The River Threatens White Bluffs
Ice jams in the Columbia River have pushed water levels to a dangerous point, risking the town's water supply.
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The ice jams are still holding in the Columbia, but the melting snows have caused the river to rise about four feet and the water is now within six inches of the top of the White Bluffs Water Company’s intake—as high as it usually is when that company starts pumping in April each year. An unconfirmed report reached here Wednesday that the pumping plant on either the Arrowsmith or Forsyth ranch just below Priest Rapids, had gone out—the result of high water caused by a jam of flow ice in the river.
“The ice jams are still holding in the Columbia, but the melting snows have caused the river to rise about four feet.”
Long before the Hanford Site transformed the local landscape, White Bluffs residents were locked in a perennial struggle with the Columbia River's volatility. Managing irrigation water intake against ice jams was a life-or-death civic concern in 1916, highlighting the town's precarious dependency on the river.
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