Records Fall, Dikes Falter in N.D. Flood

If the grizzled sandbaggers of Terrace Avenue have learned anything over the last two weeks, they now know enough not to declare victory over a river that rolls over the landscape at its own baleful will.

Twice now, Fargo’s public officials and weather forecasters have announced that the Red River, gorged with melted runoff from a winter of record snowstorms, had reached its crest. Twice, the river has proved them wrong.

So on Friday morning, after Bill Huber and Kerri Burrows stayed up much of the night to keep their riverside clapboard house dry for one more day, the couple went right to work on their pumps and backyard sandbag dike without pausing to exult.

“Eight days,” Huber said, staring bleakly out at the muddy plane of river water that seemed to stretch out to the horizon. “They say it’ll be eight days before we’re out of trouble.”

There was trouble enough all along the Red River on Friday, the third time in two weeks that the surging waterway was supposed to have reached its peak. North Dakota is in the grip of a 500-year flood, a natural disaster so rare that all known records have been broken, endangering river towns by the sheer volume of water that is flowing north toward Canada.

The implacable Red brought forth its trouble in different guises Friday, posing imminent emergencies in some towns while threatening other areas with dire portents still a few days off.

The flood crest held as promised at 38 feet Friday in Fargo, where city workers and high school sandbaggers toiled in hip boots to reinforce dikes for one more crucial week, a period when the flood walls’ durability, and not the Red River’s height, will be most critical.

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But another stubborn flow of water south of the city, moving northward from the swollen Sheyenne and Wild Rice rivers, so worried Fargo officials that they decided Friday morning to take a desperate new step: They will erect an earth-and-sandbag wall in the city’s southern section to channel flood waters into the Red River in case temporary dams there fail over the coming week.

But the new diking represents a retreat from the previous line of defense, thereby exposing an affluent neighborhood of 300 houses to as much as 2 more feet of water. That is the only alternative, Fargo Mayor Bruce Furness said, to flooding that might otherwise roll deep into this city of 80,000 people and cut off Interstate 94, the main east-west artery.

“We could have studied this thing to death,” Furness said after emerging from a meeting with city engineers and U.S. Army Corps of Engineer flood experts, “but we didn’t have time.” Furness estimated the city has 72 hours to erect the wall before the water spilling in from the south could overtake Fargo’s earthen defenses.

Grand Forks, 75 miles north, did not even have that much time.

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Fire station klaxons wailed at 4 a.m. on the town’s eastern river edge, where the Red rose a foot higher than anyone expected--approaching 53 feet--and spongy dikes were leaking. When a rupture was detected in a flood wall in the Lincoln Park area, police fanned out through a neighborhood of 300 homes as 4 feet of water spilled into the streets.

By midday, more than 2,000 of the town’s 50,000 residents had been evacuated. Two northern dikes breached later in the day and sirens wailed again at dusk.

“We have to stay out until they let us come back in,” said Lincoln Park resident Cheryl Holmberg.

Debris and sewage backups are threatening the town’s potable-water supply. The flood clogged three of the town’s four main water intake valves, Grand Forks officials said late Friday. They asked residents to conserve water until the flood waters recede.

Ice jams south of Grand Forks were blamed for much of the town’s latest flood surge--one more legacy from the worst winter this snowbound state has ever experienced. Nearly 120 inches of snow fell, a frigid blanket that clogged eastern rivers with ice and killed 100,000 cattle in the western part of the state, where decaying carcasses now pose a threat to drinking water supplies.

Worried that rotting livestock could spread salmonella, botulism and anthrax, North Dakota Agriculture Commissioner Roger Johnson urged ranchers to notify authorities about dead livestock in ponds and creeks, and ordered local health authorities and National Guardsmen to aid in removing and disposing of the carcasses.

Guardsmen were also deployed in Grand Forks to keep gawkers out of flooded areas, where porous flood walls were so riddled by holes that Mayor Pat Owens warned that a contingency plan was being readied for a citywide evacuation, an ominous possibility if the river continues to rise in the next few days.

“This is new territory for all of us,” said Byron Sieber, a town emergency official. “These are temporary dikes and they weren’t designed to take another week of water pressure.”

Mayor Owen was blunter: “This is a major disaster,” she said.

The closest Fargo has come to disaster was late Thursday when water pressure from the Red River blew out a section of sandbags from a dike in the Oak Grove area just north of downtown. Water roared into the Oak Grove High School and funneled into the basements of a dozen homes on Terrace Avenue before residents reinforced sandbag walls behind other riverside residences.

Bill Huber said he saw “sandbags lift up” as water from the Red River swallowed up a block of Terrace Avenue. Neighborhood children became adolescent Paul Reveres on bikes, screeching out warnings: “Water’s coming down the street!”

Huber and Burrows heaved more sandbags onto the ring dike in their yard. Then, while Burrows slept, Huber stayed up all night, pouring gasoline into a humming trio of pumps until dawn. Then, he staggered inside for an hour’s rest.

“I can take maybe a day or two more of this,” he said, hollow-eyed. “That river better start going down by then.”

But the likelihood that flood waters will remain high for the next week has forced homeowners in Fargo’s affluent southern neighborhoods to fend for themselves.

Mayor Furness said that city workers will still try to bolster small ring dikes around the pricey subdivisions that have grown in recent years on the city’s southern fringes. But his decision Friday to build another flood wall north of that area made it clear that if the water keeps coming from the south, the city may have no choice but to funnel that runoff toward the Red River, even if it inundates expensive houses along its path.

One homeowner took the decision in stride. “We don’t have anything more to lose,” Lane Weber said.

But restaurant owner Randy Thorsen was determined to save his $750,000 brick mansion--even though he has yet to move into it. For much of Friday, Thorsen supervised a crew of 30 high school volunteers who came to Fargo’s swamped southern fringe to offer their aid.

Thorsen’s home was an island, so isolated by waist-deep flood waters that the students were ferried to him inside the muddy bucket of a front-end loader. The girls sang “99 bags of sand on the wall” as they doubled over under the weight of the sandbags. The boys tested each others’ strength, heaving the 40-pound bags at each other as if they were beach balls.

At the end of the bagging line, Thorsen crouched in a pool of mud, jamming the bags together until they towered 3 feet over his lawn.

“I should be OK. When the dike’s finished, I’ll be at 42 feet,” Thorsen said as he folded a sheet of plastic under another row of sandbags. “But the bitch is every time we think we’ve got enough, the river keeps topping us. It’s like there’s a mind somewhere inside that water, and it doesn’t like us too much.”

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Red River’s Rise

The meltdown from this winter’s record snowfall has overwhelmed the rivers south of Fargo, causing them spread over the flatlands.

River levels as of Friday, 4 a.m.:

Red River of the North

Grand Forks: Flood level: 28’; Current stage: 52.0’

Shelly: Flood level: 15’; Current stage: 25.2’

Fargo: Flood level: 17’; Current stage: 38.5’

Source: Accu-Weather, Associated Press