News Cut: March 25, 2009 Archive

Live-blogging: Flood update

Posted at 8:01 AM on March 25, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Disasters, Floods

The daily briefing of public safety and government officials is underway in Fargo. The mayor of Moorhead, Mark Voxland , has been invited over and both are stressing that neither city ignores the other.

8:04 a.m. - Voxland says they hope to have all the sandbag dikes up to 42 feet today. He credits GPS technology with improving the flood preparations this year. Members of the Moorhead Fire Department (I wrote about this below) check all the homeowner and city walls with GPS to make sure they're all at 42 feet.

8:06 a.m. - The Army Corps of Engineers says it needs a day and a half to complete preparations and most are in the southern end of Fargo. The Moorhead side of the river should be "buttoned up" by this afternoon. Then the National Guard will be redeployed to the north side of the city.

Aside: I exchanged e-mails last night with one volunteer who was helping a friend in the southern end of Moorhead, who says the house has now been cut off because sandbagging and dike work completely encircled the neighborhood. In those cases, would you stay in the home or would you go?

8:09 a.m. - Officials have been asking people not to use much water. They're concerned about the sewage treatment plant be overloaded, although officials said the amount of "flow" dropped overnight. This is another upgrade from the flood of '97.

In Oxbow, the sewage treatment plant has failed and the pumps are "flooded" out. The National Guard is delivering another pump today.

8:14 a.m. - It snowed about 3-4" overnight. The city's are not plowing the neighborhoods.

8:15 a.m. - Fargo officials say they don't need as many volunteers now. There are areas where they don't want to bring busloads of volunteers, they'd rather have neighbors doing the sandbagging, City Commissioner Tim Mahoney said.

8:19 a.m. - A city official says at 5 p.m. yesterday, there were trucks loaded with sandbags at both sandbagging locations "with no orders left to fill." They're still making sandbags -- 150,000 are in heated storage -- in the event additional ones are needed.

8:21 a.m. -- Here's a live stream of downtown Fargo, from valleyfloodwatch.com.

8:22 a.m. -- Police officers are on 12-hour shifts. Signs have been posted on the dikes ordering people to stay off. The Guard and police are patrolling the dikes looking for areas where they may be failing.

8:25 a.m. - Fargo City Manager Pat Zavoral: "We're winding down. But if people want to do some sandbag filling, we're going to do that."

8:28 a.m. - A national Weather Service official, Greg Gust, from Grand Forks says the snow "is not an immediate player." They're still looking for a 40-foot crest early Saturday morning. "We have record flow coming from the south," he said. He says it's "scary." "It's uncharted territory for the flood plains," he said.

8:32 a.m. - Health official says they're encouraging nursing homes and hospitals 'to reduce their census." She suggests canceling elective surgery, sending patients home earlier. They're also identifying people in the area who are living at home, and "who may need extra help relocating if that becomes necessary."

8:33 a.m. - Fargo Mayor Dennis Walaker "Elective surgeries is one thing but some can't be forestalled. They have backup generators." He says he's told the hospitals to be 'self contained," in order to stay open.

8:35 a.m. - North Dakota State University has canceled classes through Thursday. The university, however, has not been closed. "We want to keep those jobs flowing," an NDSU official said.

8:38 a.m. - Salvation Army served 9500 sandwiches on Tuesday, serving 38,000 people. 130,000 bottles of water. $30,000 of local Salvation Army money has been spent. "It scares the heck out of me to see what we're doing," an official said.

8:39 a.m. - Walaker joked that he was taken to task in 1997 for his comment on the quality of the sandwiches served in the great flood of '97. "They have improved dramatically," he said,

8:39 a.m. - Interstate 29 north of Fargo will be closed soon. The northbound side from Wahpeton, ND has been reopened.

-- End --

This morning I'm staying on the Moorhead side and talking to some more neighbors who are switching to wait-and-see mode.

(1 Comments)

Flood Diaries: One volunteer's story

Posted at 9:22 AM on March 25, 2009 by Bob Collins (6 Comments)
Filed under: Disasters, Floods

Kevan Rehm of Brooklyn Park drove to the Fargo Moorhead area this week to help out. He's like dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of Twin Citians who are here. Just walking through the motel lobby a few minutes ago, the lobby is thick with men from the Twin Cities in workclothes and muddy boots, who've been working all night, some of them telling tales of running heavy equipment and sliding off the dikes.

Kevan sent us a detailed account of his experience. Here is his story.

(Update -- Kevan was later on MPR's All Things Considered. Listen)

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I drove up yesterday evening and stayed at the Super 8 in north Fargo, just a mile or so from the FargoDome. They had a 15 to 20 % discount for sandbaggers. Every guest in the place had on work clothes. :-)

I arrived at 9:30 PM and worked 10 PM until 2 AM last night. My first sight was walking into the FargoDome. When you were a kid, did you ever kick open an ant hill? Suddenly the entire ground seems to be alive with constant motion as the ants are moving every which way. Well, that was the FargoDome.

They took out the floor and started dumping huge piles of sand everywhere. Around each sand pile was a dozen or more people filling sandbags, tying them off, and stacking them on pallets. Bobcats are whizzing around picking up full pallets and bringing back empty ones. Large bulldozers would rebuild the sand piles (5 feet high) each time that people would just be about done shoveling up the previous one. It was organized chaos; how you could have that many moving people and equipment and not have anyone run over, I'll never know.

Today when I went back and counted, there were 14 separate sand piles being processed by volunteers at the same time, with Bobcats and bulldozers flying around in between.

I got on the bus and went to Sandbag Central. They had three sand spiders working there. Each is a conveyor belt taking sand up high, then dumping it into the top of a cone shape which is really ten connected pipes each about 8 inches in diameter. The pipes are connected at the top, and flare out as they go down. At the bottom of each pipe, a person has a bag over the bottom of the pipe. When his bag is full, he pulls it off and his partner slips on the next bag. The sand coming down these pipes is continuous, so you can't stop. A third person or fourth person ties the sacks as they get them from the fillers. Other folks take the tied sacks and either pass them down a line to a truck or stack them on pallets. Each pipe needs about 5 people to manage it, and there's about 10 pipes per sand spider, and they had three spiders, so that's 150 people just to keep those three machines going.

In addition to the spiders, there are the piles everywhere where people are filling sacks with shovels. After an hour on the spider I switched to the sand piles because it's much more dynamic. If someone gets behind on filling sacks or tying sacks, someone else can switch jobs and help take up the slack. In the four hours I was there, you never stop.

The Red Cross is there with plenty of food. They even had scalloped potatoes with ham in heated trays. Does that count as hot dish? :-) You certainly wouldn't starve there.

People were amazing. Everyone wanted to work. If something would start to bog down, someone would notice and say "I'll take this" and deal with it. If the line for passing sacks from fillers to pallets got a little long, someone would step into the line and help pass. Nobody stood around; everyone jumped in and helped.

I can't tell you how many times someone thanked me for coming to help. You work with someone on the line, they don't know you're not a local, but as you start to leave, they turn and say "Thanks for coming to help". It's times like this that I know why I live in the Midwest, in spite of the weather. :-) I feel like these people are my neighbors. They're not my next-door neighbors, but they're my neighbors. :-)

At two AM I went back to the hotel and crashed, woke up at 9 AM, checked out, and went back for another four hour shift from 10 AM to 2 PM. I had hoped to work the dikes today, but I ended up at Sandbag Central again. They have folks on the radio constantly, including the bus drivers, so if people start to leave at Sandbag Central, they know immediately and send the next bus load of people there to replace them.

Today I learned how to tie the sacks shut. (Last night I spent all 4 hours piling sacks on pallets.) It turns out that the way you tie off a sandbag is the same way that you tie rebar at construction sites. I told my line partner that I'm prepared for a new career in construction in case I get laid off in my current job.

Two people can fill a sack in 15 seconds easily, usually less. Another person can tie off sacks and keep up with a pair of fillers. Another person can probably handle the output of two people tying sacks, filling the pallets with the tied sacks. If I'm doing my math correctly, that means two teams of fillers, or 7 people total can do about a thousand sacks per hour. There are at least two of these sets of people per sand pile. Just awesome.

I worked until two PM today, then decided it was time to go home. I felt guilty, but the hotel didn't have Internet, so I couldn't log in and work during the off hours, so I needed to get back to my day job. Still, I am really glad that I went. I met a lot of great, hard-working people, who have obviously been doing this day after day after day, and they are still cheery. I hope others keep coming into town to help them out. They need to keep up today's rate all the way through to Saturday if they are going to make it. Tell everyone to come and help!

(6 Comments)

The view from Riverview Circle

Posted at 4:05 PM on March 25, 2009 by Bob Collins
Filed under: Disasters, Floods

I didn't bring a tripod to Moorhead with me, and my camera is pretty low-end. But perhaps with this stitched-together panorama, you can get a sense of what things look like out the back of these homes. You can move your mouse back and forth and up and down. Apologies that this is somewhat crude.

I'm standing right behind the sandbagged dike (now under a cover of snow) , that stands at 42 feet. The flood crest is going to be at 41 feet on Saturday.

Think about that, for just a moment. The river here runs back beyond that second set of trees, it's crept out of its banks and across the backyards and is now heading up the bankings to the homes.

By Saturday, the water will be one foot below the top of the dike you see in front of you. If it breaks, and people aren't quick enough to fix it (there aren't extra sandbags in people's back yards), it's going to pour through, it'll go into people's homes and down their driveways and into the street. The street here is below the top of this dike.

Now imagine you're a homeowner and you get to three days with the river in this state and the danger that the dike could give way at any moment. There won't be much sleep on Riverview Circle this weekend.

Panorama of All along the Red River on CleVR.com

Saving Riverview Circle - The Johnsons

Posted at 7:54 PM on March 25, 2009 by Bob Collins
Filed under: Disasters, Floods

Panorama of 3526 Riverview Circle on CleVR.com

Vikki and Bruce Johnson were taking a rare breather when I visited them on Wednesday, just minutes before it became apparent the three-mile-long dike in their Moorhead neighborhood would have to be built another foot higher to protect it from the Red River.

"I'm trying to decide if I clean out the basement or wait and see. We've gone from 'it's not going to get where it's at' to 'Oh my gosh, we've got it done,'" Vikki said. "We're a lot more organized this time, but we had a lot more warning last time. Because we had record snowfall, we knew we were in trouble in '97, where they really put the fear in us on Friday, where 39 to 41 (feet), we've got to get going."

Up until then, she says, there was no indication major flooding would be a problem.

"In '97, we had three weeks to prepare," said Bruce. "This time we had to get everything done in a week."

When they started building the dike through their back yard (pictured above), they still didn't believe things would be as bad as indications now say they will be. "When we started on Saturday, we were like 'what are we doing out here? It's still in its river bank.' Yesterday you saw it coming up and today when I walked the dike, it's come up. It seems to be real now," Bruce said.

Tonight, they''re bringing floodlights to the backyard to keep an eye on the dike. They have no real plans to sleep until the river recedes sometime next week. "In '97 we ended up pooling water in the backyard, and then pumping it out because the dike became so saturated." That appears to be the neighborhood plan this time, too. At the corner of their cul de sac, the city has dropped off a large pump. All the residents have their own pumps ready, too.

There were a lot of lessons learned in '97, one of them is the every-person-for-him/herself-plan isn't going to work. "The city stepped in and had a meeting on Saturday and said, 'we're building a continuous dike and everybody's in,'" Vikki said. But everybody wasn't in. A nearby neighbor initially refused to build a dike in his backyard, so the neighbors built it for them, after the fire department threatened to build a clay dike across the front yard.



"To me, this is overkill out here," Bruce said of the sandbag dike that has reached 42 feet. "In '97 it would've been up maybe a foot on the dikes." This was before the latest flood projection said the river will crest at 41.

Both have been trying to tend to their paying jobs, too. Vikki took time out at midafternoon for a loan closing (she works for Wells Fargo). Bruce, who works for Remax, closed on a home yesterday.

"Was it riverfront property?" I asked. It wasn't. It was a condo on a second floor.

Though all of the attention is focused on what might happen this weekend, most everybody I've talked to is thinking about what comes after the Red River begins to behave better. "That's the thing," Bruce acknowledged. "When you're building this thing, you've got lots of hands, which is wonderful, and then they have to get back to work and the difficult thing is to find the volunteers and the time to take it back down again."

That's not their idea of how to spend a perfect summer. They'd planned to head to their place at the lake, and relax around the water.

Listen