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It's a Sunday afternoon on May 30, 1948 in Oregon. Just north of Portland,

an unusually large crowd grows a top of hill. Their face is all sombre, gathered here on higher

ground to escape the looming disaster below them. Beyond the hill's edge are the sloping roofs

of the city of Vanport. The town was built six years ago to solve a wartime housing shortage,

but it's now Oregon's second most popular city. Bordered by the Columbia River to the north,

Vanport stands on a low-lying marsh and is bound by a series of dikes. Normally, they stop the river

water from flooding in streets, but a high amount of snowmilk has made the river rise,

and today, Vanport's nearly 20,000 residents worry that its levees won't hold.

Among the crowd of evacuees is 11-year-old Ed Washington. Ed's family was one of the first to leave

Vanport. Now, the young boy watches as droves of other residents make their way up the hill

in cars and bikes. What a shout of alarm shifts Ed's attention to the dike on Vanport's western

edge. The embankment there starts to fall apart, sending a wall of water into the city streets.

All around Ed, people shout and point at the fractured embankment, but something else catches the

young boy's eyes. The desperately flailing limbs of the people below, struggling to stay afloat

in the murky water. Ed himself doesn't know how to swim, and he trembles to think what would have

happened if he'd been in Vanport right now. But before he can even grasp the extent of the disaster,

another wave crashes through the city. Panic rises in Ed's chest as a fierce torrent water

hurdles toward a block of apartments, and effortlessly sweeps them off its foundation.

For a moment, the apartment buildings wouldn't roof ominously, bombs up and down in the swirling

...