THE SPOKESMAN • TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 2022 A5
FLASHBACK
Canal failure causes flooding in 1972
The Spokesman
100 YEARS AGO
June 8, 1922 — Cheese
factory finished
The fine brick and cement
building for the cheese factory
to be operated by K Cheese
company is just completed
and the work of installing ma-
chinery will begin the first of
the week.
The building is 32 by 62 feet
and is of fireproof construc-
tion, and located conveniently
for both receiving milk and
shipping the finished product.
The machinery necessary to
handle the business here cost
$5000 and will be up and run-
ning within the next 30 days.
75 YEARS AGO
June 12, 1947 — Betty,
Pearl’s Shoppe to open
Betty and Pearl’s Friendly
Sewing Shoppe, located at 627
D street, will open Monday,
June 16, for business. Betty
Calhoun and Pearl McDonald
are the owners and announce
that they have recently re-
turned from Portland with a
line of yardages.
They will specialize in dress
making, alterations, shirt
making and tailoring. They
also announced that free esti-
mates will be given at the shop
or by phone 268X.
Both of the owners have
had previous experience in
this line of work.
50 YEARS AGO
June 7, 1972 — A day for
flooding, dedicating
Saturday will long be re-
membered around Central Or-
egon Irrigation District. That
was the day a 75-foot section of
canal Bank broke, pouring wa-
ter over much of southeastern
Bend. It also was the day COI‘s
$3.2 million flume replacement
project was dedicated.
In photo, photographer
William Van Allen captures
Redmond‘s State Rep. Sam
Johnson chatting with con-
gressman Al Ullman, featured
speaker at the dedication. And
right, photographer Martha
Stranahan records crews al-
ready repairing the damaged
canal Saturday while dignitar-
ies addressed a crowd of more
than 100 persons.
Ullman said prospects ap-
peared bright for funding im-
provements to existing irriga-
tion projects, but uncertain for
Archived Photo
See “A day for flooding, dedicating” story for details.
new projects. Claire A. Hill,
vice president of CH2M-Hill,
Redding, Calif., engineers for
the project, remarked that the
6,000 feet of 10,000-foot-in-di-
ameter steel pipe used to re-
place deteriorating wooden
flume was the largest pipe in
uses in Oregon.
25 YEARS AGO
June 11, 1997 — Authori-
ties post reward for driver
Authorities searching for
the pick up truck involved
in a hit-and-run for fatality
have offered a $2,000 reward
for information that leads to
the arrest and conviction of
the driver who killed Sharon
Dains.
The Deschutes County
Sheriff‘s Department and
Sheriff Employees Association
each posted half of the reward
offer, which investigators hope
will produce the lead they
need to resolve the case.
Sheriff’s officers are looking
for a late 1970s Chevrolet or
GMC pickup, reddish in color,
with damage to the left front
grill and headlight. The vehicle
struck Dains from behind as the
26-year-old Redmond man was
walking to work along South
Canal Boulevard on May 28.
There were no new de-
velopments in the case as of
Tuesday, but officers remained
optimistic they will locate the
hit-and-run vehicle and driver.
“If it’s a local truck, we’ll
find it,” said Capt. Pete Wan-
less, lead investigator for the
sheriff’s department.
Anyone with information
about a pickup that fits the de-
scription of the suspect vehicle
should call the sheriff’s hotline
at 388–6641.
At a news conference held
last Tuesday to announce the
reward, Wanless and Dains’
grieving father and mother
urged the hit-and-run driver
to turn himself or herself in to
authorities.
OFFBEAT OREGON HISTORY
Deadly 1964 tsunami damaged Oregon Coast
BY FINN J.D. JOHN
Offbeat Oregon
O
n the evening of March
23, 1964, Seaside res-
ident Margaret Gam-
mon hadn’t been asleep more
than an hour or two when she
was awakened by howling.
It was the community fire
siren, blaring at full blast with-
out stopping. She looked at the
clock. It was 11:30 p.m.
“I lay in bed thinking to my-
self, ‘Why doesn’t that fellow
at the fire station get his big
thumb off the siren button so
we can all go back to sleep, and
let the firemen take care of the
fire?’” she recalled later, in an
article for Oregon Historical
Quarterly. “In just a few sec-
onds the cars started zipping up
our street toward the highway
like the devil himself was on
their tail. I thought it must be a
tremendous fire, so I figured I’d
get dressed and go watch it.”
It didn’t take long for Gam-
mon to learn that it wasn’t a
fire. It was a tsunami — and it
was almost upon her.
“When I got as far as the
12th Avenue bridge over the
Necanicum River, the water
was right under the deck-
ing, black and ominous, and
covered with great chunks of
white foam floating on the sur-
face like huge ice cakes,” she
wrote. “I learned later that I
had crossed over the 12th Ave-
nue bridge at the very height of
the tsunami.”
It wasn’t until the next
morning that Gammon
learned how lucky she’d been.
Her neighborhood was high
enough to stay out of reach of
the waves. Others were not.
“Venice Park, a residential
area just north of us and right
on Neawanna Creek, had been
hardest hit,” she wrote. “Sev-
eral houses had been wrecked
completely by the more than
four feet of water that swept
through them. It tumbled autos
like matchsticks, leaving them
pinned against houses when the
water receded. I noticed hun-
dreds of tiny fish still alive and
wriggling frantically in their
efforts to get back into the tiny
creek, now within its banks and
more than 50 feet away from
them. Water perhaps two feet
deep had surged over High-
way 101 north of Seaside at the
junction of City Center route
and the through route south.”
The 1964 tsunami was
launched by a massive event
known as the “Good Friday
Earthquake” epicentered in
the ocean a few dozen miles
off Valdez, Alaska. Measur-
ing 9.2 on the Richter Scale,
the quake was the strongest
ever recorded on U.S. soil,
and the second strongest ever
worldwide. It shook Southeast
Alaska, including Anchorage,
for nearly five minutes.
The quake itself carried a
surprisingly low death count:
just nine people were killed
in it. But the tsunami the
quake launched was another
story. Nearby the epicenter,
it was up to 220 feet high. It
wiped out whole towns and
Indian villages, including Val-
dez — which, although not
completely destroyed, was
damaged badly enough that
residents opted to move and
rebuild the whole town farther
inland on higher ground. The
tsunami killed a total of 120
people in Alaska.
Down along the West Coast,
wave heights were smaller, but
still high enough to be deadly.
Twelve people died in Crescent
City, Calif. In Oregon, Monte
and Rita McKenzie and their
four children were camping
on the beach in a driftwood
shelter on Beverly Beach State
Park when the tsunami hit.
Struggling in the churning surf
and flying driftwood, Monte
and Rita McKenzie struggled
to hang onto their four chil-
dren, only to have all of them
ripped away and carried out
to sea. Louie, Bobby, Ricky,
and Tammy McKenzie (ages 8,
7, 6, and 3 respectively) were
drowned. Theirs were the only
tsunami deaths in Oregon.
But there was plenty of
property damage, all up and
down the coast.
In Neskowin, Kathleen
Clark got a terrifyingly com-
plete view of the entire tsu-
nami cycle from the front win-
dow of a vacation rental she
was staying in with her brother
and boyfriend.
Recounting the story to The
Oregonian’s Lori Tobias, Clark
said they had the window open
and were enjoying the sounds
of the surf when suddenly those
sounds went away. The three
young people looked at each
other, baffled, then got up and
looked out toward the sea.
The moonlight was shining
on a vast expanse of wet sand.
The ocean had retreated, liter-
ally beyond the reach of their
sight in the moonlight.
“And then as we were watch-
ing, there was this wall of water
coming at us,” Clark told To-
bias. “Just a straight wall. Like
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the ocean had become vertical.
It was a tremendous roar com-
ing in. The water came into the
little yard out front. We were
just flabbergasted, just frozen
in place. If the wave had been
a foot higher, I bet it would
have taken out the plate glass
window.”
All told, the earthquake and
tsunami dealt out $2.8 billion
(in 2022 dollars) in damage,
and killed 136 people. But sci-
entists quickly figured out it
could have been worse. A lot
worse.
The majority of the tsunami
deaths in 1964 were from com-
munities near the epicenter,
in Alaska. There, waves hun-
dreds of feet high slammed
into the beaches within a few
minutes of the earthquake that
launched them. Most Oregon
beaches got a far smaller, more
attenuated version of the wave,
arriving hours later.