Sandbagged Communities Await Flooded Red River

The swollen Red River reached its highest point this century Saturday, a slow-moving potential disaster edging north toward a dozen more communities waiting behind sandbag fortresses.

After two weeks of creeping toward an anticipated record high, the river crested at 37.58 feet--20 feet above flood stage but short of the record of 39.1 feet set in 1897.

Most of the city of 74,000 was dry behind its flood walls. But officials warned that the crest was no reason for people to let their guard down after weeks of building homemade dikes and fortifying their homes with sandbags.

“When the crest hits, everybody says, ‘Hey, let’s get the champagne,’ but that’s not the case until you get all 7 or 8 feet of water off those dikes,” Dennis Walaker, Fargo’s operations manager, said Saturday.

It will be another week before Fargo is out of danger, Walaker said, predicting the river would begin falling about 4 to 6 inches today. “That’s not very quickly when it’s got to drop 20 feet,” he said.

Temperatures climbed into the 40s Saturday, bringing out sightseers who lined the railing at a parking garage across the river in Moorhead, Minn. They snapped photos of street signs poking above the murky water.

The warmer temperatures also posed a new threat that giant slabs of ice floating downstream could rupture sandbag dikes or jam up behind bridges. Many roads already were closed in the area.

The bloated river had been rising for nearly two weeks across the vast prairie that spans the Minnesota-Dakota border. Flooding had been expected following the winter’s staggering snowfall, but conditions were aggravated recently by a pounding rainstorm followed by a blizzard that dumped up to 2 feet of snow.