Ashley Shelby - Red River Rising: The Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City

RED RIVER RISING

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2003 by Ashley Shelby. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, write to Borealis Books, 345 Kellogg Blvd. W., St. Paul, MN 55102-1906.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence for Printed Library materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

International Standard Book Number 0-87351-500-5 (cloth)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shelby, Ashley, 1977

Red River rising : the anatomy of a flood and the survival of an American city / Ashley Shelby.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-87351-500-5 (alk. paper)

Ebook ISBN:978-0-87351-694-5

1. FloodsNorth DakotaGrand Forks Region.

2. FloodsRed River of the North.

3. Disaster reliefNorth DakotaGrand Forks Region.

I. Title.

GB1399.4.N9S54 2003

978.416dc22

2003025177

Title page photograph: Looking west across the Sorlie Bridge from East Grand Forks, Minnesota, to Grand Forks, North Dakota, on April 21, 1997, the day the Red River of the North reached its highest recorded flow. Photo by Steven W. Norbeck, United States Geological Survey.

For my father

RED RIVER RISING

Introduction

Its late June 2000 and I am driving northwest on I-94, that lonely truckers passage into the big bad West. The hand-painted signs for buffalo meat begin showing up in fallow soybean fields around Fergus Falls, Minnesota. Crumbling silos stand like tired sentries over farms that have fallen into disuse or been reduced to hobbies. At the turnoff to I-29, the city of Fargo is inundated with American consumer cultureOld Navy, Hooters, Wal-Mart. Interstate 29 is flat and lonely, offering an uninterrupted vista to the Canadian border. And somewhere, out of my sight but not far from the highway, the Red River of the North is heading to the same place I am.

I knew Grand Forks, North Dakota from photographs burned on my brain: a city under water, a river becoming an inland sea, an old downtown submerged while being consumed by fire. The Red River of the North had burst through the dikes, destroying first the working-class neighborhoods crouched on the banks, then the historic downtown. As the overfed Red River swept through the streets of old Grand Forks, eleven of the citys oldest and best loved landmark buildings were consumed in a spectacular electrical fire.

These images are familiar to me because my father, a television journalist in Minneapolis, spent weeks in Grand Forks in April of 1997, floating down its main street in a motorboat. In the tapes of his reports, he looks haggard and cold, sitting in a boat that rocks gently in the current moving down DeMers Avenue. One tape shows him floating down North Fourth Street, and in the old downtown buildings some distance behind him, an angry, orange fire slides its tongue in and out of the windows. Thats what I knew about Grand Forks. An old river town, submerged in its river, and fifty-two thousand people leaving their homes, some for the last time, retreating to the outskirts of their city to watch it go under, to watch it burn. And though a citys fate was still undecided, to everyone except those personally affected by the flood, what had just transpired was only a fleeting news story.

In Grand Forks, it is simply called the flood. It has affected this town like a war. Here, time is measured against it. Before the flood. After the flood. And in a town that has been battered by severe floods for over a century, including five low-grade catastrophic events in the last twenty years, the fact that the flood means the same flood to everyone is a testament to the events of the spring of 1997.

Farther upstream that spring, little towns all along the Reds course found themselves underwater, as they had in other years. Cows and hogs, trapped in shallow oxbows, drowned as the river rose. When the temperature dropped, their carcasses froze solid, stones in the iced-over river. Levees failed. Some didnt. It was a bad flood yearin some towns, the worst ever. But when the Red reached Grand Forks, high up on the North DakotaMinnesota border, it performed an act of revenge, it seemed. The original offense was never disclosed, or it had simply gone unnamed. Few in Grand Forks could remember what they had done that could have warranted the punishment they received. But they werent innocent. No one was.

According to some estimates, the U.S. government spends an average of nearly $54 billion a year to help communities crushed by natural disasters. In any year, it is likely that nearly three-quarters of all federally declared disasters are due to flooding. Each year, some community will suffer a staggering catastrophe. It will be showered with federal dollars, infiltrated by federal employees, then left to build itself again. In 2001, Tropical Storm Allison resulted in nearly $5 billion in damage. The year before, the horrific fire season in the American West caused $4 billion in losses. Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and Hurricane Georges in 98 cost a combined $12 billion. And for each community devastated by such events, a complex narrative ensues, one in which the concepts of fairness, community, and accountability are major themes.

Ive chosen to tell the story of the 1997 Grand Forks flood not because it was the nations worst disasteralthough it ranks as one of the most expensive in U.S. historybut because the story of the towns demise and recovery could be the story of any American community unexpectedly destroyed and then left to pick up the pieces and rebuild. There are no villainsalthough many who lived through the 97 flood would argue that the National Weather Services failure to accurately predict the Reds flood crest was an act of villainy. There are only real, complicated human beingsa mayor, two gifted engineers (one civic, one federal), two dedicated National Weather Service hydrologists, and a number of heroic Grand Forks residentswho struggled to save a town.

On my first visit to Grand Forks I snapped a photograph that seems to hold all the contradictions within its frame. It shows a house in the floodplain that used to be Lincoln Drive, a riverside neighborhood now reduced to an empty meadow. It was, then, the only structure still standing: a pretty little yellow box house with blue shutters and a red door. As in all the neighborhoods that had been smudged out, the grass in Lincoln Drive was overgrown and brown, and the sidewalkswhere there were still sidewalkswere chunks of displaced cement. Everywhere, cracked steps and wedges of driveway marked home sites like gravestones. The little yellow house was empty, but it was not abandoned. Right under the west window, in black spray paint, someone had warned the city Do Not Tear Down. Die If You Do, and added a smiley face.

When I took that photograph, I did not yet know the woman who used to live in that house, who refused to leave it for years after the flood, who insisted on living in it despite having no electricity, water, or heat. Meanwhile, her neighbors had sold their ruined homes to the city and moved on. But then as now, that photograph tells me what is claimed, what is taken anyway, and what is left when all is said and doneif all can ever be said and done here.