Thousands Flee as Red River Inundates City

Moving in unstoppable silence, the Red River sent walls of flood water spilling into streets and homes Saturday, forcing nearly half of the population of 50,000 to flee in a chaotic, mounting evacuation that threatened to reduce this northern Plains community to a watery ghost town for weeks to come.

The fast-moving flood spared nothing in its path, breaching the city’s earthen dike defenses in dozens of leaks that shot open like geysers. The water overcame the water treatment plant and also poses a hazard to gas and electrical service, emergency officials said late in the day.

Sirens wailed and air horns blared as fire trucks and National Guard troop carriers rumbled through neighborhoods west of the river, warning residents to flee from a mandatory evacuation zone that kept widening throughout the day as the water rolled on. The river moved so quickly over the city’s flat terrain of bungalows and clapboard homes that some residents were already cramming milk crates and garbage bags bulging with possessions into their car trunks when the klaxons sounded.

“How can this be happening?” Rachel Glaszcz moaned, tears streaming down her cheeks as friends heaved bedding, food and children’s toys into a camper. “A whole city gone. When will they let us come back?”

The people of Grand Forks moved through their watery landscape like sleepwalkers, often too stunned by the river’s gathering force to panic. To many, it was unfathomable that an entire American city could be emptied out by a force of nature. The city had toughed out a winter of epic dimensions--a record snowfall that dropped three years’ worth of snow in three months and an ice storm that whipped through the area just two weeks ago, shorting out electrical service that was still being restored when the flood struck.

By nightfall Saturday, 60% of Grand Forks was under water, emergency officials said. Black smoke billowed out over the submerged downtown Saturday night as fire raged out of control in three abandoned buildings. Firefighters let the structures burn, unable to maneuver their trucks through 4-foot-deep waters; helicopters laden with fire-retardant chemicals put out the blaze.

Pat Owens, the city’s beleaguered mayor, asked all residents to voluntarily seek shelter outside city limits and warned that high river levels and likely long-term power and water outages could make Grand Forks unlivable for at least two weeks.

“We have not lost any lives so far in this flood, and we desperately want to keep it that way,” Owens said. She added: “Lack of services is going to make life difficult and perhaps dangerous for residents throughout the city, even those who are not inundated by water.”

2-Year-Old Saved From Cesspool

The only threat to life came when a 2-year-old boy stumbled into a cesspool near his parent’s house. Neighbors found the youth by tramping through the acrid wash until they felt his body. The unnamed child was reported in good condition at an area hospital.

Though several thousand homeowners remained in some western neighborhoods at the end of the day Saturday, city officials said racing flood waters could soon stretch across the entire community, a prospect that could force a mandatory evacuation within days.

“This water’s not stopping for anything,” said City Engineer Doug Ferrie, haggard and bleary-eyed after staying up all night trying to find a place where the city might make another stand. As river water seeped toward his own home, Ferrie admitted that there was nowhere to stand.

“The water’s gonna go another 2 miles to the west, all the way to the interstate,” he said. The river was already 2 miles beyond its banks.

Owens said some residents who “don’t feel they’re in danger” remained inside their homes in evacuation areas even as the streets around them turned into muddy canals. Worried they were endangering themselves, the mayor ordered police and National Guard troops to go house to house after 8 p.m. Saturday to roust out all stragglers.

Thousands of residents fled west as the river moved in. Campers and pickup trucks crawled along city streets, moving everywhere but to the east, driving out to meet relatives and friends in the city’s suburbs. But even as they escaped, the flood waters mocked their progress, cutting off vital highway passes and snarling traffic for miles along two-lane country roads still rimmed by snow and ice.

Other evacuees opted to stay in public shelters. Hundreds drove out to an Air Force base west of the city, where nearly 1,000 evacuees slept in barracks and staff buildings Friday night after the river first poured into the city. Another 350 jammed inside a gymnasium at Red River High School, only to rush out in a panic at midday when emergency officials realized that the school was also in the flood’s path.

Police and emergency officials hurriedly vacated their own downtown command center early Saturday, carting out files and equipment as water pouring into the center of the city shut off access to City Hall.

But even moving west to the campus of the University of North Dakota may not be far enough: The college closed down for the rest of the semester, and one city official said that location was also vulnerable to the Red River’s relentless tide.

Helicopters Evacuate Stranded Residents

The river also poured over bridges separating Grand Forks from the town of East Grand Forks, Minn., where levees burst so quickly that stranded residents had to be taken out by Coast Guard helicopters and Good Samaritans on Jetskis. On the Grand Forks side, porous flood walls popped open so quickly that each ruptured dike magnified pressure against the earthen berms that still held, creating what Police Lt. Byron Sieber of the Grand Forks Emergency Operations Center described as a domino effect of cascading flood water.

The first flood walls gave way on Friday on the city’s southeastern edge. In the Lincoln Park neighborhood, 2,000 residents scurried from their homes at daybreak. But the worst breaches came at dusk, dumping sewage-laden waves into the city’s east side with surprising speed.

By 3 a.m. Saturday, residents who had only begun to pack up their homes suddenly found themselves forced to beg rides from National Guard Humvees and troop trucks--if they could find them.

Strangers Used Canoes to Help

In some cases, strangers rowed up out of the darkness in canoes, taking on passengers. Other evacuees clung to the sides of garbage trucks, ignoring acrid fumes as they rode out to safety.

After working on imploding river dikes all night, Paul Helgeson, a 30-year-old gas station owner, surrendered to the water and quickly filled a green duffel bag with clothes and supplies. But when he opened the front door of his house, just six blocks from the river, he discovered that the river had come to him.

The water was already too high for his 1968 Ford Galaxy automobile to navigate. He waved to passing trucks, but they were jammed with evacuees. Finally, he heard a chugging sound and heard a familiar voice in the darkness. A neighbor he only knew as “Arnie” drove up on a industrial grader. Helgeson grabbed his duffel and jumped on. Deposited on dry land, he walked west, barely ahead of the flood’s watery tendrils.

Nurse Linda Svejkovsky first saw river water flowing toward her home at about 2 a.m. She had been moving furniture and appliances up out of her basement all evening, but the first gurgling of Red River runoff splashing into the gutter outside gripped her in a panic. Her husband, Sam, a city firefighter who had been out warning residents farther east to leave, showed up after 3 a.m. to tell her they had to go. The river, he said, was “coming in too fast.”

She took her teenage daughters, Rachel and Allison, and drove to the home of family friend Butch Thompson, where they caught several hours of fitful sleep. On Saturday morning, Mary Thompson served them cereal and toast. As they ate in their pajamas, Butch Thompson tromped into the house with wet boots. The water was now threatening his house. The Svejkovskys would have to move again--and the Thompsons with them.

Down the block, City Council President Tommy Hagness barked on a cellular phone to public works crews, begging for a sandbag dike to protect his neighborhood.

But the Red River was already staking its claim on the neighborhood, one of the highest elevations in a city with no hills. Narrow streamlets were looping around block after block, flowing into storm drains, and then, when there was nowhere else to go, backing up into streets and onto lawns.

Within minutes of Hagness’ desperate phone call, Ferrie arrived to see if crews could set up a fallback line of sandbags to divert the river water. But the river would not be diverted. It was moving west in a 2-mile-long column. Ferrie, weary after a night at the dikes, could see that any attempt to hold off the river was a lost cause.

This was his own neighborhood, but on this peaceful Saturday morning, it was time to “let it go. We’re fighting a losing battle and it makes me sick. Last night I stood outside my mother’s house for an hour and watched it go under. That’s the house I was born in. That’s gone, and now my place over here is going too.”

Soon, the word was official. Everyone in the neighborhood would have to evacuate.

Ferrie leaned up against his car. His yellow rain slicker and his rubber boats were caked with mud. Ferrie spat at the first finger of river water that trickled by.

“I gotta go back to work now,” he said, glaring at the approaching river. “But I’ll be honest. I wish I was out of town right now, smoking my credit card and drinking beer. Another few days like this and that’s about all I’ll be able to do.”