Flooding Red River Rises to Highest Mark in Century

Hundreds of volunteers worked feverishly Wednesday to build backup dikes in Fargo as the rushing Red River rose ever higher, to its highest water mark this century, more than 20 feet over flood stage.

“We just don’t want to let up,” said Fargo Mayor Bruce Furness. “The worst may yet be coming for all we know. The problem is, nobody does know. . . . We don’t know how long those sandbag dikes are going to hold up,” he said.

As he spoke to reporters, workers who had been on duty through the night were building a 6-foot-long secondary earthen dike running more than four blocks through downtown in the middle of Third Street near City Hall.

A second dike was being built in a northeast side neighborhood where officials fear hundreds of homes could be flooded if the permanent levee there fails.

Upstream on the Red River at Breckenridge, Minn., nearly 500 people had been forced from their homes, and the advancing river threatened still more. Among those driven out were residents of a senior citizens complex who left in Coast Guard boats and National Guard trucks.

Water in parts of the southern section of Breckenridge was 12 feet deep.

In Fargo at midday the Red had risen to nearly 39 feet--more than 20 feet over flood stage and the highest since a massive 1897 flood. Dennis Walaker, operations director for Fargo’s Public Works Department, said he did not expect the river to rise much beyond 39 feet.

Farther north at Grand Forks, where the highest water is expected early next week, the North Dakota Highway Patrol closed a section of Interstate 39, the area’s main north-south artery into Canada.