Ten years ago today, covered in mud, I got home at 11:30 PM after spending the previous fifteen and a half hours sandbagging in the Riverside Park area of Grand Forks. Hungry, after a quick shower, I fixed two cold roast beef sandwiches from some leftovers in the refrigerator, turned on the TV, and sat down to eat and watch the latest news updates.
It wasn’t good. Within the last half hour the flood waters of the Red River had made an overland end-run around the golf course in the Lincoln Park area of town and were slowly moving down Belmont Road toward downtown. There was talk about evacuating the County Jail and also flood-control headquarters in City Hall.
That’s when I knew I was going to get wet. The only question was, did I need to get out now, or could I wait until the next morning? From the reports on TV it was obvious the immediate problem wasn’t the dikes, but rather the water that was coming around the golf course. About 12:30 I decided to walk the two blocks from my house to the river and see what it looked like there. Getting home after checking the river, I checked the news again, and decided I could wait until morning. At 1:00 I set the alarm for 6:00 and got into bed.
At 4:10 I woke to the sound of someone pounding on the door and a voice on a bullhorn saying there was an immediate mandatory evacuation. I got dressed, threw an extra pair of jeans, two t-shirts, a sweatshirt, and underwear into a plastic bag, and by the time I got to the National Guard truck, I was wading through waist-deep water running down the street. The hood of my car, parked on the street, was underwater.
By that evening most of Grand Forks was under water. Several buildings in the center of the city had burned to water level. More than 46,000 people had been evacuated. For the first time in more than one hundred years Grand Forks and East Grand Forks had lost a battle with the Red River.
Some Flood Of 1997 Facts:
- Flood crest was 54.4 feet - nearly 5.5 feet above the predicted crest of 49 feet. Normal river level is 28 feet
- Water flow at it’s peak was 140,000 cubic feet per second. Normal is 780
- More than 9o% of the population of the two cities was evacuated
- More than 8600 homes were damaged. Many were completely destroyed
- For two weeks there was no running water in either city
- More than three weeks without drinkable water
- More than two weeks before most people were allowed back into their neighborhoods
- The largest evacuation of an American city in history until Hurricane Katrina
It was a little more than two weeks before people in my neighborhood were allowed back in to look at their homes. Many of us lost everything except what we took with when we evacuated.
Today, ten years later, I saw several people around town commemorating the ten year anniversary of the flood by wearing two old t-shirts that were popular attire in the weeks and months after the flood. One simply said across the front “49 Feet My Ass”. The other was quite similar to the decals often seen on the back windows of pickups. A small boy with a stream of water arcing from his mid-section and falling on the word “FEMA”.
Today, ten years later, the government uses the cities of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks as the poster child of disaster recovery efforts. Probably because, for many of us, we chose to take that little boy’s advice and just did it ourselves.
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