Vanport

Book excerpt: Vanport construction began in August 1942 to house the workers at the wartime Kaiser Shipyards in Portland and Vancouver, Washington. Vanport?a portmanteau of "Vancouver" and "Portland"?was home to 40,000 people, about 40 percent of them African-American, making it Oregon's second-largest city at the time, and the largest public housing project in the nation. Vanport was dramatically destroyed at 4:05 p.m. on May 30, 1948, when a 200-foot (60 m) section of the dike holding back the Columbia River collapsed during a flood, killing 39. The city was underwater by nightfall, leaving 17,500 of its inhabitants homeless.