural amnesia.”
Vanport Spirit mural
Lots of interesting side stories, including learning more about Levee Ready Columbia, working to protect from flood risk in the context of development and climate change in the slough today, as well as finding all the ways to access some local waterways via the Columbia Slough Watershed Council’s ‘Paddlers Access Guide‘. From the artistic side, a few related events include a documentary of Portland stories around trees, Canopy Stories, and a cool project exploring stores of place through music from the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble “From Maxville to Vanport”. Similar geography, the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center highlights a fascinating slice of Oregon history, and many other stories can be found via the Oregon Heritage Tradition, which “recognizes events that are more than 50 years old, reflect Oregon’s unique character, and have become associated with what it means to be an Oregonian.” Lots more folks at the event, so this is just a snapshot of a few.
Additional Stories
For a more permanent look at some of the art that looks back at Vanport, you take the yellow line north and stop at the Delta Park/Vanport MAX Light Rail Station. From the TriMet site outlining the Public Art on the Yellow Line, there are a number of elements that reference Vanport. Artist Linda Wysong was the primary creator of this stations installation, built in 2004. Elements include foundation remnants embedded in sidewalk, and a range of other specific elements.
These mosaic tile (the original Vanport Mosaic?) of community maps overlay the current Delta Park site onto the city grid of Vanport. Another map shows local river context within the location of the station.
Vanport MosaicClose-up of Mosaic
There are also these beautiful bronze railings, which are a nice touchand easy to miss if you’re not looking, featuring “cast artifacts from the Chinookan culture, Vanport and the Portland International Raceway.”
Bronze railingClose-up of artifacts
Another piece that slipped my attention was some “CorTen steel sculptures recall rooftops adrift in the 1948 floodwaters”. There are also works by Douglas Lynch and Timothy Scott Dalbow are reproduced in porcelain enamel on steel, and “…a cast-bronze scupper channels stormwater into the bioswale below.” Lots I missed as it also seems like there an adjacent water quality pond a sculpture called “Waterlines” which had “Massive steel arcs allude to the engineered landscape and Liberty ships made by Vanport residents” as well as a “glowing monolith of stone, steel and acrylic symbolizes the unity of human and natural worlds.” Guess I need to make another visit.
The stories of Vanport are told in multiple locations, with the help of groups like Vanport Mosaic and local artists. However, as mentioned in the OPB story, our “collective amnesia” about historical events, especially those that involve racial inequities and displacement, requires us to first understand and next confront these narratives. As I talked with people around Portland, it was a mixed bag of whether people even knew about Vanport (many had not) or had any real knowledge of the significant (many, myself included, had not). Hopefully the Vanport Mosaic Festival continues, and energy around more ways to discuss, celebrate, and interpret this spatially, so that these hidden histories and made more visible and persist.
HEADER: Force Lake – image by Jason King (all images in post by Jason King unless otherwise noted).
We take for granted much of the modern system of mapping and cartography. In the United States, this system is very much derived from our Jeffersonian grid, established in the late 1700s, and expanded along with US western expansion, this (mostly) unwavering net draped over the country as part of the Public Land Survey. I’ve written previously about the General Land Office (GLO) Cadastral Survey, in more general terms, but in that post, I mentioned a unique feature in Portland — the location of one of the few starting points — the 0,0 point which started the mapping for the entire Pacific Northwest on June 4, 1851.
In the most lovely case of serendipitous map-nerdiness, this point has been protected and celebrated, and is thus both visible and accessible by visiting Willamette Stone State Heritage Site in Northwest Portland. A quick drive from downtown Portland, for anyone remotely interested in maps and Portland history it’s a simple trip up Burnside and winding along the back side of Forest Park.
I’ve been staring at the GLO maps for years, and knew it existed but had yet to visit this spot, so the hint of a nice Spring day last weekend was a pretty good opportunity for a short walk and to check this off my list. A small pull-out off of SW Skyline Drive opens up to trailhead, with a informational board offering a brief introduction that outlines the purpose of the park, and some background on the survey, including a sketch by Roger Cooke showing an illustration of the surveyors at work.
From a short blurb on the sign:
“This short trail leads to the Willamette Stone, the surveyor’s monument that is the point of origin for all public land surveys in Oregon and Washington.”
The monument itself is simple. A short walk through forest, a few steps down and a square paved zone, measuring 20×29 feet, surrounded by benches and immersed in a remnant of northwest forest. From the Oregon Encyclopedia: “The surveyors selected a high point on a ridge along the Tualatin Mountains (known today as Portland’s West Hills) for the intersection of the meridian and base line and the location of the survey initial point established on June 4, 1851. Known later as the Willamette Stone, the first marker placed at the survey point was a cedar post. It was replaced in 1888 with an obelisk marker, but the stone marker and bronze plaques were vandalized in 1951, 1967, and 1987. A stainless-steel marker, set into the original obelisk, was rededicated in 1988. The Willamette Stone site is now enclosed in Willamette Stone State Park near Northwest Skyline Boulevard. “
A plaque provides more information, and the marker (a stainless steel version that was installed after other had been vandalized), with the words ‘Initial Point’ of the Willamette Meridian with the T1N/T1S marking townships above and below, and R1W/R1E marking their east/west counterparts. It was a sunny day but early afternoon was casting deep shadows on the spot, giving it an austere, and somewhat ominous feel. It felt, to me somewhat sacred.
The Willamette Stone Park monument captures some of element of the survey in subtle ways. Embedded metal strips highlight markings on the ground surface, representing the meridian and baseline, a typical township broken into it’s requisite allotment of 36 equally spaced, 640 acre sections, ready for development.
It’s interesting for something so innocuous to hold such power, a simple disc of metal that references something much larger, and more meaningful. The hours I’ve spent staring at the maps derived from this point and the rich history that unfolds. It includes both a snapshot of what existed in the mid-1800s, but by extrapolating back as well to Native settlement and use, shows also a network of pathways worn to common points – a boat launch, a ferry, a significant landmark. These hints of pre-colonial use were shaped for many years, and some have persisted in our urban development – a path turning from a trail now a road with some odd, informal alignment. Ecological mosaics now transformed, consisting of coniferous forests and deciduous lowlands, with marshy margins near meandering rivers whose shorelines continue to weave their way through the pull of northward flowing water. And, all of those now disappeared waterways – the buried creeks, the long forgotten lakes, the now filled wetlands.
Township 1 South, Range 1 E (the Willamette Stone would be the upper left hand corner of this map)
Sitting on one of the benches, I close my eyes and transport myself back to this spot in 1852. I remark on the integrity of some of the remaining verdant ecosystem in this unassuming spot. The verticality of Douglas Fir spires towering skyward, mixed with moss-draped Bigleaf Maple and understory Vine Maple pushing their bright green spring leaves. On the ground, dense clumps of Salal weave around in abundance, punctuated with the complementary textures of Sword Fern and Oregon Grape, lighter margins of Snowberry and Currant. And, to mark the season with a punctuation mark, the fleeting display of Trillium.
Then, slowly, as I peer around, at the edges, I spy a hint of invasive English Ivy and English Holly (both of which were absent from this ecosystem of 170 years ago), beginning to creep out to the margin of my vision. A witness to our human impacts. Panning right, the faint etchings of guy-wires intrude into the viewshed amidst the trees. I’d been so focused on the ground, and the stone, head down focusing on the monument, I’d been unaware of this neighbor. I slowly follow their paths in an about-face, craning my neck straight up to the apex of the radio tower close-by. Not looming, but its red and white paint, and geometry in sharp contrast to the lush greenery.
Thus the scene, as the origin point, took on a double meaning. Although lush and natural on the surface and very much of the place in the Oregon landscape, this survey point was also the origin of our rapidly changing environment. This is evident in the burgeoning city that exists today, and the irreparable impacts on ecology and hydrology that make it barely legible from where it all started. The origin point of our discovery, what we have now experientially only in maps as a record, also being the origin point of our changing landscape and humanity.
The bench I sat on had double meaning also. Surrounding the monument, these contained the names of significant surveyors relevant to this westward documentation. William Ives was responsible for running the Meridian northward towards the Puget Sound, and Eastward along the Baseline as well, according to the history of the Oregon Land SurveyJohn B Preston is also acknowledged, as the first Surveyor General of the Oregon Territory and Western US, his name is pervasive, affixed to many of the GLO maps. And finally, one dedicated to C. Albert White, who was at BLM surveyor with the General Land Office who started in the 1940s, and is know as an expert in cadastral surveying history, which is seem in his 1983 publication, ‘The History of the Rectangular Survey” which is the definitive tome on the Public Land Survey, and fitting for him to be celebrated here as well.
A map excerpt shows these ubiquitous gridlines – the work of Ives and Preston notably on, “A Diagram of a Portion of Oregon Territory,” from 1852. This map highlights this point where the Baseline runs east and west from ocean to the state borders, and the Willamette Meridian runs north-south from the southern border of Oregon up to the US/Canada border. The origin made manifest.
It’s amazing how this GLO survey left an amazing resource for hydrology of cities that were relatively undisturbed, as these surveys were done in a relatively youthful United States, and in the west the mapping in the 1850s was done concurrent with the establishment of many settlements. The resulting maps show small, nascent grids, which predate much of the late 19th and early 20th creative destruction that forever changed the landscape and led to hidden hydrology. It’s good to know your origin story. And in this case, the origin is close at hand.
HEADER: Willamette Meridian — this and all images in post, unless otherwise noted, also by Jason King
The story of Vanport is a critical narrative woven into Portland’s water history, and gives a hint at the dynamic nature of river/city interactions, along with formative context for race and class relations that shaped the community, both in positive and negative ways. This 2016 documentary from the Oregon Experience provides a compelling and well illustrated history of the Vanport community that’s worth a watch.
From the cover of the video: “During the early 1940s, Vanport, Oregon was the second largest city in the state and the single-largest federal housing project in the country. Built quickly to house men and women coming to work in the Portland/Vancouver shipyards during World War II, Vanport boasted some 42,000 residents at its peak and offered progressive services for its diverse population. But one afternoon in 1948, a catastrophic flood destroyed the entire city, leaving about 18,500 people still living there suddenly homeless. Vanport tells the story of a forgotten city: how it was created and once thrived; and how it changed the region forever. It features first hand, personal accounts of former residents and dramatic, rarely-seen archival film and images.”
The origin story here is around World War II, and the wartime shipbuilding, and Henry J. Kaiser, who operated 3 major shipyards that built over – two in Portland, in St. Johns and Swan Island, and another across the river in Vancouver, which built over 750 ships and employed around 100,000 people at their peak in the early 1940s.
In order to house the growing and diverse population of shipbuilders, who were coming for a mix of opportunity and patriotism, Kaiser proposed in 1942 to build what would become the largest wartime housing project in the United States, a new community of over 40,000 people in a 650 acre tract wedged between the Columbia River and Columbia Slough in North Portland. The plan of the community, completed in 1943, shows the general layout, including over 9,900 individual apartments, built cheaply and quickly. The size and diversity of the community, which included a diversity of White, Black, Asian, and Native American workers, as well as a large percentage of the workforce made up of women, who were recruited from all around the country to come to Portland to support the war effort.
From the documentary, the community also had a hospital, police station, library, fire station, transit, shopping, grocery, schools, recreation centers and even a move theater. While there was an effort to make the community livable, and improve ‘quality of life’, the goal was also production, with buses ferrying workers to and from shipyards, which operated 24 hours a day.
The relationship of the plan is woven around water, and the history of flooding of the wetlands and sloughs within which Vanport was built could be said to be both amenity and omen. Some images from the documentary show life around these waterways, including beaches on one of the two lakes, and some exploration around the Slough and it’s tributaries that wove throughout the community.
Vanport Location – via Vanport (Oregon Experience) Vanport Location – via Vanport (Oregon Experience)
As mentioned in the documentary, the cafeteria was located adjacent to the beach on one of the lakes, with water-loving cottonwoods woven throughout. And beyond what was referred to as a “slightly ill-kempt public park”, kids found waters of the Slough the real playground, using make-shift rafts to find turtles, bullfrogs, and tadpoles.
Vanport Location – via Vanport (Oregon Experience)
Post World-War II the idea was for the temporary city to be demolished, and as people starting moving out, some structures were removed. A housing crisis kept Vanport a necessity, as a combination of post-internment Japanese, blacks who could not find housing due to red-lining in the greater Portland area, and lack of housing for post-war returning soldiers, all combining to provide affordable, if somewhat ramshackle, housing for a variety of residents. There was also a Vanport College, founded in some of the vacant buildings, which eventually became Portland State University. For the growing Portland area, “mud on the shoes” meant you were from Vanport, which was seen by the greater Portland community through the lenses of racism as a slum.
In the winter of 1947-48, conditions started to shift towards catastrophe. Heavy snowfall coupled with more intense spring rains swelled the Columbia Rise, which flowed in mid-May at a rate of 900,000 cubic feet per second (cfs), which was almost double the normal flow. This led to the need for reinforcing dikes and sandbagging, along with regular patrols by the Army Corps of Engineers to ensure the perimeter was solid. At this point, there was a question of whether to evacuate, and an emergency meeting was held, but the thinking was that the dikes would hold, and if not people would get plenty of warming. A few days later things changed dramatically.
River Stage levels in late spring 1948 – via Vanport (Oregon Experience)
The entire Vanport area, as former lowlands, was surrounding on all four sides with dikes in order to keep the adjacent waters at bay. The massive vulnerability of the perimeter meant a lot of potential failure points. The dike along the railroad lines to the northwest of Vanport separated Smith Lake from the lower-lying Vanport area was just that failure point, seen in the map below.
Vanport Location – via Vanport (Oregon Experience) Vanport Location – via Vanport (Oregon Experience)
The 30′ berm was ostensibly about protection of the railroad, so the integrity to hold that massive amount of water back during a huge flood event was less a priority, so water levels from Smith Lake started spilling over the dike, the railroad berm started degrading with water boils appearing and seeping thorugh, and on 4:17pm on the May 30th, the breach happened, as mentioned, a “600 foot section melted away.”
Railroad embankment failure – via Vanport (Oregon Experience)
Sirens blared, and people grabbed anything they could get their hands on to evacuated to nearby Kenton. As people recounted stories of “a wall of water” and climbed to their roofs to be rescued, it was exacerbated by the housing, which was built cheaply and without solid foundations, which began to float around, knocking into each other, as seen in the images below.
Houses in the aftermath – via Vanport (Oregon Experience)
The sloughs filled up with the initial flows, so people had 30 minutes to escape. With only one route available, Denver Avenue, the road was quickly jammed, and people started fearing that this area would also fail, so continued to sandbag and reinforce this zone, and people started walking through water as vehicles and buses were stuck. By Monday morning, Denver Avenue was also breached, along with other perimeter dikes, inundating the entire community. The extent of flooding wasn’t localized to Vanport, as it impacted the entire city and it was estimated to have caused over $100 million in damages throughout the basin. The displacement of 1000s of people meant that the flooding of Vanport was some of the biggest impacts, and they were long-lasting well after the water subsided.
via Vanport (Oregon Experience)
There have been a number of stories that have covered the events around Vanport life and flooding, including loss of life, as well as its aftermath, such as investigating the absence of accountability for inaction on evacuation and the lack of dike maintenance that could have prevented the disaster. I’ve not seen critical analysis in general of the general wisdom of occupying the spaces and places like Vanport and its flood susceptibility, which were chosen hastily to fill a need, such as emergency housing in war-time, but are perhaps much less suitable for people to live long-term. Should the city have been demolished after ship-building slowed? It shows the impacts of larger social forces on disasters, and the brunt of that impact being felt by frontline communities.
Some of that aftermath is capture in this snippet from the Oregon Encyclopedia: “Refugees crowded into Portland, a city still recovering from the war. Part of the problem was race, for more than a thousand of the flooded families were African Americans who could find housing only in the growing ghetto in North Portland. The flood also sparked unfounded but persistent rumors in the African American community that the Housing Authority had deliberately withheld warnings about the flood and the city had concealed a much higher death toll.”
Iconic image of man holding boy – via Vanport (Oregon Experience)
The erasure of that history is part of this larger story, with little remnant or physical marking of the place and event as what was left of Vanport was demolished, burned, or auctioned., which is now occupied in parts with West Delta Park, Portland International Raceway, and Heron Lakes Golf Course. As summed up in the Oregon Experience, there is to this day:
“Little to remind anyone of a ‘once thriving city.'”
It an important piece of history around both race, building, and hydrology to investigate in Portland, so expect to hear more about this. The Vanport Mosaic site provides a great opportunity to learn more, and there are some other films on the topic, including a documentary ‘Vanport and the Columbia River Floods of 1948‘, produced by the National Weather Service, and ‘The Wake of Vanport‘, produced by local independent paper The Skanner in 2016.
HEADER: Image of flooding with newspaper Headline – via Oregon Experience
