From the Portland Architecture blog comes news of an exhibition at the Portland Architects’ Institute, imagining if hurricane Katrina had hit Portland. It turns out, if the flooding caused by the broken levees were superimposed here, everything from Beaverton to Camas would be under a huge pink tide of strawberry milkshake: I was about to do a poll saying, “which part of Portland would you miss least?” then I remembered what happened to Vanport, and wondered if it might be in poor taste. I decided it would be. From Vanport’s Wikipedia entry:

The Vanport Flood parallels the more recent Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans. In both cases, public officials led the population to believe that the damage would be slight, and in both cases the government response to the disaster was harshly criticized. Many have attributed the poor response, in both cases, to racist attitudes on the part of officials, who allegedly neglected to respond appropriately to the destruction of heavily-black communities.