Grand Forks Adrift in Uncertainty

National Guard Staff Sgt. John Nygard is one of the few among this sunken city’s 50,000 dispossessed who have seen up close what the Red River has done to their lives.

On boat patrol for stragglers in the trash-skimmed cistern where the Central Park neighborhood once stood, Nygard saw only murky waves washing over the building that houses his family’s duplex apartment.

“Everything we own is gone,” he said. “You got the personal effects of an entire city floating out there. And no one to fish it out.”

The Red River’s humbling of Grand Forks is as sweeping in its devastation as nature has visited on an American metropolis--a slow throttling of nearly every amenity of modern life that city dwellers take for granted.

Just about everything has failed: Electric power, gas service, water delivery. The entire population has emptied out, leaving no forwarding address for the mail piling up in mounds inside a diked post office. Fires, sparked by the flood’s volatile contact with live wires, burned out a third of the downtown and several houses. Tons of raw sewage leeching through the flood water contaminates everything it touches. Communication is crippled, phone service in danger of winking out.

The region’s sleep-deprived officials are only now beginning to turn to the future. But the uniqueness of their city’s plight--and the absence of past models to learn from--poses a recovery period that can only be groped through. The months of rebuilding may require as much ingenuity as relief money.

There is even opportunity in Grand Forks’ humiliation, officials say: the possibility that the abandoned city will remain a blank page for several weeks after the water recedes, rid--at least temporarily--of the human interruptions that so often snarl the chaotic aftermaths of earthquakes and tornadoes.

And the flood likely will add impetus to a long-discussed $70-million plan to build a channel around the city--a trench that engineers believed would have spared it much of the current devastation.

“If we can get a head start in there after the water goes down and before the people come back,” said Mayor Pat Owens, “I think we can make some real progress. I’m just not sure how long their patience will last.”

Owens has promised that she will allow residents to return to inspect their homes as soon as possible. But at the same time, National Guard troops and police have tightened security around the town, turning away anxious homeowners. Only a few residents have been allowed back to retrieve pets, Owens said.

Officials have said that it could take up to a month before the most vital services--potable water and sewage disposal--would be on line. But some say privately that it could take longer, at least six weeks.

Residents have so besieged officials with requests to return to their homes that police are threatening to arrest anyone caught trying to run the cordon around the city’s perimeter.

The coming weeks also will test the character of Grand Forks’ displaced population--and the good Samaritans who have taken them in by the thousands. For the moment, the region is awash in an aura of goodwill. By the hour, rural families and church leaders call KNOX-AM, the town’s only remaining radio station, offering up spare rooms to take in strangers.

“This is how we are up here. We stand by one another,” said Leroy Hiuzenga, who has called the station repeatedly to air his offer to house evacuees in the cabins of the Park River Bible Camp. At least 40 refugees have arrived, he said, and there is room for 260 more.

Air Force National Guard Staff Sgt. Dan Welsh moved with his wife to Niagara, 45 miles west, where they are staying with 30 other refugees in a sprawling farmhouse owned by his mother-in-law. Neighbors have parked two motor homes in the driveway to handle the overflow.

Welsh is “tickled by their generosity,” but he realizes, too, that he and thousands of others ultimately will overstay their welcome. If their stay extends to weeks, an entire city will need to find more permanent housing.

Announcing Tuesday that the federal government will fund an extra $200 million in disaster aid to the region, President Clinton acknowledged as much. And Vallee Bunting, a spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said that officials are considering the possibility of erecting tent cities in the warmer summer months if they are needed.

The scattering of the city’s population may make FEMA’s job harder, Bunting said. Unlike most disasters, where the homeless population is concentrated and close at hand, Grand Forks’ evacuees are too spread out to contact easily. “We’re going to have problems in reaching them,” Bunting said. “And if they move several times, it will be hard for us to get back in touch with them if they don’t leave us numbers to call.”

The length of their homelessness depends largely on the ability of Grand Forks officials to restore water and sewers. The 4-mile spread of contaminated river water makes that a more difficult job than any region has suffered in decades, officials say.

The problem is not only that the town’s water intake system failed, but that miles of pipes are likely broken and tainted with filth. Grand Forks’ sewer system is equally ruined. Only two or three of the town’s 36 sewer pump stations still function, officials report. Douglas Ferrie, a city engineer, said workers will have to drop TV cameras into scores of sewers to determine the extent of damage before the repairs can begin.

If there is any precedent for the shock delivered by the flood to the city’s system, it is the shutdown of Des Moines’ vital services during the extensive Mississippi River flooding of 1993. Fast-swelling flood waters conked out its water treatment plant.

The recovery took nearly two weeks, said L.D. McMullen, general manager of Des Moines Water Works: “Seven days to clean up the treatment plant, then about five more days to get the distribution system up, then about seven more days to test the distribution system to verify the water was safe to drink.”

Grand Forks officials doubt they can match Des Moines’ performance. Repair crews will not even be able to get to the frozen water intakes until the river drops at least 2 feet--not expected for another week to 10 days. The plant’s dikes would have to be rebuilt. Then, said Public Works Director Ken Vein, “we’ll have to pump the water out and flush out the whole system, disinfecting all the lines.”

The capacity of the Des Moines system--supplying water to 250,000 people--is larger than Grand Forks’. But Des Moines only lost its treatment plant, not the miles of pipes that Grand Forks will have to inspect.

“It’s a tough situation for them,” McMullen said. “We sympathize. They have to be patient and tolerant and recognize it will take some time, longer than what they will like.”

North Dakota Gov. Edward T. Schafer said Tuesday that spotter planes and helicopters would soon begin circling the city, taking detailed photos and videos of the scene “so people can start to see what damage they may or may not have.”

Once the water recedes, the first wave of government inspectors will fan out to survey the damage and determine which structures remain viable and which must be condemned. Hundreds of houses in the city’s swamped eastern corridor will have to be torn down, one Grand Forks official said. Several have been sighted by National Guard patrols floating free of their foundations.

Farther away from the river’s natural banks, most of the city’s houses are salvageable. But even those have suffered a range of damage, from buckled walls and floors to flooded basements, officials said. In deeper areas, the destruction may be compounded by backwash caused by cranes, heavy trucks and military Humvees that have forded through the flood areas in the last five days.

Downtown was doubly plagued, first by 6-foot flood waters then by a fire that raced over three blocks, showering embers that started blazes in more abandoned buildings until a dozen were nothing but smoking masonry craters. Even those structures not hollowed out by the fire may have to be torn down, said Jim Durkin, newsroom maestro of the Herald, the town’s daily newspaper.

The editorial staff of 58 fled the onrushing water Saturday, only to watch their office building burn to the waterline that night. Reporters and editors have moved three times since then, working to put out their paper, which has been inserted into editions of the St. Paul Pioneer-Press and distributed free around the flood zone. In its first flood edition, the paper proclaimed it would print “come hell and high water.”

The printing plant was not burned, but there is concern, Durkin said, that structural weakening by flood waters may force it to be razed. For the duration, the newspaper now operates out of an elementary school in the town of Manville. The school has been closed because of flood damage.

“We want to be out before school resumes in the fall,” Durkin said. “We don’t want to be tripping over little kids.”

Mayor Owens raised the possibility that much of the city’s downtown buildings may be demolished, replaced by a new town center. “A lot of downtown will have to be renovated,” she said.

Like many small cities, Grand Forks’ downtown has had its lean years, its storefronts shuttered as commercial firms moved to newer shopping malls on the outskirts. Over the last several years, a few businesses have trickled back, but the area was still “pretty sad-looking,” one business leader said.

Before businesses downtown and elsewhere in the city rush to return to Grand Forks, they likely will press for assurances that another 500-year flood would not overrun their operations. Unlike Fargo, 75 miles to the south, which has attracted its share of heavy industry in recent years, Grand Forks is a simple service-industry town--where stores and fast-food outlets augment seed and mill operations that cater to the region’s wheat and sugar beet farmers.

“If businessmen can’t be certain this won’t happen again, who’s gonna want to relocate here?” asked Dan Welsh.

Those fears may give new life to an old plan to dig a channel around the city to divert the Red River when it floods. Last year, the city allowed engineering firms to make bids for the first phase of the project. But the project’s completion was still in doubt, Ferrie said, because of the cost involved.

“It’s a lot of money for a small city like Grand Forks,” Ferrie said.

A rarity among engineering projects, it would be similar to a trench dug around the city of Winnipeg in the Canadian province of Manitoba. Winnipeg is also on the Red River, the next heavily populated area to ride out the flood. Whether its diversion channel succeeds may determine whether Grand Forks gets enough funding to try its own version, Ferrie said.

“In theory, I think it would have saved us,” he said. “There still would have been flooding, but more like the usual spring floods we get. We could have protected a lot of the houses on the west side, and the water would have been lower nearer the river.”

For now, the channel is only a blueprint, an engineer’s dream. The flood waters are still so high that there is nothing for the city’s staff of seven engineers to do. After working without sleep for a week trying to shore up leaking dikes, Ferrie is a refugee like everyone else who fled the lake that was Grand Forks.

He sits in a motel room in Devil’s Lake, 90 miles from his swamped house, waiting for the reconstruction of his city to begin.

“I’m pretty comfortable,” he said. “I’m going to be here awhile.”

Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this story.