The greatest disaster to ever hit Oregon

I am eternally fascinated by an event that occurred 13,000 - 15,000 years ago and may be the most extreme catastrophe to hit Oregon in the last 500,000 years or so.  I discovered this a year or two ago by accident, and I'm astounded that I could have lived here 35 years and never heard of it.

The Missoula Floods, about 40 of them over 2,000 years, repeatedly buried most of the Willamette Valley under 400 feet of water, which drained into the Columbia and out to the Pacific, only to be repeated about 50 years later.

There was a huge ice dam on the Clark River near the location of Missoula, MT, which created a lake greater than the size of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie combined.  The dam was over 2,000 feet high, and periodically collapsed catastrophically releasing all the water.

Some portions of the West Hills were above the high water mark, but most of the Willamette valley as far south as Eugene were buried under the flood waters.  Geologists estimating the volume of water have made some stunning guesses, estimating that the flood contained more water than flows in all the rivers in the world today.  I think I saw a historical marker in the Columbia Gorge that estimated waters over 1,000 feet deep moving at speeds of 125 mph going through the gorge.  We owe a lot of the famous fertile soil in the Willamette Valley to the floods, we got it all from Eastern Oregon!

There are a number of articles that discuss this, the Oregonian, and again here, and there is a web site dedicated to the event as well.