Many Flood Evacuees Find Their Lives Have Been Set Adrift

Her home is submerged, her city is quarantined and her county is a disaster area, yet Jodie West can only sit and wait.

“I feel like a bag lady,” West said on Thursday, slouched on a cot next to those of her husband and three children in a cavernous Air Force hangar that houses the most desperate and destitute of Grand Forks’ 50,000 flood-stricken evacuees.

She bowed her head, then nervously twiddled her thumbs. “Honestly, we have no plans,” she added, her voice sinking into a whisper. “Most of the time, we just sit and wait for the waiting to end.”

Like most people in North Dakota’s third-largest city, West fled the surging Red River last Saturday with only a blanket and a change of clothes, fully expecting to return within two or three days. Now, with flood waters not likely to recede for weeks and homes left uninhabitable possibly for months, it is as if she is lost in some soggy nether world, neither hoping nor grieving, neither rescued nor imperiled.

She doesn’t know how long she will stay in this shelter. She doesn’t know where she will go when she leaves. She doesn’t even know if she will make those decisions, or if she will need to keep waiting until somebody else decides what she can do.

“It seems like a dream,” sighed West, 31, cradling a stuffed, floppy-eared dog that her youngest son managed to salvage before National Guard troops ordered them to flee.

Humbled and fatigued, Grand Forks is slowly resigning itself to a new life of displacement, a city in exile. More than 95% of its residents are gone, scattered like grain across the Great Plains, marking time until their streets and cars and homes emerge from the icy brown water.

Those without family or friends to take them in huddle under the corrugated steel of the Air Force hangar, a stadium-size garage for C-130 cargo planes that President Clinton visited earlier this week. Cots are lined up side by side. So are the portable toilets. Day after day, everyone wears the same stale, crumpled clothes. At night, they sleep in them, tossing and turning to the chorus of groans and coughs.

“It’s a nightmare, that’s what it is,” said Corrine Roch, 57, whose downtown Grand Forks apartment was still surrounded by an 8-foot-deep moat the last time she got word.

Yet only 500 evacuees remain in this shelter, which housed more than 3,000 immediately after the evacuation. That’s a sign, officials say, that many of the tiny soybean and sugar beet communities that ring Grand Forks have begun to absorb its human overflow.

In little Larimore, about 25 miles west of Grand Forks, the normal population of 1,500 has already surged by more than 50%. The Grand Forks County seat has been relocated to Larimore’s Masonic Temple, where County Administrator Ed Nierode works from a rattan table covered with frilly white lace. Across the street, state District Judge Bruce Bohlman is presiding in a vacant department store, his courtroom nothing more than a row of folding metal chairs on the torn linoleum floor. Outside, four temporary stop signs--the only signals on the entire main drag--have been mounted atop sandbags to regulate the unprecedented stream of cars.

“You’ve got to keep a sense of humor about it,” said Gordon Penn, 46, as he trudged out of Melby’s Food Pride (where six extra employees had to be hired to handle the crowds) with a couple of bulging grocery bags. “If you don’t, you’re going to start crying.”

Penn, a maintenance man at the Grand Forks Wal-Mart whose home of three decades is filled with water, is one of 11 family members taking refuge on the carpets and couches of his “first cousin’s husband’s daughter.” While he shopped, his mother slipped into Temple’s Hair Stylists to get permed and colored. “Life goes on,” said 75-year-old Mary Penn, who lives with her son. “It has to.”

Over at the Good Friends Bar, which is hosting a community pig roast on Saturday, Ruth and Bill Phalen were lunching on beers, burgers and barley soup. With a 28-foot RV to call home, they figure they’re better off than most of their Grand Forks neighbors. In fact, if they wanted, they could easily drive away from all this, turning misfortune into a vacation.

But the Phalens don’t want to be in their camper. They want to be in their house.

“We’ve got to be here, to see it as soon as they’ll let us in,” said Bill Phalen, 70, a retired Social Security administrator.

“I know that it doesn’t make any difference, but I keep thinking that I’ve got to clean out that refrigerator,” said Ruth Phalen, 64, imagining what a week without electricity has done to an icebox full of food.

It is that uncertainty, not being able to see for themselves, that eats at Grand Forks’ evacuees. Tempted by gradually drying streets, some have begun to slip past security checkpoints, creating headaches for the hundreds of police officers and National Guard troops on round-the-clock lookout for looters.

But most of the people who once inhabited Grand Forks have been forced to imagine the disaster through the prism of TV, their bleary eyes scanning the half-submerged images, anxious for a familiar sign.

“If I could go home, at least I’d be able to get a mental picture,” said West, wiping her tears back at the Air Force shelter. “Right now, we don’t even know what we have lost.”

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How to Help

Some contacts for helping flood victims:

* Salvation Army: Accepting donations by credit card at 1-800-SAL-ARMY (1-800-725-2769) and giving information on how to donate supplies. Checks marked “Flood Relief” can be sent to 2300 Freeway Blvd., Minneapolis, MN 55430, or any local Salvation Army office.

* Red Cross: Accepting credit card donations at 1-800-HELP-NOW (1-800-435-7669). Checks made out to the “American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund” may be sent to P.O. Box 28326, Oakdale, MN, 55128-0326, or any local Red Cross chapter.

* Minnesota State Emergency Operations Center was compiling a volunteer reserve list at 612-297-1304.

Source: Associated Press