"Pollution in Paradise"

Tom McCall lead efforts to clean the Willamette River as both a reporter and a politcian.
Courtesy of the Oregon State Archives

The Willamette Basin was home to eleven flood control dams by 1969 creating a system of flood management that is overseen at the Army Corps district headquarters in Portland. There, engineers coordinate with the Rivers Forecast Center to determine how much inflow and outflow is appropriate for each dam. It is a complicated task made more difficult by competing interests in the river system.

Originally, boosters touted the dams as a means to clean the river, but in 1962 the river remained as polluted as ever. That year Tom McCall, an engaging television news reporter who would become Oregon's governor in 1967, wrote and narrated a documentary about the Willamette, "Pollution in Paradise." As governor, McCall led successful efforts to restore the river which catapulted Oregon into the national spotlight. In 1972, a year after the passage of the Clean Water Act, the National Geographic magazine printed an article declaring that the Willamette was "A River Restored."