In addition to substantial damage to thousands of buildings— residential, commercial, and civic—and to miles of power lines, the severe winds toppled countless trees in western Oregon's forests. The storm outranks all other natural disasters in the state in terms of destruction and cost, including the 1903 Heppner Flood.

The intense winds left over a million people in Oregon without electrical power, some of them for weeks. On Mt. Hebo, near the Coast, the storm’s winds destroyed an Air Force radar station. Outside the capitol building in Salem, the Circuit Rider, a bronze sculpture by Alexander Phimister Proctor, toppled off its pedestal. In Monmouth, on the campus of the Oregon College of Education (now Western Oregon University), Campbell Hall (1871) lost its landmark Gothic-style tower. Portland's Morrison Street Bridgeexperienced wind gusts of 116 mph, and a number of the city's major radio-transmission towers tumbled over. Most of the deaths from the storm in Oregon were the result of flying debris and falling trees.

U.S. Forest Service employees working in the coastal forests that Friday were blocked by trees across the roads. With trees crashing down all around, some of the men ran to the comparative safety of recently logged clear-cuts. In the national forests of the Pacific Northwest, between 11 billion and 17 billion board feet of timber blew over, creating jack-strawed areas of fallen trees. The volume of downed timber exceeded the annual cut of the Forest Service's entire Pacific Northwest Region at the time. Because of the storm, construction of salvage logging roads accelerated the