‘I can still see it’

A Klamath store is buried in mud after devastating floodwaters receded 45 years ago in December 1964. Photo by Maris Ward courtesy of the Maris Ward family

On Monday night, Dec. 21, 1964, Del Norte County Civil Defense Chief William Parker was first alerted that floods were expected from a strong winter storm already onshore. But floods were not uncommon. There had been floods in 1953 and 1955, and the people of Del Norte County had always recovered, and at the time Parker had no indication that the flooding would be anything out of the ordinary.

In Klamath, Mark Mellett watched and listened as huge redwood logs rushing down the river rammed into the Highway 101 bridge, making the whole bridge shake — something Mellett had never seen before.

By Tuesday morning, the people of Klamath needed no weather forecasts to tell them a flood was on the way. They could see the water line begin to swallow neighborhood roads and then their own property lines. Mellett could no longer watch the bridge because floodwaters kept him away from it.

In haste, the residents of the Klam­ath River valleys began to evacuate. 

Writing for the Crescent City American newspaper, George Mer­riman described the eerie sight of logging trucks pulling mobile homes to higher ground, dragging TV and electrical cables, telephone wires and sewer hoses behind because there was no time to properly disconnect the lines.

Bridge washed out over the Middle Fork of the Smith River. Photo by Maris Ward courtesy of the Maris Ward family

County Supervisor Harold Del Ponte, a Klamath dairy rancher, worked quickly to move his herd to higher ground.

Dale and Jean Worker, living on Terwer Riffle Road, put their TV set on the dining table, stacked their mattresses, and threw the drapes over the curtain rod and fled to Dale’s aunt’s house on a hill.

Wanda Shafer, also on Terwer Riffle, was at home with her children while her husband was out helping others evacuate. With her sons they carried as many belongings as they could to their attic before going to a friend’s house above Crivelli’s restaurant.

By afternoon, the river rose to a record height of 55 feet. In three areas where people had gathered on higher ground in Klamath Glen, they were cut off from from the rest of the world. Two-lane roads leading out of the valleys had been reduced to single lanes because so many trucks and trailers were parked on the sides.

And for the first time, the weather bureau informed Civil Defense Chief Parker that the floods would be catastrophic.

Part of the swollen Smith River. Photo by Maris Ward courtesy of the Maris Ward family

A cold air mass over Alaska and a powerful surge of warm tropical air from Hawaii combined to squeeze fire-hose jets of warm water at the West Coast, melting mountain snows and swelling rivers to unimaginable depths.

In Del Norte County, four highway bridges were destroyed — the Klamath River bridge on Highway 101 and three bridges east of Gasquet on Highway 199. 

Vast inventories of felled logs were lifted from lumber yards and carried out to the ocean, where much of it drifted north, clogging Crescent City Harbor in a berm of floating debris that reached more than 600 feet from land. 

Crescent City beaches and harbor combined were covered with an estimated 100 million board feet of lumber, and residents were warned not to collect any of the private property blanketing public beaches.

Only one life was lost — that of a county employee, Howard Carter Jr., who was attempting to clear Big Flat Road for the rescue of flood victims when he was buried in a landslide — but hundreds of homes and businesses were destroyed. 

The flooding was not limited to the lower Klamath River. 

Parts of Gasquet were flooded. Farms and homes on the plain surrounding the lower Smith River were also flooded, and many residents had to be rescued by boat. 

After several days without word from the Tedsen family, a boat was sent to their farm beside the banks of the Smith, where the family was found waiting out the flood in their barn with their cattle, more concerned about their livestock’s safety than their own, according to newspaper reports. 

Klamath damage

Photo by Maris Ward courtesy of the Maris Ward family

Del Norte County’s second-largest town, Klamath, was completely erased, just eight months after a tsunami had leveled its largest city’s downtown. 

By Wednesday morning, the damage to Klamath and its bridge, now missing, were apparent.

“I can still see it,” recalls Mellett. “The next morning it was like somebody took a magic wand and wiped away 300 houses and all the stores, and there was nothing left but gravel. It all happened overnight, took it all away. Can you imagine? Two story buildings? It was all gone. Some beautiful houses, all gone.”

The Workers’ house was a study in surreality. Their picture window was gone and from its base a 2-foot-high dune of silt stretched across the living room, tapering down to the floor at the other end. The sliding glass door at the rear of the room was also broken out, and their furniture had flowed out with the water. Their dining table and chairs were on the patio. The living room furniture had moved to the garage, and the TV set was lodged against a fence in the yard. 

In one of the bedrooms, they found the beloved organ their daughters had been crying about ever since they fled the house. It was kept dry in a drawer the Workers had stowed it in, even though the drawer itself was wet, having floated out of its chest.

The water line in Wanda Shafer’s home was 3-4 feet high. Although she and her sons had saved many important things in the attic, she couldn’t save everything.

“The thing that hurt me is that I had my grandmother’s china closet with things of hers, and it was hung up in the window blinds. We found a few pieces, but it was ruined. I felt worse about that than anything,” she says. 

Christmas Eve

In the hard-hit Klamath Glen area, scenes of shock and isolation soon gave way to Christmas cheer. From Merriman’s account of Christmas Eve come these descriptions:

 “Darkness fell early, leaden, soggy skies still continued to deluge the area, our isolated pockets of humanity still separated by mud, slime and debris. A civilian defense electrical generator was set up at the base of operations, Don Bennett’s home. Against a picture of chaos, despair and dampening chill, a string of Christmas lights shone out…. One small boy walked down the road, carrying a bedraggled wet, white chicken in his arms, partly protected from the rains by his already soaked jacket. A group of about a dozen youngsters, led by an adult, walked along the filthy road, carrying a lantern and singing Christmas carols. The spirit of Christmas almost seemed to lift the heavy skies, if only for a moment.... 

“The Silver Dollar was lit with a lantern or two, several candles, and a cheery fireplace fire. Jammed to the walls, someone was playing the piano and the air was filled with singing, 90 percent of them off key. Suddenly from a room back by the bar, came a Santa Claus, complete with costume and pack. With a Ho, Ho, Ho, he made his way around the crowded hall, reaching out with a well tattooed hand to chuck a youngster under the chin — pat a bedraggled girl on the head, then try to stuff his slipping pillow back under his belt. Even the toughest of us turned our heads to wipe away a tear or blow a nose.”

Room for displaced

Debris clogs the Crescent City Harbor. Photo by Maris Ward courtesy of the Maris Ward family

“If you had extra room, you brought them in, and if you had food, you served them and just made sure everyone was warm and comfortable,” McMillan remembers. “There was a lot of crying on each other’s shoulders, then we got up, dusted off and went about it again.”

The Workers’ stayed at the house of Dale’s aunt, Belva Weaver, sharing space with two other families.

“The men hung out in the basement and the women upstairs,” Jean remembers.

“We had venison in the freezer and my aunt would make pots of venison stew, and we packed stuff from our freezer and took it up there,” Dale says.

The Red Cross provided food, shelter, clothing and eventually trailer homes for many of the newly homeless. 

Shelters were set up at the fairgrounds and there were Red Cross stations in Klamath Glen and across the street from the Trees of Mystery at the Trees Motel, where the McMillans stayed for a week. Eventually they moved into a trailer home. Mark Mellett put his trailer as high as one can get from water, at the top of Requa Hill.

Captain Courageous

Dave Stewart, a worker at Citizen’s Dock in Crescent City Harbor, noticed movement 200 feet offshore and realized it was the head of a steer that was still alive, caught in the floating debris. The steer, named Bahamas, had somehow managed to survive a journey among the debris from Terwer Valley out of the mouth of the Klamath and up the coastline into the harbor. 

With the help of several other men, they dug him free and carefully walked him to shore over slick logs.

Nursed back to health, the steer was quickly dubbed “Captain Courageous” in the newspapers and celebrated as a symbol of survival. 

Pardoned from slaughter, eventually Bahamas was kept by Del Ponte and Mellett in a pasture near the new Klamath bridge, and it was buried in 1983 not far from where its original journey downriver began.

Rebuilding

A 1950s view of Klamath before much of the town was wiped out in 1964. Photo by Maris Ward courtesy of the Maris Ward family

In addition, “a whole mountain” of earth, Mellett says, was moved to raise the level of the Klamath townsite by 20 feet before the town could be rebuilt.

Although nearly everyone survived, the Klamath of old did not.

Gone were its department store, grocery store, movie theater, skating rink and numerous lumber mills, restaurants, drugstores, cafes, churches and motels. 

 Old-timers, the ones who stayed — many of whom were ranchers or employees at the Simpson lumber mill, which was not affected by the flood — say the problem was that most residents did not return. Red Cross money given to families to rebuild homes had to be spent within a year, and they could not wait two years for the raising of the new townsite. Most families were forced to rebuild elsewhere.

“Most of Klamath is all mobile homes now,” McMillan says.

With the loss of restaurants and stores, the Klamath area lost its gathering places where neighbors would meet and establish a sense of community, and each survivor who remains in the area speaks of missing the old Klamath.

“Sure I still think about the flood,” says Mellett. “We think about how the town never came back. It was a good town.”