Dynamite Used to Break Up Ice on N.D. Rivers

Crews used dynamite on ice jams clogging flood-swollen rivers Wednesday in an attempt to drain backed-up water away from the Red River Valley before it rises even higher.

Communities along the Minnesota-North Dakota state line wrestled with overflowing small rivers and girded for the crest of the Red River itself.

People’s lives already had been defined by miles of pooled water and vast sheets of ice, the double hit of snowmelt flooding and a brutal weekend blizzard.

At Abercrombie, halfway between Fargo and Wahpeton, crews twice exploded dynamite in an effort to loosen an ice jam that was stuck in the river like a giant cork.

“It didn’t do anything,” said Richland County Road Supervisor Harlan Bladow. The explosives needed to be put underneath or embedded in the ice to be effective, but getting it there was too dangerous, he said.

Water behind one ice jam at the twin towns of Breckenridge, Minn., and Wahpeton, N.D., was expected to rise by as much as 2 1/2 feet.

Northwestern Minnesota and eastern North Dakota cover the bed of a glacial lake that disappeared 9,000 years ago. The rivers that drain it are too young to have carved deep valleys, so floods spread outward.