The railroad bed functioned as a dike, holding back Smith Lake from the Vanport floodplain. The breach was visible even from the window. Brown water gushed from where the gravel and dirt had given way to the lake’s pressure, over the tracks and down toward the city.

Vanport was going to flood, and fast. Williams felt his stomach knot. The stockyards were above the floodplain. The cattle, the buildings, the water wouldn’t reach them. But those people in Vanport. All those people.

“Call the Vanport city manager,” Williams barked at his secretary. “Tell them there’s a fifty-foot gap in the railroad fill near the northwest corner of the project.”

The girl hesitated. Her eyes looked wild.

“Now,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” she said, turning and running to her desk outside the office.

Fifteen thousand people lived in Vanport. Working people. Families. Plenty less than lived there during the war. The apartments were cheap, but the walls were paper thin, and there wasn’t hot water or heat at night.

“They don’t have telephones,” Floyd said. “Company decision.”

As the minutes ticked by, the two men listened in silence for the emergency siren. Williams didn’t hear anything. He lifted the window. The smell of cattle and hay settled in the office. He could hear the moan of the cows, the tremble of their hooves on the bare beaten ground. But he still didn’t hear a siren.

It was 4:35 P.M.

His secretary returned.

“Well?” Williams said.

“I told them,” she said.

Several more minutes passed. Williams began to fume. He picked up the pair of binoculars that he kept on the windowsill and aimed them out the window. The breach had widened, and was now nearly a city block long. The water from Smith Lake spilled through the dike like a gleaming brown waterfall. It was coming with such force that Williams could see it moving, see it spreading on the west side of the dike, a new lake forming, widening by the second, the muddy water transforming as it advanced, reflecting the calm blue of the sky, deceptively tranquil. He followed the water west with the binoculars, toward Vanport. A boy riding his bike in the two feet of water that had already collected on North Portland Road. A car driving up Victory Avenue. A couple walking together across a park.

“What’s taking them so long?” Floyd asked.

It was a good goddamn question.

Williams put down the binoculars, picked up the phone on his desk, and fumbled with it, his palm slick with sweat. But he didn’t make calls. His girl did. He looked at her helplessly and she came around his desk and took the receiver and dialed, and then handed him the phone.

“Hello?” a man’s voice asked.

“For God’s sake,” Williams hollered into the phone, “alert those people.”

It was a few minutes after that that the sirens finally started.