It was scary and the ironic part was we had some friends that lived right on Row River at the riverbank below Dorena Dam on what they call Eakin’s Corner and they had to leave earlier. They came with their kids to our house thinking we were fine, you know, and then about one or two in the morning — here, we hadn’t gone to bed yet because it was sort of exciting and we didn’t have enough sense to really be scared — [the corps] came and they asked us to leave. All of us went up to my brother’s but it didn’t reach either house luckily.
Juanita Hensely remembering the ’64 flood at her home on Mosby Creek, 1999 interview.
The dams did not guarantee freedom from flooding in the Willamette Valley. In 1964, two major floods hit the valley, one in December 1963, and one in January 1964. Every major tributary of the Willamette threatened to breech its banks. The Lane County Sheriff Department evacuated residents in the flood plain as water overcame the spillway at both Cottage Grove dam (by three feet) and Dorena dam (by nine). The dams prevented heavy flooding in the city of Cottage Grove which sustained relatively little damage. These floods caused an estimated $71 million in damages to the valley alone (Portland was also hit hard). According to the Army Corps of Engineers the economic costs of the floods would have been much higher without the dams. The agency claimed that the flood would have washed out all of the bridges in Portland except the St. Johns Bridge had it not been for the reservoirs. The Corps estimated that the dams prevented $514 million in damages throughout the basin (Cottage Grove prevented over $16 million and Dorena over $53.5 million in damages).
