FARGO, N.D. (FargoPhantom.com)– – Shifting from confident to jittery, flood-fighters in and around Fargo, N.D., intensified their dike building Wednesday after a dire new forecast called for the Red River to swell to its highest level ever by Saturday.
Authorities used airboats, helicopters and large military trucks to rescue dozens of trapped residents in the North Dakota towns of Oxbow and Abercombie. And if the rising river weren’t enough to heighten anxiety, 8 inches of snow blew in with ice and wind to handicap sandbagging efforts and close highways not already swamped with floodwater.
“It’s uncharted territory,” Fargo Mayor Dennis Walaker said. “If nature has anything else to throw at us, it’d have to be a tornado.”
The mayor pleaded for more sandbag volunteers and urged exhausted crews to raise the dikes another foot — to 43 feet — before Saturday’s expected crest of 41 feet. That would eclipse the 1897 record level of 40.1 feet in Fargo and the 39.57 feet reached during the devastating 1997 flood.
Beginning today, Fargo officials will start distributing evacuation information.
Fargo, North Dakota has become the poster boy of this flood. So far, the life or death battles of this flood have been fought on farmsteads and tiny hamlets with no flood control beyond what one can accomplish with an old farm tractor or a few old folks throwing sandbags. But Fargo scared me… And then today the crest forecast was bumped up by another foot!
And scared for good reason. Even Fargo’s not quite so low twin on the Minnesota side of the river, Moorhead, is scared, and for good reason. At today’s late afternoon press conference they announced plans to evacuate folks with special needs. North Dakota’s emergency services office put up evacuation information on their web site. With a combined population of over 100,000 the Fargo-Moorhead metro area ain’t New Orleans, but a breeched levee here is just or even more dangerous. And Fargo is especially scary- I had a look at a GIS map of the flood plain yesterday. Now at the originally forecast crest of 40 feet levee breaches would flood the city for several blocks in from the river as well as low lying areas on the south side of the city. The forecast has now been upped a foot to 41 feet, and the Weather Service suggests a range of 40 to 42 feet. At 42 feet what remains above water in Fargo becomes an island between the Red River, a smaller river to the west, and assorted lowland. On that Island could be trapped thousand of Fargo residents. They’d be the lucky ones- thousands could die from hypothermia, trapped in the barely above freezing water.
That’s why we need to take these floods so seriously. If you can make it to the flooded area and help, please do. If not, please help spread the word and dredge up info to help fight this flood.
Fargofloods.com