Fargo residents rushing to fill sandbags for flood onslaught

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This article was published 20/03/2009 (6355 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Fargo, N.D. — Stunned metro leaders scrambled resources and issued pleas for volunteers Thursday to prepare for a Red River crest that forecasters say could exceed the flood level of 1997.

There was some confusion over the forecast, with Fargo Mayor Dennis Walaker saying the National Weather Service told him Wednesday there was an even chance the river will reach 39.5 to 40 feet in Fargo as early as March 28.

That’s about two weeks earlier and 1 to 11/2 feet higher than last week’s crest prediction, Walaker said, calling the shorter preparation time a "huge, huge, huge issue."

"We have to take this as a serious threat," he told local officials and media packed into a room at city hall Thursday morning.

But the weather service issued a preliminary flood forecast Thursday predicting a Red River crest of 37 to 40 feet between March 28 and April 1.

"It’s important to understand, this number will change," said Mark Ewens, data manager at the weather service office in Grand Forks, N.D.

A 40-foot crest would be about half a foot higher than the 1997 flood crest of 39.57 feet.

Meanwhile, A "massive effort" to fill and stack more than a million sandbags in backyards and atop earthen dikes gets underway today as Fargo braces for the flood.

Moorhead, too, is gearing up for the flood battle and the city announced Thursday it will provide residents with sand and sandbags.

"It’s going to be a massive effort to protect the city to 40 feet," said Walaker.

An estimated 880,000 sandbags will be needed just in the area of south Fargo, said senior engineer April Walker.

The North Dakota National Guard has committed 200 soldiers to aid in the effort, and the city may ask for more, city administrator Pat Zavoral said.

Sandbags dikes along the river will be built to 40 feet, with enough base width to go to 41 feet if necessary.

Survey crews will mark off the levels for dikes levels in backyards along the Red, which are the city’s first line of defence, Walaker said.

"If they lose, we all lose," he said.

Walaker said the city bought two octopus-type sandbag filling machines for $38,000 apiece. They were expected to arrive from Canada on Thursday night and be ready today.

With enough volunteers, the city should be able to fill about 300,000 sandbags a day, he said.

"We need to build a stockpile as quickly as possible and get ahead of the game a little bit," he said.

Further north, the probability that the Red River might rise higher than Grand Forks’ dikes appears to have dropped, City Engineer Al Grasser told the city council Thursday.

The predictive model the National Weather Service had used to forecast that the river has a one-in-50 chance of reaching 60.6 feet is no longer in play, he said, because that model assumed colder conditions here in the northern valley.

Now, he said, the weather service anticipates the river will crest at 45 to 50 feet sometime between March 30 and April 4, which is would be at least 10 feet lower than the city’s dike system.

"Fifty feet is well within the capability of our flood protection system," he said.

This is in spite of a rain storm the service is predicting for this weekend.

There are some mitigating factors that reduce the impact that a rainy fall and snowy winter in the area might have had, according to Grasser.

First, in many snowy winters, it’s snowy both in eastern North Dakota and northwest Minnesota. But this past winter, there was less precipitation in Minnesota, so the eastern tributaries of the Red River will not be dumping very much snowmelt.

A major cause of the 1997 flood, Grasser said, was that the Grand Forks area got hit with water from farther south on the Red. That will not likely happen this time around, he said.

— The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, with files from Grand Forks Herald

 

 

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