A City’s Calm, All-Consuming Disaster

The river runs wild, but it is deceptively demure, a glassy, chocolate-brown, wall-to-wall carpet spreading across the flatness with nowhere to drain.

Block after block, street after street, mile after mile, it swallows all that is gritty and uneven and tattered, enveloping this Great Plains community in a smooth layer of water that rises up to porches covered with artificial turf and over the hoods of submerged American-made sedans.

A plastic baseball floats by. An empty milk jug bobs atop the oily sheen. Birds chatter in the leafless elms. There is no traffic, no plumbing and no power. Grand Forks is still here, but no one is home.

“It still doesn’t seem real,” Don Purpur, a Grand Forks reserve policeman, said Wednesday as he surveyed his ghostly city from the bow of an inflatable boat.

“It won’t,” his partner, Jim Carroll, agreed.

The vastness and stillness of the Grand Forks flood only belies the calamity that has struck. On Wednesday, five days after beginning the evacuations that emptied out this town of 50,000, rescue workers found themselves with virtually nothing to do, other than escort reporters through the flood zone and wait for the water to go down.

But there is too much and it is not going anywhere soon, even as the water level dropped by half a foot.

The water starts in earnest along Washington Street, making a moat of the Town & Country Shopping Center, where a True Value hardware store boasts a slightly outdated sign. “Flood Sale,” it says. The parking lot is filled with more than a dozen soggy Christmas trees--left months ago for recycling crews, but soon buried under a blizzard of snow that still has yet to fully melt.

Purpur’s and Carroll’s boat, navigated by a sheriff’s rescue diver, is moored at a yellow street sign that warns, “Right Lane Ends.” So does the left lane--the whole street disappears, actually--but the officers are too busy wriggling into their chest-high waders to pay much notice.

“If we hit a current, we might be in Winnipeg by noon,” joked Purpur, a 22-year police veteran, pointing out that the pugnacious Red River flows north from North Dakota into Canada.

The water here is just knee-high but everything is so flat that gutters and lawns and anything else too waterlogged to float all vanish under its expansive reach. It swamps the Holy Family Catholic Church and the Northern Light Council’s Boy Scout headquarters, lapping up against the doors of South Junior High School.

As the boat heads east--toward downtown and the river’s drowned banks--the water gets deeper, covering soccer nets and air-conditioning units, engulfing picnic tables and fire hydrants. In front of one white stucco house, a “For Sale” sign is nearly submerged. Ladders lean against some structures, offering their now-quarantined residents a last-ditch escape to the roof.

And still the water gets deeper. Lincoln Park Golf Course is a lake. Along aptly named River Road, the pressure has shattered windows and buckled in garage doors. Abandoned shovels, wielded last weekend to craft earthen levees, poke from muddy mounds. Outside one elegant turn-of-the-century mansion, an American flag flutters at half-staff.

Near the river’s original banks, the water is above basketball hoops, over street signs, just inches below precariously sagging power lines. A Chevrolet Suburban Silverado bobs like a hunk of balsa wood. Basements and first floors are sunk, leaving only second stories and attics.

“I accept that this is happening--I mean, obviously, I’m seeing it--but it doesn’t sink in,” said Carroll, who has spent 17 years on the Grand Forks police force. “I couldn’t have dreamed this in a million years.”

Downtown is another story altogether, not as deeply inundated but gutted by electrical fires that still smolder from within brick skeletons. Cranes have knocked down teetering walls, exposing twisted rebar and gnarled metal. Here, just across the Red River from similarly ravaged East Grand Forks, Minn., the water moves more swiftly--not the cold blanket covering the rest of the city--but gurgling whirlpools and swirling rivulets.

It knocked out the glass storefront of the Grand Forks Glass & Paint Co. It rolled into the Plain Brown Rapper, sweeping adult videos off the shelves. It burst into Widman’s confectionary, where the sign outside says, “Have a sweet day.” It swelled through the door of Clothes Cents, soaking the tiny cribs and bassinets in the window.

The water treatment plant is surrounded by water. So is City Hall, the U.S. District Courthouse and the Grand Forks County Correctional Center, which had to ship all its inmates across the state to a prison in Bismarck. At the Grand Forks Police Station, Carroll and Purpur hop off the boat, surveying the downstairs damage with the beams of their flashlights.

Computers float in the flooded basement, alongside a riot helmet. A generator beeps in the quiet. In one room, which housed the city’s emergency operations center until flood waters forced officials to flee, chips and soda cans litter the floor--testament to a hasty departure.

It will likely be weeks before the waters subside enough to allow all the people of Grand Forks to survey this damage for themselves.

“When they come and see it for the first time, it’s going to hurt,” Carroll said. Then he headed for his own house, which he hadn’t seen since running for higher ground last Sunday in the early morning darkness.