aia ‘they are determined, must be Vanpert overwhelmed by flood This picture was taken in tke inundated town of Vanport, Oregon, about an hour after a dyke on the banks of the Columbia River burst.. The rampaging waters poured into the war-time com- munity, demolishing homes and carrying as yet an undetermined number of people to their deaths. The dramatic picture shows how quickly the water poured into Vanport, trapping residents as they walked along the street...Motorists are shown being rescued by lifeline. Five years’ work ruined as floo By HAL GRIFFIN Nor can you measure a personal Before a Raye nate this man’s $6,000 house has been Fraser River ack From, .swept from its foundations. and den dykes: and ‘weary volunteers lies now a twisted shell at Carey’s begin to assess the enormity of) ,):.;4 Gaited Atsiwack; oF thet the negligence that made their/+1i. man has lost his $2,000 berry task so difficult, the spate of €% —14, you have to fill out these planations frofh the politicians will reach its height. Government experts will follow the retreating waters across ruined lands and the long task of inquiry and con- clusion will be started. dry figures with the human de- bridge the gulf between the im- persona] statistic and the personal tragedy which is also a gulf be- tween the old-line politicians and The promises of the old-line the people. politicians are already anticipat- 7 o * ing the conclusions of the ex- perts. The promises have been; There is, for instance, the story made before, after the 1894 flood,!of Mrs. Mary Stillwell, whose| and the conclusions drawn from farm home some two miles north- that disaster are buried in re- | west of Agassiz is under water. : I spectable obscurity on govern- At least, she believes that it must ment shelves. But neither prom- be under water. She doesn’t ises made by old-line politicians know. When she said. goodbye to, 'As she describes it, “Some of the concerned more for the disaster her husband and left the flooded to their political fortunes nor, ‘town on the special train evacu- _ conclusions bound in the King’s ating women and children, the, Printer’s finest blue covers will water was swirling over the fields, satisfy the thousands of Fraser but it had not yet reached her | Valley residents facing the ruin house. @h theik bomen. “All I know is what a girl who Experience has made them dis- came down from Agassiz after I trustful of promises couched in left told me. She said the water) Beneral terms and they can re-;was up to the windows of a. member other sound conclusions neighbor’s house. The neigh- help up for years by financial | bor’s house stands on a knoll and bickering between provincial and/ours is down in a slough, so I federal governments. This time'don’t see how it could have es- they want the promise defined; caped,” she said. at nothing short of full compen- sation for their losses. And this, der, barely time to pack a change ; of clothes and no time at all to So = move valued possessions to a saf- lands—a a their lives. : |er place, She hopes that ther hus- You cannot measure the mag-' band was able to move the fur the last time that the Fraser runs nitude of the disaster merely by/niture to the attic, but she is | ‘totalling up the millions of dol-\ desperately afraid that when she lars in property damage, in crops/returns it will be too a ruined ruined and livestock lost. For | home. when the figures run into mil-| “It all happened so quickly we lions they become general and/had no time for anything,” ‘she - meaningless. They are impressive| told me. “The morning the evacu- in the same way that the vast|ation order came through my hus- stretch of flooded land viewed from | band and I walked along the road the hill above Mission is impress-| to a high knoll overlooking the river. We saw the water pouring ive, but the thousand pergonel) oss the fields, and I remem- tragedies are overwhelmed by the) per one field particularly. It was collective disaster. planted in corn, two or three | tre agedy only by recording that tails of struggle and hope, to: Mrs. Stillwell had only 20 min- | utes’ notice of the avacuation or-, needed money and Lorne had to {go to work in a mill at Harrison inches high, and as we_ stood there we watched the water cut a channel through it, growing wider every minute. Half an hour later, on the way back to our house, we had to wade through the wa- ter on the road, “One of the men driving the gravel trucks came round with the evacuation order and I had 'just enough time to pack a small suitcase before I left. “The town was already flooded by then. There was all kinds of debris floating around the streets and the smell was terrible.” * _* * That was how Mrs. Stillwell left the home it had taken her five years to build. In 1943, she and her husband, Lorne, bought ten acres of bush. ‘trees were eight and ten feet through and on the part that had been logged over years ago there were huge stumps.” Before they coud begin clearing the land they had to have a place to live in, and like thousands of other people in the Fraser Valley they put up a frame and moved in as soon as they got the roof on. “When it was wet we worked on the house and when it was fine we worked on the land. Lorne cut |down the trees and cleared the bush and I burned it up,” ex- plained Mrs, Stillwell. There were times when the work went slowly because they Hot Springs. But at the end of three years much of the bush had been cleared, a big chicken house stood beside the house, and the house itself was something more than four walls and a roof. “We were just putting the fin- ishing touches to the house this year,” Mrs. Stillwell. remarked. “Now I don’t know what to think. It’s on a high concrete foundation and maybe the water didn’t. reach the first floor. But I’m sure it must have done. I’ve just got to get back as soon as I can.” The Stillwells were more for- tunate than most. They sold their 1,000 chickens last fall and had not yet replaced them with young Nanaimo organizes for labor defense NANAIMO, B.C-——Acting on request of a recent meeting of 700 Nanaimo citizens, Nanaimo and District Joint labor Council has established a Defend Nanaimo Labor Committee. The committee set as its first and immediate task the mobilizing“of wide popular support, morally and financially, to Mirko Vitkovich, Nanaimo coal miner, who has been commit- ted by Magistrate Lionel Beevor- Potts to stand trial June 14 on charges of defamatory libel. Charges against Vitkovich arose out of a leaflet circulated March 29 branding Dr. Mladen Guinio Zorkin as a traitor to Yugoslavia and as- sistant to big business interests in British Columbia in breaking trade unions. In setting up the Defend Nanai- mo Labor Committee, Joint Labor Council pointed out that organized labor in Nanaimo regards the pros- ecution of Vitkovich as threatening the civil rights of all and of the labor movement in particular. Accordingly, the committee has been established on a basis which will allow any individual person de- siring to give his time and services to join as an active member. Officers of the committee are representative of the largest trade unions in Nanaimo. Chairman Ar- hie Lewis is president of the In- ‘ternational Woodworkers in Nanai- mo and is also a parks commis- sioner. George Bryce, treasurer, is secretary of the United Mine Work- ers (CIO). Art Clarck, secretary, is birds. Nor did they have to shoot their cattle as so many farmers did because they also sold their pure-bred Holstein cattle last fall. But the governments—the John- son-Anscomb government at Vic- at Ottawa—have a_ responsibility to the Stillwells and the thousands of other victims of the flood. Ful- fillment of the promises made in 1894 and implementation of the conclusions reached after that flood would have confined if not prevented this year’s disaster. Even action taken earlier this spring might have saved large areas now inundated. The land it took the Stillwells local president of the United Bro- therhood of Carpenters and Join- ers (AFL) and was a recent alder- manic candidate of the Joint Labor Council. The defense committee is giving widespread distribution to a leaflet outlining the sequence of the anti- labor campaign on the Island and throughout the province, including « the miners’ wage dispute and the woodworkers’ negotiations. Dealing with Dr. Zorkin, the leaflet points out that he renounced his Yugoslav nationality after the people's front government came to power in that country. 3 Zorkin made the acquaintance of Bob Morrison, notorious. anti-labor publicist employed by top circles of big business, soon after his arrival. — He is personally acquainted also with John Hladun, MacLean’s Mag- azine’s featured anti-communist, Howard Mitchell, president of Van- couver Board of Trade, Stanley Da- kin, past president of Nanaimo Board of Trade and author of 3 brief on “subversive” activities in Nanaimo and Mayor George Mui!, a champion of the interests of big busin