Fargo racing to protect against rising river

By Monica Davey

Published: March 26, 2009

FARGO, North Dakota: Volunteers, many of them cold and weary after loading sandbags all night, were racing on Thursday to raise dikes protecting this city still higher, hoping to hold back the Red River, which is expected to reach record levels by Saturday.

In one sign of this city's intensifying fears about the flooding threat, hundreds of workers on Thursday began building a second set of dikes — inside the primary, 12-mile long dike — to protect Fargo's main services, like a water plant and a waste water facility.

"We're in uncharted territory," Dennis Walaker, the mayor of this city, said after a morning meeting of city officials. Noting that the river's waters had risen another 3 feet in the last day, Mr. Walaker said he gave the city a "3- or maybe 4-to-1 shot at winning" its battle with the flood. "We're still optimistic," he said.

Worries of major flooding extend well beyond Fargo. Throughout parts of North Dakota and western Minnesota, residents are bracing for the Red River, nearby streams and rivers and the Missouri River to spill their banks — the result, experts said, of a combination of factors. In the fall, the flat terrain here was saturated by rain, followed by a winter of heavy snow, and now — as so much snow began melting — came days more of rain and, on Wednesday, half a foot of snow in some places.

All around, the frozen conditions were complicating efforts to stop the flooding. In Fargo, where the Red River marks the border with Moorhead, Minnesota, volunteers in snowsuits on Wednesday told of icy conditions on the dikes they were building but could barely see at times in the falling snow.

Snowplows focused all their efforts on clearing roads for flatbed trucks carrying sandbags and were escorted by police cars with sirens blaring. One concern, some officials said, was whether so many sandbags would function properly and hold back the river waters if they became frozen.

And near Bismarck, where some residents were evacuated and the Legislature closed down on Wednesday, the authorities used explosives to begin breaking up several large ice jams (some with frozen chunks the size of cars) on the Missouri that they feared could dam the river or divert water in unexpected ways.

In this city of 90,000, the state's most populous, political leaders said they expected to offer details of an evacuation plan later on Thursday. The authorities acknowledged that any evacuation would be complicated by many changing factors — roads that were already blocked by rising water, the possibility of overland flooding in unexpected directions, and uncertainty about where the levee would breach if it did.

The mayor said an evacuation had never been tried in Fargo, even after a major tornado more than half a century ago. Some residents, who live in homes that would not be protected by the second ring of dikes, expressed fear that the city's decision to quickly build those dikes indicated that Fargo officials had now given up on saving their properties.

"We are not abandoning anybody," Mayor Walaker said. "That was never the intent." Still, the mayor said that given the record levels now expected here, the city was forced to look for ways to save the bulk of the city and its crucial infrastructure, in case the first protections were to fail.

Already, south of the city, near the Red River and the Wild Rice River, 46 residents (and 12 pets) had to be rescued by boat from homes in which water had pressed through sandbags and made its way into first floors, said Sheriff Paul Laney of Cass County. Sheriff Laney said his officers were headed off on boats to make 11 additional rescues on Thursday.

While much of life stood still in Fargo — schools closed, trials in the municipal court were suspended, as was home garbage collection — hundreds of people swarmed the floor of the Fargodome, the home of North Dakota State University's football team and where a rodeo had been scheduled for this week.

In the center of the stadium, mountains of clay- and rock-filled sand were surrounded by college students, children, members of the National Guard and ordinary residents, all bearing shovels and filling white sandbags. Thousands of volunteers — from places as far as Florida and Alaska — have filled 2.5 million sandbags in just five days. Little forklifts whirred around bearing pallets of bags and dump trucks drove through delivering more sand, even as volunteers offered "fresh hot cookies," neck massages and tetanus shots.

"I think my house will be O.K., but I'm here for all the people in harm's way," said Jack McCrary, 70, a retiree and Fargo resident who was spending a fourth day on Wednesday in the sandbag line.

Mr. McCrary said he had heard concerns about how the snowy, frozen conditions might affect all the flood-control efforts. Would water flow through frozen sandbags? How treacherous would it be to keep adding new bags to the tops of slippery ones?

Weather forecasters predicted that by Saturday, waters would swell to more than a foot above the level reached on April 7, 1897, when the record flood occurred here. The river should surpass that 1897 level by 7 a.m. Friday, forecasters said..

In 1997, the most recent major flood in this area, the river had been about a foot and a half lower in Fargo than forecasters are predicting this time. That year, it reached even higher levels in Grand Forks, to the north, causing damage of more than $3 billion.

In Fargo's City Hall on Wednesday, city workers, all of whom have been assigned to 12-hour shifts, were answering phone calls from residents who wanted to know what might happen to their homes. "Fargo flood line," the workers answered cheerfully. They checked addresses on city flood maps and urged people to bring items out of their basements.

"I don't want to promise anything," one worker told a caller, "but the city's going to try our best."

Katharine Q. Seelye contributed reporting from New York.