The year after this disastrous turn of fortune, the Lincoln City Chamber of Commerce hired David Gomberg as director. “I learned very quickly that the mothers and fathers in Lincoln City took the ‘shortest river’ very seriously and they said, David, go fix this for us,” Gomberg said, in an interview with Conde Nast Traveler’s Ken Jennings. In the more than 30 years since that year, Gomberg has been the D River’s number-one booster in the battle for shortest-river honors. 
The D River, as seen from under the Highway 101 bridge, looking out to sea. (Image: Offbeat Oregon)“A group of students in Great Falls as a school project decided to get a drainage ditch recognized as a river by the Survey of Geographical Names,” he said, “and then submitted that to the Guinness Book as the shortest river in the world.” As a drainage ditch, the Roe would be something to see – its stream flow is in the range of 2,300 cubic feet per second, or about half the size of the McKenzie River at Leaburg. Moreover, the D itself isn’t exactly huge. But then, it’s not usually 440 feet long, either. In fact, it’s only that long twice a year, at the two maximum low tides. With the title on the line, Lincoln City locals started thinking that wasn’t a fair way to measure the river. So a local survey company sallied forth on a spring tide and measured the river at its shortest – with the tide as high as possible, and the ocean practically lapping at the footings of Highway 101. The result: 120 feet. Armed with this information, the Lincoln City partisans went back to the Guinness Book publisher to petition for a new trial. In 1990, the Guinness people agreed to update the listing so that it listed the D River as the world’s shortest during high tides, and the Roe as the world’s shortest at other times. Both could keep their “World’s Shortest River” signs and information, and everybody was happy.... 
The D River and Devils Lake as seen from the bank of the river, justunder the Highway 101 bridge. (Image: Offbeat Oregon)Well, almost everybody. Just as Randolph McCoy wouldn’t have been happy settling for half of the hog he thought was his, some of the students and community boosters in Great Falls did not want to share the title they considered theirs by right of conquest following a hard-fought victory. Mrs. Nardlinger found another short waterway nearby — this one really was more or less a drainage ditch — that was the length of a medium-size motorhome, and started the process of surveying that to petition to designate it as a “fork” of the Roe River. As for Dave Gomberg and the Lincoln City boosters, they weren’t ready to settle for half a hog either. Under Gomberg’s leadership, the Chamber hired a team of geologists to survey the river, and the geologists decreed that the river measurements that had been used were entirely wrong. “They said that it starts where the water comes out of the lake at the water break there, and ends at the vegetation line,” said Gomberg. “We determined that our river was actually not 440 feet but about 110 feet long.” Beyond that vegetation line, the geologists said, the D River was no longer the D River, but rather the D River Estuary ... or at any rate, that’s how Gomberg sees it.
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“That’s our story,” he added. “We’re sticking to it.” At that point, very understandably, the Guinness Book people gave up and simply deleted the entire category of “shortest river” from their next edition. The whole affair seems to have left a bit of a bad taste in their mouths, because they’ve basically memory-holed the whole affair: When Beach Connection writer Andre Hagestedt asked about it a few years ago, a PR assistant with the Guinness Book actually claimed Guinness had never published the D River as the world’s shortest.
The D River and Devils Lake as seen from the bank of the river, just under the Highway 101 bridge. (Image: Offbeat Oregon)This article is un-by-lined and has no date, but a quick dive into the source code brings up a fairly suspicious one: March 30, 2021 ... just in time for April Fools Day. Oregon Coast Today is kind of famous for April Fools pranks, and it seems pretty clear that this is one of them. In this article, Chip Dipson (or is that Dip Chipson? It could be a typo) claims Explore Lincoln City brought some of its extra leftover marketing money to the table to partner with the Oregon Department of Transportation while ODOT crews were shoring up the Highway 101 bridge over the river. “Workers already had concrete deliveries on order, they had rebar,” Mr. Dippity says in this article. “All you’d need to build a concrete channel to narrow the width of the D River to four inches.” The article says the new riverbed would be unveiled at a special ceremony on Thursday, April 1, 2021. “Some people question whether building up concrete walls two meters tall to force the D River into a 4-inch-wide channel was a smart move,” Mr. Chippity adds. “They’ll see how smart it is when potamologists and tourists flock to Lincoln City in the dead of winter to stand astride the world’s narrowest river. Mark my words.” This also, according to Mr. Chalupadip, puts it in the running for world’s fastest river, as squeezing the channel down into a four-inch slot resulted in current speeds of 39 miles an hour. Ironically enough, that was probably about the maximum sprinting speed of Old Man Hatfield’s razorback hog.
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