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Clear to partly cloudy. Low around 30F. Winds light and variable..
Clear to partly cloudy. Low around 30F. Winds light and variable.
Updated: December 13, 2021 @ 10:49 pm
This News-Review photo from the 1964 Christmas Flood shows a family stranded on the roof of a house.
This house on North Myrtle Road in Myrtle Creek was taken off its foundation in the 1964 flood.
This News-Review photo from the Christmas Flood of 1964 shows Brown’s Bridge washed out on Garden Valley Road.
South Umpqua River at Winston Bridge is shown in this News-Review photo taken during the Christmas Flood of 1964.
South Umpqua River at Winston Bridge during the Christmas flood of 1964 is depicted in this News-Review photo.
News-Review photo of Curry Estates House on Curry Road in Riversdale, flooded by the Umpqua River during the Christmas Flood of 1964.
Home in Riversdale flooded by the Umpqua River is shown in this News-Review photo from the Christmas flood of 1964.
Senior Reporter
This News-Review photo from the 1964 Christmas Flood shows a family stranded on the roof of a house.
This house on North Myrtle Road in Myrtle Creek was taken off its foundation in the 1964 flood.
This News-Review photo from the Christmas Flood of 1964 shows Brown’s Bridge washed out on Garden Valley Road.
South Umpqua River at Winston Bridge is shown in this News-Review photo taken during the Christmas Flood of 1964.
South Umpqua River at Winston Bridge during the Christmas flood of 1964 is depicted in this News-Review photo.
News-Review photo of Curry Estates House on Curry Road in Riversdale, flooded by the Umpqua River during the Christmas Flood of 1964.
Home in Riversdale flooded by the Umpqua River is shown in this News-Review photo from the Christmas flood of 1964.
Senior Staff Writer
On Dec. 13, 1964, a cold spell hit the Pacific Northwest. It was followed by a heavy snow.
It looked like it might be a white Christmas. No one could have guessed that within days, an area the size of France would be inundated with floodwaters and 47 people across the region would be dead.
But the weather was about to take a very strange — and deadly — turn.
Former Douglas County Commissioner Doug Robertson was a University of Oregon student, excited to get home and enjoy the snow over Christmas break.
“It had been cold and snowing every day and all of a sudden the weather started to warm up, and it started to rain,” he recalled.
It was 60 degrees in the valleys, he said.
“You could walk around in your T-shirt,” he said.
Meteorologists said the warm weather was caused by a “pineapple express” bringing warm, moist weather from the southwest into the Pacific Northwest.
“When we got home, the destruction, it was stunning. I remember particularly the bridges,” he said.
He and a friend went to look at each of the main bridges around his parents’ White City home.
“You could see the logjams that got hung up on the bridge and actually kind of formed a dam behind the bridge with all that force of the water, and it destabilized the bridges,” he said.
He also recalled helping clean out the home of other friends who had had a foot of water in their front room.
Robertson said there hasn’t been a flood since to rival the Christmas Flood of ‘64, and it was devastating.
“Mother Nature decides to take a swing at you, you’re pretty defenseless,” he said.
The National Weather Service calls the Christmas floods the fifth worst weather event in the region during the 20th century.
At least four Douglas County residents died in the floods.
Two of the flood’s victims were Ella Cox and Ed Kilgore. The unfortunate pair were in a truck that stalled in high waters of Calapooia Creek east of Sutherlin.
The Sutherlin Sun-Tribune reported that another of the truck’s occupants survived. He had gone for help, but when he returned the truck had been washed into the creek and Cox and Kilgore were gone. Evidently, they drowned in an attempt to escape.
The News-Review said Arlin Spaulding of Myrtle Creek was reported missing after he stepped into swift water while moving furniture out of his flooded home.
Howard Thomas, a logger from Reedsport was found in his trailer, the Dec. 28 News-Review reported. He was attempting to rescue his wife, not knowing she had already been rescued earlier and taken to the hospital for injuries and shock.
A fifth man, Donald Oddy, died suddenly while cleaning silt from a home in Laurelwood. He was found lying in the mud, but the cause of death was not immediately clear in the reports just after the flood.
Reedsport was inundated. It received 22” of rain in December, double the usual amount, and much of that came within a week of Christmas. The water was 8 feet deep in the business district. The News-Review called it a “nightmare.”
At least 30 major bridges, and countless smaller ones, across the region were damaged and hundreds of miles of roads were washed out. Bridge damage in Douglas County was expected to exceed $2 million.
Brown’s Bridge on Garden Valley Road west of Roseburg was taken out by the storm. Residents on lower Garden Valley, Cleveland Rapids and Big Bend roads were evacuated. Fremont Junior High in Roseburg was extensively damaged, as were many homes.
The North Umpqua Highway and Little River Road sustained extensive damage.
The western span of the Bullock Bridge at Tyee, about 14 miles from Elkton, was also destroyed and the Sutherlin Sun-Tribune reported Tom Cooney’s home nearby had water 4 feet deep from the flooding.
Even the Umpqua Watershed was forever changed after floodwaters reached a Reedsport fish hatchery. Non-native small-mouth bass entered the watershed and began taking a toll on the native steelhead and salmon.
Darlene Swearingen lived about 15 miles from Elkton.
Swearingen’s home was on top of a hill, high enough to be safe from the water. But she could see that all the houses down by the Umpqua River were surrounded by water.
The thing that sticks out most in her mind, she said, was that her kids couldn’t get home. She knew they were OK, though because her mother taught at their school, and Swearingen knew grandma would take the kids to her home.
There was a stream, though, that Swearingen’s father had converted to a pond. It flooded, so her mother couldn’t get across in the car with the kids. Fortunately they had a boat.
Floodwaters surrounded Elkton High School too, she later learned.
The local grange opened up for those who were stranded and needed a place to stay, she said.
Seven miles from Elkton, prune farmer Gene Fisher put in a desperate call to his daughter Janet Fisher. The flood had swept through the bottomland of his farm, knocking down every tree in his newly planted orchard, and Maupin Road was underwater.
Fisher lived in Southern California at the time with then-husband Wally Cegavske. They took the 12-hour drive up to Oregon on Christmas Day, dining only on Christmas cookies because no restaurants were open.
When they arrived, the water had receded from the road enough that they could reach the house and the river was high but back inside its banks.
“The trees, it was like something planned to push them overall in the same direction. They were all lying in the same direction with their roots up on one side,” she said.
The men set about replanting the trees and saving the orchard.
Jack Rountree’s parents were flooded out at their home in a Myrtle Creek trailer park near the South Umpqua River. The water surrounded the house and was raising a foot an hour, but Rountree’s dad didn’t want to leave the house.
Rountree had to wade through waist-deep water to get to the house. Once there, he convinced his Dad to leave. After they left, the flood washed out the windows.
“It was a pretty devastating thing for our family at that time,” he told The News-Review earlier this year.
Editor’s note: Janet Fisher and Wally Cegavske are the reporter’s parents. The News-Review would like to thank the Douglas County Museum and the Roseburg Public Library for their assistance in procuring the records we no longer have that contributed to this story, as well as the people who shared their memories with us.
Reporter Carisa Cegavske can be reached at ccegavske@nrtoday.com or 541-957-4213.
Senior Reporter
Carisa Cegavske is the senior reporter for The News-Review. She can be reached at ccegavske@nrtoday.com or 541-957-4213. Follow her on Twitter @carisa_cegavske
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remember getting released from fremont jr high and walking home thru the low income housing area by st josephs in waste deep water. we lived higher up and in no danger
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