Severe flooding in downtown Drain, Oregon, March 16, 2025
Although less than four inches of rain fell on the city of Roseburg, Oregon, on Sunday, March 16, 2025, it was the wettest day in any March on record, surpassing the previous record set in 1965.
But the unprecedented flooding that followed—much of it in places it had never flooded before—was in no small part manmade.
And the men responsible for this flooding have names and addresses. In fact, you may have voted for them—Douglas County Commissioners Tim Freeman, Tom Kress, and Chris Boice, and State Rep. Virgle Osborne and State Senator David Brock Smith.
The three Douglas County Commissioners have repeatedly allowed the filling in of creeks, wetlands, and abandoned timber ponds, and permitted the construction of homes and business on top of (or near) those reclaimed former waterways, assuring the flooding of hundreds of homes in places like Drain, Green, Yoncalla, Sutherlin, Myrtle Creek, and Roseburg.
More than a few lifelong residents concur that the flooding witnessed on March 16, 2025 was the worst flooding they’d ever seen in their community.
A century ago, logs were floated downriver to timber mills and corralled into huge millponds excavated out of the wetlands along the riverbank. Many Douglas County communities sprang up around these timber mills. When the mill shut down, these legacy timber ponds remained, providing flood control when the river overflowed its banks.
Many towns have more than one of these abandoned mill ponds in the middle of what is now populated residential areas. But most have been filled in and reclaimed, leaving no place for floodwaters to go except into low lying residential neighborhoods.
For example, in the Green District, west of Roseburg, the 1,000-foot-wide Umpqua Log Pond at the old Roseburg Forest Product plywood mill on Carnes Road is one such abandoned mill pond. Excavated in what was once wetland a few hundred feet south of the South Umpqua River, the pond was fed by Roberts Creek.
Historically, when Roberts Creek overflowed its banks, water covered Carnes Road, but didn’t flood homes. But with the filling in of the enormous old Umpqua Log Pond and adjacent wetlands, and with the removal of ditches, brush, and beaver dams on Roberts Creek, the March 16 rains brought five feet of water into homes on Carnes Road, Dark Horse Street, and Happy Valley Road—some of which had never flooded before.
Similarly, in Drain, 40 miles north of Roseburg, the Drain Plywood Company log ponds a few hundred feet from Elk Creek were also excavated in wetlands. But subsequent reclamation and filling in of the ponds and surrounding wetland resulted in severe flooding on March 16, in places it never flooded before.
In Glendale, at the southern end of Douglas County, they filled the old log pond with dirt, resulting in severe flooding on March 16, 2025.
When flooded buildings in Douglas County are condemned and torn down, the county commissioners (and their associates) profit, buying up the land for a fraction of its former value.
Each time a house is resold, the property is reassessed at the current market value, increasing property tax revenues for the county, and raising property values of neighboring homes. The county commissioners legally pocket some of these profits by repeatedly voting to increase their own salaries.
This is why the county commissioners and our representatives in Salem are so intent on building as many trailer and RV parks in Douglas County as possible, even on “reclaimed” land in flood plains.
Though personally responsible for the bad decisions that caused the March 16 flooding, the county commissioners deny culpability, blaming their usual scapegoats, the parks and planning departments.
But everyone knows who really calls the shots in Douglas County—who wields the power of executive order: commissioners Tim Freeman, Chris Boice, and Tom Kress.
Douglas County Commissioner “No Term Limits” Tim Freeman, candidly admitted to predatory profiting from the predictable misfortunes of his tenants.
“The best thing about owning a trailer park,”Freeman once said, “is that you can sell the same space sometimes 3 or 4 times a year.”
Hundreds of homes in Yoncalla, Drain, Green, Myrtle Creek, Glendale, and Sutherlin experienced severe flooding as a result of the March 16, 2025 storm. The Red Cross set up shelters to assist displaced residents and emergency services conducted rescues, some by boat. Damage assessment teams evaluated the storm’s impact.
Additionally, the heavy rains caused more than 100 landslides in Douglas County.
A gigantic landslide occurred on Oakley Road west of Roseburg. In October 2023, neighbors there lost an 18-month battle trying to prevent the Douglas County Board of Commissioners from allowing a clearcut at Britt Nichols Park, on a steep slope above their homes in the Callahan Mountains.
Since the Oregon Department of Forestry had already designated this area a “high landslide hazard location,” it seemed a no-brainer that the commissioners would leave standing timber buffer zones on both sides of the creek, as demanded by both the neighbors and best forest practices.
Yet despite these obvious red flags, the commissioners green-lighted the clearcut without any buffer zones—a foreseeable recipe for disaster.
The neighbors’ worst fears were realized on March 16 when the downpour triggered a massive slide. Karla Riley and Jon Parman’s home on Oakley Road was nearly swept away in the avalanche. Parman described a wall of mud stretching nearly a mile that damaged properties and blocked the road for days.
Neighbors fear that the rest of the mountain will unravel during the next big storm. “What has it done to our lives, to our property values, to our future?” one homeowner lamented. “And what’s left to come may be worse than what we’ve already experienced.”
On March 16, a 40-foot section of Hubbard Creek Road in Umpqua was swept away in another landslide, sending asphalt roadbed, boulders, and trees crashing down into the Umpqua River. Crews worked around the clock for two days before the road was cleared.
Another landslide temporarily closed Highway 138 near Kellogg.
Douglas County reported that the March 2025 flood affected practically every street in the 1,140 miles of county-operated roads.
The initial damage to county-operated roads was an estimated $5.2 million. But damage to property and homes will cost significantly more.
So, why did it flood in neighborhoods where it had never flooded before—where neighbors had never previously needed flood insurance?
Douglas County’s elected politicians and their ongoing pattern of reclaiming and filling in wetlands, creeks, and abandoned timber ponds, and using them as construction sites for trailer parks, homes, and businesses.
These politicians claim that 85% percent of the state is protected wetlands—far too many they say. They consider wetlands protection an impediment to the construction of new homes and trailer parks.
But they ignore the preponderance of evidence that wetlands prevent flooding by absorbing vast quantities of water so towns doesn’t flood.
These politicians claim that there are way too many protected wetlands. This is not an original idea. They’re literally reading from a script.
The three county commissioners, Rep. Osborne, and Senator Brock Smith are collectively “guided” by New Media Northwest (NMN) of Salem, Oregon, a public relations and political consulting “think tank” owned by Chuck Adams.
A long-time strategist for right-wing causes who ran some nasty “swiftboating’’ campaigns, Adams is the man who crafts the language and strategy for Douglas County’s elected representatives.
Adams has a “lengthy history of stretching the truth beyond acceptable political bounds.”
According to Rob Patridge, a former three-session House Republican from Medford who has known Adams since 1989, “The politics of personal attack are his specialty.”
One colleague referred to Adams work as “a tsunami of sleaze.”
In his defense, Adams commented, “It’s almost never just about what a person stands for. It’s always about a mix. The point of that is that negative information is powerful. . . People thrive on negativity.”
Senator Brock Smith, has paid Chuck Adams $265,049. Rep. Virgle Osborne has paid him $90,662.
Douglas County Commissioners Tim Freeman and Tom Kress have paid Adams $274,421 and $233,287, respectively and they funneled another $151,541 to Adams via the so-called “Protect Douglas County Safety and Jobs PAC.”
As per Chuck Adams’ directive, Senator Brock Smith, Rep. Virgle Osborne, Rep. Court Boice, and Rep. Alek Scarlatos held a town hall meeting at the Roseburg courthouse on Friday, April 19, 2025. The four republicans were heckled by a large audience of constituents who vehemently opposed their plans to end vote-by-mail in Oregon and institute vote ID laws that will make it harder to vote.
But the primary issue the four politicians were pushing—also wildly unpopular—was the need to reclaim wetlands and fill them in, so they can building more housing in highly flood-prone areas—this just four weeks after the unprecedented March 16 flood, so fresh in the memory of their Douglas County constituents.
In an effort to absolve the three Douglas County Commissioners for the extreme recent flooding, Rep. Virgle Osborne denounced the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality and Oregon’s Land Use Board of Appeals, blaming them for preventing the construction of new homes on dangerously flood-prone reclaimed wetlands.
“Bejing” Brock Smith pandered to the angry mob, “I don’t think Portland legislators should be telling Roseburg farmer’s what they should be doing with their damn land.”
In response to comments published on this website, Chuck Adams instructed Osborne to launch a podcast. The first episode of “On the Virg” [sic] was deployed on April 17, 2025.
Adams doesn’t want Osborne talking about why four inches of rain caused the biggest flood in 60 years.
Armed with Adams’ talking points, Osborne told his listeners, “Flooding isn’t about climate—it’s just how fast it rained.”
Responding to this website’s recently published exposé on Osborne’s questionable conduct, Osborne told his podcast listeners on April 17, 2025, “If you see it on my social media or if you see it on my newsletter it is factually true. We don’t lie.”
In an attempt to cover up his apparent collusion with the county commissioners in a 2018 sweetheart deal in which he inexplicably obtained the half million-dollar property absolutely free, Osborne claimed, “There are a lot of people that fundamentally do not understand politics. They have an agenda. They have an opinion, which is great. Everybody should have an opinion—that doesn’t mean it should be shared.”
But Osborne occasionally drifts off script.
During April 17 his podcast accidentally admitted, “The county commissioners are kind of like the ring—I wouldn’t say the ring leaders. They’re kind of like this, yeah, kind of, it’s a circus and they’re the ones that are kind of directing things.”
Truer words were never spoken.
The timber corporations that fund the three county commissioners, as well as Osborne and “Bejing” Brock Smith, are well aware that the sand in their hourglass is running out.
In 2025, timber constitutes just 3% of statewide employment. This is why clearcutting is so prevalent in Douglas County—the timber corporations know the sun is setting on their industry and they won’t be coming back.
Yet Rep. Virgle Osborne and the three Douglas County Commissioners advocate abolishing zoning laws to fast-track trailer parks and high-density residential developments in dangerous rural flood-prone areas—far from fire stations, hospitals, police, emergency services, and the county seat.
It’s a classic bait-and-switch: strip rural, isolated communities of services, then “solve” the problem by handing their land to developers.
Although these politicians’ names do not appear on the construction contracts, building permits, or business registration, they nevertheless profit for this cycle of serial reconstruction.
Osborne and his associate Senator “Bejing” Brock Smith are mouthpieces for a network of industrial timber interests. It’s their job to reinforce the ideological scaffolding that keeps Douglas County locked in extractive, crony capitalist timber plantation governance.
Private timber plantations like Lone Rock refuse to log their forests selectively. Rather, they clearcut and replant dense stands of monoculture cloned Douglas fir plantations, sprayed with toxic herbicides linked to cancer and birth defects that are banned in more than 100 civilized nations.
These immature, tightly packed timber holdings are extremely flammable due to their high resin content and thin bark, and wildfire risk increases exponentially near clearcuts.
Timber plantations increase the severity of wildfire.
But Vurgle Osborne ignores the preponderance of evidence that links logged properties to wildfires.
Adhering to the same propaganda playbook the Oregon Forest Resource Institute created for the timber industry, Osborne blames “Monsanto and all of those guys … corporate farms, right? And that’s not good for our state.”
Meanwhile, Osborne champions his campaign donors—large timber conglomerates like Lone Rock Timber, Roseburg Forest Products, and Seneca Jones—for “replanting trees and taking care of the land,” insisting that they “are some of the best stewards of our forests, not the villains the extremists claim.”
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Clearcuts cause landslides and wildfires.
The three companies Osborne holds up as paragons of virtue, in fact, operate monoculture, herbicide-sprayed plantations that function exactly like Monsanto’s GMO cornfields, with runoff poisoning the rivers, creeks, fish, and wetlands—and the drinking water of their downstream neighbors.
Osborne and his counterpart State Senator “Bejing” Brock Smith owe their political careers to the three Douglas County commissioners.
When will rural moderates realize their elected representatives are lining their own pockets at public expense, while putting tenants, homeowners, and business at risk of catastrophic flooding—the illusion of benevolence quickly unravels, like a clearcut slope in a heavy downpour?
During the March 16 storm the condemned and uninsurable Winchester Dam on the North Umpqua River was completely submerged in the turbulent brown floodwaters, allowing county residents to see with their own eyes that the dam provides no manner of flood control.
This has lulled some people into a false sense of security. If the dam didn’t fall apart during the March 16 flood, they argue, then “maybe it’s not that dangerous after all?”
They forget that the dam is rated a “high hazard” by the Oregon Water Resources Department, meaning the agency anticipates “loss of life” when the dam fails, and a seventeen-foot wall of water descends on the downstream neighbors.
Considering the damage a mere four inches of rain wrought upon Douglas County residents in March 2025, this is a serious concern.
Ironically, Ryan Beckley, president of the Board of Directors of Winchester Water Control District, owners of the Winchester Dam, is among the well-connected few.
Beckley’s TerraFirma Foundation Systems makes regular and generous contributions to the reelection campaigns of county commissioners Chris Boice, Tim Freeman, and Tom Kress, and Virgle Osborne and David Brock Smith.
Beckley’s TerraFirma has few competitors in the flooded house and basement repair category in Douglas County. He profits from unlucky tenants who wind up living in flood-prone areas built on top of reclaimed and filled in creeks, wetlands, and abandoned timber ponds.
So you see, the privileged few make money off the misfortunes of the unprivileged many.
