Red River Tightens Its Stranglehold on Grand Forks

The Red River’s brackish reign over this defeated city was nearly complete Monday as doctors airlifted out the only patients remaining in Grand Forks’ shuttered hospital and exhausted crews worked to save the last dry tract of homes from advancing flood waters.

Public officials in North Dakota and Minnesota pleaded for more government relief funds to help 45,000 residents left homeless by the flood. President Clinton has declared the Red River valley a disaster area twice this year--after a savage winter and again after the recent flooding. He is expected to survey the scene today and meet with some of the 4,000 refugees housed in a hangar at a suburban Air Force base.

Damage estimates will not start until the river recedes enough to allow inspectors into water-swamped houses. But after emerging from a meeting with government relief and emergency officials, Grand Forks Mayor Pat Owens said that property losses “will be in the billions. We’ve had an ongoing disaster since the snow started falling.” North Dakota Gov. Edward T. Schafer said the cleanup alone could exceed $40 million.

The few remaining vestiges of urban life in the stricken town winked out over the day like stars in a clouded sky. Electric power was shut off to the swamped eastern half of the city after water shorting out sump pumps sparked fires in three houses overnight. A downtown office where telephone and cellular service has been kept alive appeared to be on the verge of succumbing to flood waters, prompting U.S. West officials to warn that communications could be cut at any moment.

Devoid of its human presence, the town seemed as unreal as a sound stage, its quaint neighborhoods of bungalows and trailer parks showing small, eerie signs of life interrupted. National Guard troops returning from house-to-house searches said they saw stuffed animals and sofas bobbing in the icy murk and heard alarm clocks buzzing from bedroom windows.

“It’s like the entire population was sucked up into a UFO,” said Guardsman John Nygard, who has spent three days combing neighborhoods for residents unwilling to vacate. “You can go for blocks without seeing a soul and then, when you see someone, it shocks you.”

The devastation was even more extensive across the spreading river in East Grand Forks, Minn., where 3,800 fled rushing water Friday. The town’s mayor, Lynn Stauss, had to be taken by helicopter to Grand Forks’ dry west side for a news conference. The violent currents of the Red had overflowed over every bridge between North Dakota and Minnesota north of Fargo, 75 miles to the south.

At least 600 houses in East Grand Forks lay sunken to the rooftops, Stauss said. Some homes were floating in the tide, broken free by the river’s power. Stauss urged homeowners to stay away from the water. “What do you have to come back to?” he asked.

Authorities abandoned efforts to protect United Hospital, the city’s only major trauma center. The last of the facility’s 197 patients were taken out by helicopter Sunday night. Some were flown as far as the Mayo Clinic south of Minneapolis in Rochester, Minn.

A group of doctors is staffing a small emergency clinic at a National Guard armory on the dry west side of town until a Federal Emergency Management Agency mobile surgical unit arrives this week. One remaining physician, Dr. Rob Eastman, said hospital officials had “tried to stay but we couldn’t keep the place sanitary enough to keep patients.”

Raw sewage backing up in bathrooms and the hospital’s water supply forced the decision to close the hospital even though a ring dike around the medical building had kept river water away.

An Orange County team of 18 doctors, nurses and medical technicians flew to Grand Forks on Monday night to relieve weary hospital staffers. Working with federal and military agencies, the contingent from the Orange County Disaster Medical Assistance Team expects to spend a week on the mission, a group spokesman said.

Police and more than 400 North Dakota National Guard troops tightened a cordon around the stricken perimeter, turning away residents desperate to inspect their flooded homes.

The only habitable portion was on the city’s southwest side, where sandbaggers tried to brace a one-mile earthen wall and divert flood waters off toward the west.