Document text
Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Columbus Day Storm was terrible By HANK HENRY I t was Oct. 12, Columbus Day, 1962, and old Christopher was destined to have still another thing named for him: the Columbus Day Storm. The storm started as a typhoon way out in the central Pacific. For some reason, a portion of that storm broke away from the main body and streaked eastward with howling winds, passing well north of Hawaii. Typhoons were not supposed to be on that track. It came ashore on a broad front, ranging from well south of Crescent City to north of Gold Beach. The day after the storm, the Mail Tribune featured two photos from Gold Beach on the front page. One was a house trailer that had been picked up and blown clear across Highway 101; the other was a picture of the Riley Creek Grade School gym, also at Gold Beach, which was demolished by the hurricane-like winds. Damage in the Gold Beach area totaled more than $1 million. When the winds hit the coastal mountains, the major part of the storm turned north; but enough winds continued straight ahead over the mountains and remained strong enough to affect inland counties such as Josephine and Jackson. In Medford, lots of trees and power poles were blown down by the winds, which topped out at 58 mph. I was working for a Portland radio station at the time, and living on the banks of the Clackamas River near Oregon City. At midmorning, my wife, Nora, sent our two kids out to play in the fenced-in back yard, not realizing what was to come. She called the kids back in when the winds really started to howl. By the afternoon, our radio station lost power and was off the air. KGW-TV's 600-foot tower in the hills was a pile of twisted metal. At Yaquina Bay, the Coast Guard station was abandoned after the winds sent the gauge to 120 mph -- the gauge's highest mark -- and stayed there for at least five minutes. At Tillamook on the northern Oregon Coast, dairy farmers lost more than 100 milk cows. Hundreds of chickens were lost when two large barns and four sheds were flattened. Astoria lost a tuna cannery. With the power off, there was no reason to stick around the station, so I started to drive home. Less than half a mile away, a couple of trees large enough to be a century or two old had fallen across the road. I got out a map and laid out a couple of routes that might take me home. With a lot of searching and backtracking, I finally approached the house from the east. I usually made the trip home in 10 or 15 minutes, but this time it had taken me over an hour. Power was restored to the radio station the next day, but we still were powerless at home. Nora prepared a meal in an electric skillet, and we all went back to the station, where she plugged in the skillet and cooked it. Oregon Gov. Mark Hatfield called out 1,000 National Guardsmen that first night to guard against looting and to help in the cleanup. Thirty-five deaths were attributed to the storm in Oregon, and another 18 people died in Northern California. The capitol grounds in Salem were littered with debris, since almost all of the large trees were uprooted. At the Oregon Supreme Court building, a huge stained-glass skylight over the meeting room was smashed. The roof of the main building at the Oregon State Hospital was ripped away, exposing the maximum security wards for men and women to the elements. The Columbus Day storm was called a windstorm from the first, even though it had grown by breaking away from a typhoon, which is a tropical cyclone usually found around the Philippines or China Sea. And although it had winds above 74 mph, the minimum for a hurricane, it didn't qualify for that name, either. The reason, as explained to me years later by a veteran meteorologist, was that hurricanes and typhoons are both storms that spin around a core, or "eye." This storm just blew and blew. Leave it to Oregon to have a storm that was absolutely different. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA