Rising Waters May Force North Dakota Towns to Move

At a time when the crops should be growing tall under the summer sun, three-fourths of the farmland in Bottineau County is still too wet and muddy to even plant.

About 80 miles east, the little towns of Minnewaukan and Churchs Ferry are thinking about picking up their buildings and moving to escape from rising Devils Lake.

“You need three-buckle overshoes to get into the fields,” said Stan Romsos, who has raised grain for 43 years on his 2,900 acres of Bottineau County, just south of the Canadian border.

This year, after 10 months of torrential rain and heavy snowfall, he is looking for something else to do. The county has gotten 8 to 15 inches of rain since May 1.

In all, about 3.2 million acres of North Dakota cropland--16% of the state--are too wet for planting this year.

Devils Lake has risen about 24 feet in seven years--about 2 1/2 feet just in the past 12 months--because it sits in a closed basin with nowhere for its water to drain. And with the general flatness of the prairie, rising water spreads out quickly.

Once eight miles from Minnewaukan, Devils Lake now laps at the town’s edges. Repairs to the town’s sewer and water systems and streets are running into the millions of dollars. Basements get wet, and on a windy day waves lap the corner of the high school football field.

“Right now, everything is an option,” Minnewaukan Mayor Mike Every said. “There are no dumb ideas. We’re really either one big rainfall away or one bad winter away from a disaster.”

Every said that saving the town of 350 people will mean either building a dike--which won’t solve the problems of fixing the streets, basements and sewers--or picking up the buildings and moving.

Town officials haven’t surveyed any sites yet, but one possibility is on higher ground a few miles to the west.

Raising the dike that protects the 100 residents of Churchs Ferry, about 20 miles north of Minnewaukan, would keep the water at bay but wouldn’t protect nearby U.S. Highway 2, Mayor William Bartle said. Taking other roads out of town would mean long detours.

Churchs Ferry may have to join with Minnewaukan or some other town in forming a new community, the mayor said.

The city of Devils Lake sits next to its namesake lake and already has had to move several hundred lakeside houses to drier ground. The city of 8,000 has built its dikes higher several times over the past four years, and two major highways into town also have been raised several times.

Residents of Minnewaukan and Churchs Ferry had been counting on the Army Corps of Engineers to drain water from Devils Lake, possibly by digging an outlet.

But the corps said that would be too expensive, at $103 million. It proposes to wait until the lake rises an additional 6 feet, when the benefits would be greater.

It may all be part of a long-term weather cycle, said Leon Osborne, director of the University of North Dakota’s Regional Weather Information Center. “It tells us how very little we know,” he said.