Heppner Flood

The town's answer to the flood came eighty years later and stands just upstream. Congress authorized a dam on Willow Creek in 1965, and to cut its cost the Army Corps of Engineers built it of roller-compacted concrete, spread and pressed with earth-moving equipment: 435,000 cubic yards placed in 125 days in 1982, the first dam in the world built entirely that way. It leaked as soon as the reservoir filled in 1983, and in 1989 the Corps declined to release a report on the concrete's deterioration. Today only patches of damp show on its face.

Where it stands