In February 1950, Dorothy McCullough Lee, mayor of Portland, Oregon, appointed Charles P. Pray as head of a new civil defense bureau. The bureau, which soon became known as Disaster Relief and Civil Defense, was created under the Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950, which placed the funding responsibility for civil defense on local governments, to be matched with federal funds. The bureau was tasked with teaching the city's citizens how to respond to a nuclear attack, including providing information about fallout shelter construction, first aid and survival techniques, and evacuation procedures. In 1952, Portland voters passed a $600,000 levy to fund the bureau.

In 1955, the bureau ran Operation Green Light, a drill for evacuating Portland's downtown area. By following traffic light patterns to guide escape routes, more than 100,000 people and 29,000 vehicles had successfully evacuated the designated area in less than one hour. In 1956, the bureau opened the Kelly Butte Civil Defense Center, which was the first underground, self-sustaining civil defense center in the United States. The facility was meant to house up to 250 people, who would form an emergency local government. The center also housed microfilmed versions of the city's records. In 1957, CBS produced a television documentary about the bureau's work, titled "A Day Called X."

In spite of the bureau's work having received national recognition, in 1960 and 1962, voters rejected levy measures to continue funding it. In May 1963, the Portland City Council voted 4-1 to abolish the bureau, in spite of Mayor Terry Schrunk's protests. By that time, some figures, including City Commissioner Stanley Earl and U.S. Senator Wayne Morse, had become skeptical of the program's usefulness, saying that advances in nuclear weaponry meant that a direct attack would be unsurvivable. City officials had also criticized the bureau for an ineffective response to the Columbus Day Storm of October 1962.

Sources: "Portland Civil Defense," by Brian K. Johnson, Oregon Encyclopedia, https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/portland_civil_defense/#.YzMovXbMIuV; "Kelly Butte Civil Defense Center and Kelly Butte Natural Area," by Nick Blackbourn, Oregon Encyclopedia, https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/kelly_butte_civil_defense_center_and_kelly_butte_natural_area/#.YzMowXbMIuU; articles in the Oregonian, 1950-1963.