Vanport

This panel stands in West Delta Park, on ground Vanport covered until the afternoon of May 30, 1948, when a railroad fill on the city's western edge gave way. Its story ends in court. Residents sued the federal government, which had paid for the city, for what the flood took. In 1954 the Ninth Circuit ruled against them in Clark v. United States: the Flood Control Act of 1928 bars any federal liability for flood damage. The panel puts the dead at 18, where the count usually given is 15.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vanport — 0.5 mi
  Briefly Oregon's second-largest city, built in about 110 days for Kaiser's shipyard workers, washed away in an afternoon in 1948, and later renamed out of existence.
• McLoughlin House — 17 mi
  The retirement house of the Hudson's Bay man who supplied the Oregon Trail's starving arrivals, saved from a paper mill's lot in 1909 and hauled up the bluff to a park he had given the town.
• Willamette Falls — 17 mi
  A horseshoe of basalt across the Willamette, ringed by a century of mills, that is still one of the last places in the Columbia basin where tribes gather lamprey by hand.
• Vista House at Crown Point — 22 mi
  A rest stop on a basalt point 733 feet above the Columbia, budgeted at $12,000, finished for about $100,000, and mocked for years as Oregon's most expensive outhouse.

More markers nearby

• The Willamette Stone — 6.0 mi
• Troutdale — 15 mi
• Sandy River Bridge — 16 mi
• George Abernethy — 17 mi