SECTION 2

Series examines flooding from Minnesota lakes to Montana border

elcome to the second installment of television and on websites affiliated with the

W
flooding.
“Living with Water.”
“Living with Water” is a five-part
series. Today’s installment deals with

Recently, flooding has been the most obvious

William C.
MARCIL
Forum
Communications
company’s properties.
Personnel from a number of our media outlets
have helped put this section together. Mike
Jacobs, editor and publisher of the Grand Forks
Herald, has been project coordinator.
water issue in our region. Finding ways to fight Co. chairman
We welcome your comments at
floods and to avoid floods is critical in the Lakes mjacobs@gfherald.com. Or you can write to
Country of Minnesota and in the river basins of Water Project, P.O. Box 6008, Grand Forks, ND
North and South Dakota. 58206-6008.
Next week’s installment of “Living with Water” Copies of the series are available by
takes up the issue of water supply, including completing the coupon printed in today’s
storage, always of critical importance. section.
Forum Communications Co. is proud to present the thought- Enjoy!
provoking and educational series in our newspapers, on radio and William C. Marcil, chairman, Forum Communications Co.

Discuss this series at water.areavoices.com

 Michael Vosburg / Forum Communications Co.
PAGE 2
A FORUM
COMMUNICATIONS
SPECIAL PROJECT

SUNDAY,
FEBRUARY 5, 2012

ON THE COVER
Devils Lake waters
surround the Spirit Lake
Casino on the Spirit Lake
Reservation in June 2010.
Forum Communications Co.
OVERWHELMS US

Sightseers take in the views of the flooded Red River on the Moorhead Center Mall parking ramp in April 2011.

Sometimes water hurts

those who value it so much
hat are we to make of has been the we lovers of weather conditions, essentially

W ourselves, we people of
the plains and hills, we
rule rather
than the Jack
our rivers and
lakes have
ignoring the best engineering
efforts of those who would save us
WATER

people who love the

water when it serves us, yet hate it
when it hurts us? What are we to
make of a pattern of development
so routine and ultimately foolish
that it has been inevitable from the
start – since settlement before the
territories became states – that
flooding would be as much a part
of our lives as the vast open spaces
and big skies?
Pick a place: the Lakes Country
of western Minnesota; the oxbows
of the Red and Sheyenne rivers;
the silt-laden Missouri River;
mysterious Devils Lake; the
usually meek but sometimes
mighty Mouse River. Any one of
those waters, at any time, can and
has delivered tragedy. In the giant
swath of land from western
Minnesota to the confluence of the
Missouri and Yellowstone rivers
SECTION 2
WHEN
exception. In
2010 and ’11,
high water
was
ubiquitous –
nearly every
lake, river,
even
historically
low-water
sloughs, rose to elevations never
seen in modern times.
Modern times? What do we
really know from that blink on the
geologic calendar? Floods of
gigantic proportions have
inundated the land for as long as
records have been kept – in some
instances 250 years. Newer
methods of measuring
floodwaters and river crests – and
assessing damage – have raised
flood forecasting to a sophisticated
ZALESKI never learned.
From the
from high water.
And today the risks to life and
Editorial page
start, we property are bigger than they were
editor for
The Forum of crowded along a century ago. Slow learners, all of
Fargo-Moorhead waterways, in us, we’ve continued to build in
part for vulnerable floodplains, hoping
commercial against hope that a levee here, a
purposes dam there will keep us dry
(riverboats on permanently. To date, it has not
the Red and happened.
Missouri) and in part because it’s So in 2012, we find ourselves in
just darn nice to be near the water this beautiful region of lakes,
(expensive homes around lakes rivers, unnamed coulees and
and too close to flood-prone sloughs, and reservoirs and dams,
rivers). essentially confronting the
Our river cities developed mostly problem of flooding that has
without serious regard to the plagued the land from the
threat of flooding. High water beginning. This second section of
didn’t happen that often, and when Forum Communications Co.’s
it did, recovery usually was “Living with Water” offers a broad
acceptable. Often the areas that view of flooding and flood
flooded near cities were potential. Our writers also focus
undeveloped farmland or on how individuals cope not only

near the North Dakota-Montana
line, there are few places that have
been safe from high water. Sure,
the region has been very dry at
times. But when conditions turn
wet, get out of the way. For
example, since the early 1990s,
flooding somewhere in the region
science. The difference between
now and a flood a century ago is
that the sciences of hydrology,
geology and meteorology can tell
us why it happened, how it
happened.
But nothing prevents it from
happening. And that’s the lesson
neighborhoods without the
political clout to secure protection.
Eventually, dams on the Missouri,
James and Mouse rivers provided
flood protection for all, it seemed,
but in recent years, it’s proved to
be false security. As they have done
for millennia, the rivers respond to
with high water but with living
under the perennial threat of
flooding.
Yes, we are people of the lakes
and rivers, people of the hills and
prairies. But we are also, as we
have been for several hundred
years, people of the flood.

In upcoming sections Join us at water.areavoices.com

SECTION 1: JAN 29
Water where we live: From
drought to flood, water
bedevils us
FEB. 12
Water when we need it:
Sometimes, there isn’t
enough
FEB. 19
Keeping our water clean:
Quality poses challenges
throughout the area
FEB. 26
Making water policy: A
maze of agencies manage
resources in the region
Have a story to tell about living
with water? Then please visit our
Living with Water website at
http://water.areavoices.com/ to read
more about this project, to interact with
others who are contributing and to tell us
your own story.
Also on the site, you’ll find a library of
water-related news stories from regional
Forum Communications Co. newspapers,
and you can visit our collection of water
resource Web links, and much more.
This project’s mission is to build
understanding about water and its
impact on our lives across the region,
and your contributions will lead to a
deeper understanding of the issues
surrounding water. Discuss it with us.

This field north of Wolverton, Minn., sits under water in April 2011.
Why, oh why, is it so wet?
sk a room full of people to
A explain why the rivers
and lakes across our
region have been flooding
so much in recent years, and you
will get myriad answers. Some
answers will have elements of
truth. Some will be based on
myths that need to be dispelled.
To begin with, the fact that the
Red River flows northward is not
why it floods the way it does.
Once the Red tops its banks, it
spreads out across the flat terrain
for miles. Ice in the river channel
cannot possibly be responsible for
a 10- to 20-mile-wide river. Rather,
it is the lack of slope downstream
that causes flooding.
The average drop of the Red
River from Wahpeton, N.D., to
Halstad, Minn., is about 5 inches
per mile. North of Grand Forks,
the slope drops to 3 inches per mile.
Between Drayton and Pembina,
N.D., the slope is 1½ inches per
mile. This is one flat river valley.
When waters gather due to
snowmelt or heavy rain, the slope
in the valley is just not able to
move that water downstream as
quickly as it gathers, causing the
waters to rise out of the river
channel and spread out over the
land.
Second, urban sprawl is not a
significant contributor to the
John
WHEELER
The WDAY and
WDAZ chief
meteorologist earned
his degree at Iowa
State University
increase in flooding.
It is true that rain falling on
concrete does not soak into the
soil but drains directly into the
river. But the percentage of land
covered in concrete remains
small. Plus, there is no evidence
of increased flooding immediately
downstream from urban areas
that cannot be otherwise
accounted for.
What about changes in the way
water drains from farm fields to
the river systems?
Since the 1880s, farmers have
been draining wetlands, building
ditches and sculpting their land to
allow fields to dry out more
quickly in the spring and after
heavy rains. Intuitively, this must
have an effect because it means
water gets to the river faster.
However, a comparison of
annual stream flow totals to the
five-year running average of
precipitation shows that the ratio
between these two has, over time,
changed only a little.
Essentially, when it is dry, there
is very little flooding, and when it
is wet, flooding becomes a problem.
And the effect is cumulative.
A run of dry years, as in the
1930s, reduces the water table to
such low levels that the risk of
flooding goes essentially to zero,
and even a very snowy winter
cannot create flooding. On the
other hand, the current run of
wet years has filled the lakes, the
wetlands and the reservoirs to the
point that now just slightly
above-average precipitation
causes serious flooding.
Devils Lake displays the same
accumulative effect.
Its lowest modern-day level was
not at the height of the 1930s
drought, but in October 1940,
when the lake was barely a mud
puddle. During the past 19 years of
wet weather, Devils Lake has
risen and grown to new levels
virtually every year. With the
repetition of heavy winter snows
and frequent summer downpours,
the water just keeps coming.
Flash back to the room full of
people. Ask them why our
weather is wetter than it used to
be. Again there will be
disagreement.
Some will lay blame on global
climate change. Some will
Michael Vosburg / Forum Photo Editor
PAGE 3
A FORUM
COMMUNICATIONS
SPECIAL PROJECT
SUNDAY,
FEBRUARY 5, 2012
vehemently deny the very
possibility of such a thing, saying
it is merely natural climate cycles.
Both responses are based in
political dogma. Reality in
weather is rarely so simple.
From intrusions of glacial ice to
decades-long drought, natural
cycles are certainly capable of
tumultuous changes. However, it is
foolish to categorically deny that
human-caused changes in our
atmosphere are incapable of
changing climate.
The ongoing 19-year wet period
likely has not one simple cause but
many causes, layered on top of one
another in a way that makes them
difficult to identify. This means, of
course, that there is no way of
knowing what direction our
climate will go next.
Will it remain wet? Will the
flooding get even worse? Would it
be possible for the climate to
suddenly swing back into a
multiyear drought that would
leave us wanting for water?
A big-picture view of our climate
makes it clear that all of these
things can be expected. What we
cannot tell is when to expect the
changes because our climate, like
today’s weather, is inherently
unpredictable.
John Wheeler is the
chief meteorologist at WDAY and WDAZ.

PAGE 4
A FORUM
COMMUNICATIONS
SPECIAL PROJECT
SUNDAY,
FEBRUARY 5, 2012
ONLINE
Watch Howard Blegen’s
“The Demise of a
Community,” and a video
produced in 2010 by
Northern Plains Electric
Cooperative, Cando, N.D.,
at water.areavoices.com
Howard Blegen, a farmer from rural Churchs Ferry, N.D., produced a DVD that illustrates the plight of farmers and farmsteads
being flooded by the rising Devils Lake.
Map by Troy Becker
Abandon farm
Forum Communications Co.
US
Families leave farmsteads they’ve held for generations
By Kevin Bonham
Forum Communications Co.
PENN, N.D. – Howard Blegen
waited until the ground froze late
OVERWHELMS
this past fall to haul furniture and
other belongings from the rural
house his family was forced to
abandon last spring.
As he walked through the yard,
he found bicycles, duck decoys, a
fishing net, a lawn mower, a
portable basketball hoop and more
frozen in time under a thick layer
of crystal-clear ice covering 2 feet
or more of water in his yard.
At the edge of the yard, 4-foot-
high fence posts protruded just
about a foot out of the ice.
A pickup and a car – a Chevy
Lumina – had become rusting
metal sculptures in the ice, along
with wagons, tools and dozens of
other items stuck in place inside
the Quonset.
“I wanted to get the vehicles out,
but there wasn’t time,” he said.
It was April 29, 2011, when water
overpowered a nearby country
road that had been serving as a
dike, rushing toward Blegen’s
farmstead and those of a dozen or
more of his neighbors in this part
of the Upper Devils Lake Basin,
from Penn to Churchs Ferry and
Minnewaukan.
“It was a Sunday, and I was
outside with a cup of coffee, and I
heard this sound – I can’t really
explain it – it was a noise I hadn’t
heard before. Later on, I went out
and I looked south across my place;
you could see the water coming.
“There was no longer time to box
things up and pack them nice, like
we were doing. We were dumping
drawers in boxes to get what we
could and get out. That night, the
water was coming over the road.
“We didn’t dare stay there that
night,” he said. “The first thing we
WATER
felt, I guess, was panic. We expected
we’d have a fair amount of time
before the lake actually rose high
enough to come in.”
The Blegens and several
neighboring families stayed in
motels in Devils Lake that night.
“I came back the next day and
was able to make it through the
water, and then I continued to
finish getting some clothing and get
what I could,” Blegen said.
He hitched a trailer onto a
tractor, driving through about a
half-mile of water up to the
hubcaps to get out.
“On Tuesday, I couldn’t get in. So,
I walked across the fields and
hills,” he said.
A flood on record
Like his neighbors, Blegen has
SECTION 2
been keeping a watchful eye on the
WHEN
rising lake for several years now,
knowing that it was just a matter of
time before they would be forced to
leave.
In 2010, he produced a video, a
DVD, “The Demise of a
Community,” to illustrate the plight
of scores of people who had lost
their livelihoods and even their
homes as a result of the flood that
keeps spreading, year after year,
across the upper Devils Lake Basin.
“The past several years have been
heartbreaking for many families
as, one by one, homesteads that
have been around for 120-plus years
are slowly devoured by a hungry
and cancerous-like flood and have
been or soon will be abandoned,”
he said as he narrated a story of
despair, of third-, fourth- and even
Churchs
Ferry
Penn
Minnewauken
Minnewaukan
fifth-generation families being
driven away.
Background music features
country pianist Floyd Cramer
performing Simon and Garfunkel’s
hit song from the early 1970s,
“Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and
a mix of other songs – country,
reggae, pop and gospel.
“They have been consumed by a
flood that moves slowly, nibbling
away at a community of farm
families who have worked for
generations to build up a
productive farm area,” the
narration continues, “eating away
and gradually destroying that
which our grandparents and
parents worked all their lives to
build up – a neighborhood of
friends and family, where the coffee
was always on and a lending hand
was always extended.”
The video shows water-covered
roads and bridges, fields and
farmsteads, both from the air and
the ground, as a musical medley
plays in the background.
“It wears on you. How can you
measure the toll on the families?
Some say that these people out here
are in their 70s and 80s, and it’s
time to move into town,” Blegen
said. “But losing your home like
this, watching all you’ve worked for
all your life, it takes a toll.”
They’re still moving. Many of
them left last spring, around the
time that the Blegens were forced
out.
Some have moved into the city of
Devils Lake or to other nearby
communities, some to other cities
in North Dakota and beyond.
The majority of the homes here
are built on land high enough to be
out of danger as the lake elevation
nears its natural spill elevation of
1,458 feet. But the farm fields and
the roads that connect them have
been disappearing for more than a
decade.
“Picturesque farmsteads that
once stood surrounded by trees,
shrubs, green grass and flowers,
where gardens flourished, children
ran and played, dogs chased the
cats and the sunsets were gorgeous
have been replaced with drowned-
out trees, muskrats and cattails,”
Blegen says in the video.
Looking back
In April 2011, it was the Blegen
family’s turn to walk away.
“When we took a motel room in
Devils Lake, we realized we were
there with some of the other
neighbors. We were all homeless,”
Blegen said. “At that time, we really
didn’t have an idea of what we were
going to do.
“It’s not only me,” he said while
standing on a hill overlooking his
old house and farmyards for miles
around, all tightly packed in a fresh
layer of ice. “It’s the people that
lived over there on that farmstead,
and the people that lived over there,
and the people that lived over there,
Devils Lake
the people that lived over there, the
people that lived over there, the
people that lived over there, and we
can continue on.”
The video had been a cry for help,
an attempt to show government
how people were suffering from
this near-two-decade-old flood.
The school bus had stopped
traveling past their farmstead in
the spring of 2010 because the
water-logged roads were unsafe. So,
students drove over fields to reach
higher roads, to get to school and
back.
“When you see your wife sitting
in the kitchen after dark, waiting
for the kids to come home, driving
through water, through the slop, it’s
tough,” Blegen said.
“During the wintertime, the way
the wind blows, we didn’t know
from morning to afternoon
whether we were going to get in or
out. The township did a good job of
plowing, for the most part. I give
credit for that. But it’s been tough
for local governments. They don’t
have much money.”
He’s not so generous with state
and federal governments.
“The government bought out
Churchs Ferry. They came in and
bought out Penn. And they’re
helping Minnewaukan. But for
those of us living in the country,
there’s been nothing,” Blegen said.
“We were going to meeting upon
meeting upon meeting, and the
only thing that was decided at
those meetings was when the next
meeting was going to be,” he said.
“We’re not all farmers in this area.
We were residents of the area, all
standing here with a hand up,
begging, ‘pick us up out of the
muck and set us on dry ground.’
We’ll take it from there. We just
needed a little help.”
In recent months, the Federal
Highway Administration allocated
about $100 million for repairs of
flood-damaged roads.
While county officials have
expressed gratitude for the aid,
they say the needs are far greater.
They’ve had to pick certain major
roads to maintain, allowing others
to deteriorate as the flood drags
on, even if it means leaving other
rural families with no way to get to
their homes or fields.
A North Dakota State University
study last year estimated the
annual agricultural cost of the
flood at nearly $200 million in the
basin, the loss coming from
decreased production and fewer
purchases from farm suppliers, as
well as other ag-related businesses.
“I’ve got an old farmstead, but it
was home. Some of these people
had beautiful places, and they had
to move away,” Blegen said.
“It didn’t have to be this way. The
government just decided that we
were expendable.”
Blegen said one federal
government representative in 2010
told him the only chance they had
Eric Hylden / Forum Communications Co.
to survive financially “was to set
fire to my house and collect the fire
insurance.”
Another, he said, told him that
his family never should have
moved to the upper basin in the
first place.
“My grandfather homesteaded
almost 140 years ago just a couple
miles away from here,” he said.
“So, what you’re telling me is that
he shouldn’t have moved here?
Along with all the other families
that moved to this community,
families that helped build this state,
they shouldn’t have moved here?
“When those stubborn
Norwegians and Germans that
settled this area and were part of
the Legislature, they would have
never allowed this to happen.”
Looking forward
When the Blegens couldn’t find
answers from the government, they
turned to their faith.
“There’s no other way to explain
it,” he said. “We realized that there
was a hand stronger than any
government agency, and we
reached up and we took that hand.
We had somehow lost some of the
faith that had been instilled in our
family. But once we grabbed hold of
that faith, of that hand, everything
changed.”
Eight days after evacuating to the
motel in Devils Lake, they found a
small, older vacant house in nearby
Leeds.
At first, the owner didn’t want to
rent or sell it, Blegen said. Then,
the next day, the owner called back
and offered the house.
“All of a sudden, things started
falling in place for us,” he said.
“Fortunately, they left the heat on,
so that helped.”
A local bank approved a
mortgage. An appliance store made
sure they had a refrigerator and a
stove and other necessities. Several
weeks later, they received a flood
insurance settlement to pay off the
mortgage on their rural home.
“Now, we’re living in Leeds. We’re
a block-and-a-half from the school,
and the kids love it,” he said.
Blegen misses the countryside.
And even though they live in a
small town less than 15 miles away,
they sometimes reminisce about
the lifestyle they left behind –
shooting their BB guns or riding
their go-carts, playing basketball in
the yard, or having cats and dogs
around.
“We’d sit on the deck in the
morning and the ponies would line
up along the fence, waiting to get
fed,” he said.
When Blegen returned to the
farmstead in November, to begin
moving more of the family’s
belongings, he was surprised by the
changes around him, the quick
evolution of the landscape.
“There’s no life. There’s no
activity,” he said. “There’s no
wildlife, no squirrels, no birds, no
rabbits. I’ve seen one coyote, no
deer.”
Then, as he reflected on his past
year’s experiences, a pair of
mourning doves flew overhead.
“They’re the first I’ve seen out
here in a long time,” he said.
“That’s a promising sign. We’ve
been through a lot, all of us who
live in this part of the basin. We’ll
be OK. Like our ancestors, me must
be survivors.”
Kevin Bonham reports
for the Grand Forks Herald.
Salt flat to fishing lake
Devils Lake has been deep, but also dry and dusty
By Kevin Bonham
Forum Communications Co.
DEVILS LAKE, N.D. – Kyle
Blanchfield has become a student
and collector of Devils Lake
history.
In addition to the mounted
walleyes, northern pike, Canada
and snow geese that decorate the
walls, his Woodland Resort
features a display of historic
photographs of Devils Lake.
Featuring the Minnie H, a
steamboat that cruised the lake in
the late 1800s and early 1900s, the
exhibit is framed by two shards of
wood that came from the boat,
perhaps from its spars or boom.
The Minnie H and the steamboat
era on Devils Lake lasted less than
20 years, partly because it was
squeezed out by the expanding
railroad industry, but also because
Devils Lake was shrinking even as
European-American settlers
started to farm and build
communities here.
From a then-recorded high
elevation of 1,438 feet above sea
level in 1867, Devils Lake declined
to just 1,400.9 feet in 1940,
shrinking to just about 10 square
miles of surface area.
Blanchfield’s grandfather, Julius
Weed, bought some farmland and
pasture along what is known as
Creel Bay in the early 1940s.
“He farmed part of Creel Bay
that’s under 52 feet of water now,”
Blanchfield said.
Although Weed likely didn’t
know it at the time, Devils Lake in
the 1940s was in the early stages of
a long-term turnaround that has
seen record-high elevations each of
the past three years, peaking in
June 2011 at 1,454.4 feet, just about
3.5 feet from the elevation at which
it will begin spilling into the
Sheyenne and Red river valleys.
The 70 years since then have seen
a general rising of Devils Lake,
along with short-term dry spells.
From 1940 to 1956, the lake rose to
nearly 1,420 feet. That was followed
by a 12-year decline, before it
started rising again. From 1983 to
1987, the lake reached century-high
elevations of about 1,428 feet.
Building a resort
In 1988, Blanchfield and his
parents started building Woodland
Resort on the family farm that
bordered the Creel Bay shoreline.
“Back then, it was pretty tough
times in farming,” said
Blanchfield, who was a 21-year-old
UND student. “It was just time to
try to diversify because the ag
economy wasn’t very good. It was
real tough.”
The North Dakota Game and
Fish Department had stocked
Devils Lake with walleye and
perch a few years earlier, and it
was evolving into a promising
fishing destination.
During high school in the mid-
1980s, Kyle Blanchfield had spent
summers working at a small
resort, The Boat Yard, across the
lake.
“There were no restaurants on
the lake. There were no cabin
rentals. There was a marina, a
couple of convenience stores with
bait shops. There were a couple of
campgrounds, but that was it,” he
said. “I’d get people coming in
every day asking: Where can I eat,
where can I stay? I had to tell them
there is no such thing. There is
nothing on Devils Lake.
“And that was when the fishery
was really starting to take off,” he
said. “It was just a no-brainer at
the time. So, we got started from
scratch back in 1988. My folks
literally bet the farm on it.”
They built a small marina, a
store and a cafe, along with a small
bar, some boat rentals and fuel. In
“ North Dakota is blessed with abundant
resources. We need thoughtful planning
to protect our communities andd
build critical infrastructure.”
–Pam Gulleson
Paid for by Pam Gulleson for North Dakota
Kyle Blanchfield runs Woodland Resort on what once was his
grandfather’s farm back in the 1940s.
1989, they added 56 campsites.
Like Edward E. Heerman, who
operated the Minnie H steamboat a
century earlier, they quickly
realized that the lake was
beginning to recede.
“I thought this is kind of like
history repeating itself,” he said.
“It was really tough then. And it
didn’t rain hardly at all in that
time.”
The driest years were 1988 to
1990.
“We built a smaller marina at the
time,” he said. “The funny part
about that story is right after we
got that marina built, the lake
started dropping pretty good, so
that marina was unusable for a
couple of years,” he said.
Those dry years, however,
worked in the Blanchfields’ favor.
“It was actually a perfect time to
get into it because it was warm and
nice, and people wanted to be on
the lake,” he said.
By the early 1990s, though,
concern spread throughout the
Devils Lake Basin that a prolonged
drought would endanger the local
fishery and the budding tourism
industry.
A Lake Preservation Committee
was established to lobby in
Bismarck and Washington for
funding to stabilize Devils Lake, by
building an inlet as part of the
Garrison Diversion project, one
that had been promised some 40
years earlier but never
accomplished.
But the rains returned, and the
lake started rising again before
federal or state money ever flowed
into the Devils Lake Basin for an
inlet.
The rising lake
From 1993 to the summer of 2011,
the lake rose by nearly 32 feet, from
1,422.62 feet to a record 1,454.4 feet
last June, with its surface area
expanding from 44,230 acres to
211,300 acres, or 261 square miles,
and its water volume growing by
more than seven times.
Because of evaporation and a
generally drier climate later in the
summer and fall, the lake normally
drops by a foot by the time it
freezes, and it was listed at 1,453.3
feet in January.
At its peak last year, the lake was
only about 3.6 feet below the
elevation at which it would begin
spilling from the connected Stump
Lake to the Tolna Coulee and the
Sheyenne River Basin. If it reaches
that point, Devils Lake will cover
about 261,000 acres.
Like farmers and rural residents
throughout the Devils Lake Basin,
Woodland Resort has fought the
water for nearly two decades.
“There’s a lot of negatives to the
p g
www pamgulleson c
www.pamgulleson.com
Eric Hylden / Forum Communications Co.
flood,” he said. “A lot of people
have lost their livelihoods, their
entire farms. And they have no
recourse to make a living. Their
land’s gone,” he said.
“Every one of our neighbors
along the bay have had to put
$50,000 to $80,000 into their places
just to hold on. They’re high, but
their banks are eroding. And this
isn’t Detroit Lakes, where they
have this multimillion-dollar
homes. This is a big deal to these
people. A lot of them are retired
people living mostly on fixed
incomes, and not expecting to have
to fork out tens of thousands of
dollars just to protect their place –
and some of them have had to do
that a couple of times.”
Taking a stand
Blanchfield uses a couple of
visual aids to explain to visitors
the scope of the lake’s rise since
1993.
He points to the 16-foot-tall peak
of the ceiling in the A-frame
Woodland Resort Lodge.
“The lake’s come up 32 feet,” he
said. “That’s twice as high. So,
people come in, and when you can
see that, you can get a sense. And
that’s pretty incredible.”
If that doesn’t register, he tells
them that the average flagpole
outside a school or post office is
about 30 feet tall.
“We’ve been operating in kind of
a five-alarm-fire mode for more
than 15 years,” he said.
In 1995, encroaching water forced
them to move the original café – for
the first time.
“We actually had to shut the
restaurant operation down for just
about a full year,” Blanchfield said.
“That was a tough time. There was
no loss-of-business coverage. You
just had to eat it.”
Since the mid-1990s, the resort
has received a Small Business
Administration loan, plus an
$80,000 grant through the state, to
help shore up the business. Today,
that $80,000 might pay for a few
days of work with a large backhoe
and scraper, he said.
“There’s a real misconception
that all of this diking and stuff has
all been done on the government
dime. But that’s not the case,” he
said. “All the dirt we’ve had to move
is money out of our pockets. I’m
very, very fortunate that we have a
very good bank, a local bank. Our
banker has been our lifesaver.”
Blanchfield and his wife, Karin,
bought the resort from Kyle’s
parents in 1996.
“The nice thing is we are on a
deep part of the lake, so we didn’t
lose a lot of acreage of property.
Luckily, we had high ground to fall
back onto, too,” he said.
PAGE 5
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SUNDAY,
But even that was becoming more FEBRUARY 5, 2012
difficult.
“About 10 years ago, I kind of
made a line in the sand against the
lake,” he said. “I said I’m not giving
another inch. I’m going to hold this
ground, no matter what it takes.”
So, instead of moving back
deeper into the woods, he has been
hauling in clay and rock by the
truckloads – so much that he
bought his own trucks and dirt-
moving equipment to save some
money.
“I was just fortunate to have
land, ground high enough to go
back into, where we could keep our
infrastructure above 1,460 feet,” he
said.
In 2011 alone, they hauled in
about 250 semi-truck loads of rock
and 100,000 cubic yards of clay. At
about $1,500 per load for rock, the
cost adds up in a hurry.
“That 100,000 yards was a new
benchmark,” he said, explaining
that the total amount of clay
hauled in during the previous 15
years amounted to about another
150,000 yards.
“We’ve been involved in 17 “Personally, my
building moves, not counting my kids have had to
own home and my parents’ home.
We’ve gotten pretty good at moving pay the price more
stuff.” than anything,
A new marina built in the past
year sits on top of about 12 feet of because I haven’t
fill. had any time to do
The new restaurant, bait shop
and marina sit back more than 200 anything with
yards from the original shoreline. them. All we
The original restaurant is now
part of a five-unit lodge located do is move
behind the new restaurant. rock and dirt.”
All of the buildings are higher
than 1,460 feet, 2 feet higher than Kyle Blanchfield,
the lake’s spill elevation. The Woodland Resort owner
campground, which has grown on Devils Lake
from 56 sites to more than 200, is
located in the woods on even
higher ground.
“Had we not done that, all of that
would be under water. So, this is
my defense, building up,” he said.
“We didn’t really have a decent
alternative. It was either give it to
the lake or fight for it.”
Looking ahead
The Blanchfields’ sons, Warren,
14, and Landen, 11, have been
sacrificing, too.
“We’ve learned how to deal with
it, but at a pretty big cost, in money
and peace of mind,” Kyle
Blanchfield said. “It’s
psychological warfare. This
summer was just sickening. You
wake up in the morning and just
get at it. You go out and just get the
work done.
“Personally, my kids have had to
pay the price more than anything,
because I haven’t had any time to
do anything with them. All we do is
move rock and dirt. To me, that’s a
pretty expensive bill to pay – loss of
time that you have to spend with
your family. They like to fish, and
tube. They’re hunters, too. We like
doing stuff outside as we can.”
Between lodge, cabins and 150
campground spots and other
facilities, Woodland can and does
accommodate up to about 500
people at a time. The resort now
entertains as many as 15,000
overnight guests annually.
“The one positive thing that the
lake rise has done is it’s giving us a
world-class fishery. We do a lot of
business with waterfowl hunting
in the fall,” he said. “So, we
manage to try to grow our
business and stay with the lake
and take advantage of the positive
parts of it the best we can.
“It would be nice to just back into
a routine, where you’re not in a
five-alarm-fire mode all of the
time.”
Kevin Bonham reports
for the Grand Forks Herald.
 Devils Lake in 1984 Devils Lake in 2009
PAGE 6 NASA Earth Observatory photos

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SUNDAY,
FEBRUARY 5, 2012

These photos show how Devils Lake in North Dakota has grown between 1984 and 2009.

A floating patchwork of roads,

fields, islands and water
Kevin Eric Hylden / Forum Communications Co.

BONHAM
Bonham has covered
water issues for the
Grand Forks Herald
for 19 of the past
24 years

he North Dakota landscape

T often is described as a
patchwork quilt of farm
fields, of crops separated by
threads of rural roads a mile apart
that stretch for mile after mile in
the same direction.
US

In the Devils Lake Basin, at least

in the summertime, that quilt
appears to be floating in a vast
swimming pool, with those long,
straight roads reduced to water-
logged lanes that rise out of the
water for short distances as if
they’re puffed up with air, only to
disappear once again beneath the
water’s surface.
OVERWHELMS

The bright green and yellow

patches of wheat, canola and
mustard fade quickly to muddy
shades of browns and grays, as the
water, sometimes trimmed with
pale lines of whitecaps, eats away
at the land.
It’s a vastly different picture from
a couple of decades ago.
In the summer of 1991, Grand
Forks Herald photographer John
Stennes and I spent 20 hours flying
over North Dakota, observing what
many people then called the end of
a mini-drought that had lasted
three or four years. The Herald
published a four-page section,
“North Dakota in Green and Gold.”
“Rain has returned to the
Plains,” I wrote back then. “In 1991,
the grass turned green. Trees grew
full. Rivers widened. Lakes rose.
“There are patches of North
Dakota that the rain clouds passed
by, where the drought of the late
1980s lingers still. And there are
others, where rain came too hard,
too fast, and drenched a promising
crop.
“But for the most part, North
Dakota is lush this year, from the
Red River Valley to the Badlands,
from the Turtle Mountains to the
Prairie Heartland. …
“It is a land worthy of picture
postcards. … Each farmer is a
landscape artist, creating
brushstrokes along shelterbelts and
rivers, around rock piles and
lakes.”
In the Devils Lake Basin, it was
the first hint that a once-promising
fishing and tourism industry – now
estimated at more than $30 million
annually – might rebound.
High to low to high
WATER

When the first European settlers

arrived in the Devils Lake Basin in
the early 1880s, the lake was at an
elevation of 1,435 to 1,440 feet above
sea level. Settlers called Devils
Lake the Inland Ocean. And
steamboats carried passengers and
freight from town to town along the A submerged road on Devils Lake is seen from the air in October 2011.
shoreline.
But the lake elevation was slowly
falling. By 1940, it dropped to 1,400.9 neighboring Stump Lake, the lake Where they’re visible, grain bins control structures while putting
feet. has been rising ever since. and barns also rise out of the sea. together a mitigation program to
Anybody who has lived in the Farmstead after abandoned ease the pain of such an
Lake from the air farmstead are isolated. Roads uncontrolled spill. Yet in the Upper
Devils Lake Basin since the 1950s
can tell stories about walking I’ve seen Devils Lake from the air leading to them have been washed Devils Lake Basin, people suffer, as
across what is now East Bay. Devils several times in the past couple of away. the water rises and spreads more
Lake was so small; its waters were years, to see how it’s changed in the Standing water is visible on every year, consuming section after
contained almost exclusively in past 20 years. virtually every section of land, section, road after road, homes and
Main Bay, south of the city. Although they didn’t have a even every quarter-section of 160 utility systems all along the way.
But the lake was slowly birds-eye perspective, those early acres. Water is everywhere in
rebounding. By the mid-1980s, it settlers were close to the mark in Entire towns are virtually northeastern North Dakota. If this
was above 1,425 feet, and local their descriptions. surrounded. Penn. Churchs Ferry. were spring, it would be one thing
residents started building a fishing If Devils Lake isn’t an inland Minnewaukan. Roads and houses because spring floods eventually
SECTION 2
WHEN

and tourism industry.
Just as quickly as a couple of
businesses opened, the lake started
falling again, dropping by about 6
feet from 1987 to 1993, in what later
was determined to be the second-
worst drought in recorded history.
A Lake Preservation Coalition
was formed to lobby the state and
federal governments to bring water
into Devils Lake, perhaps from the
Missouri River.
But nature took care of that
problem in the late spring of 1993.
It rained all summer.
The lake elevation rose by about 1
foot every two to three weeks.
By August, roads in the upper
basin began to flood.
Except for a couple of years in
2005 through 2007, when the lake
was filling up the deep,
ocean, as they described it, it is a
vast sea, stretching some 50 miles
east to west, from a relocated N.D.
Highway 1 at Stump Lake to beyond
Churchs Ferry and a relocated U.S.
281, and some 40 miles north to
south.
The lake has risen almost 32 feet
and quadrupled in size since 1993.
Portions of the basin appear to be
more like an aerial view of the
Florida Everglades than the Prairie
Pothole region.
Coulees are bulging rivers, water
spilling from their banks, drowning
once-fertile fields of durum.
Small lakes have merged into one.
It is impossible to see where one
ends and another begins.
Patches of brown and green
shelterbelts seemingly grow right
out of the water.
are swamped on Spirit Lake
Nation.
Threat of spill
The lake, at 1,454.4 feet, was just
about 3.5 feet from reaching its
natural spill elevation.
After rising by about 6 feet in the
past three years, the rising lake is
prompting emergency responses, as
local, state and federal officials try
to find a solution and avoid what
most believe could be an
uncontrolled spill from Stump
Lake, through the Tolna Coulee to
the Sheyenne River.
The potential downstream
impacts of such an uncontrolled
release of water have not been
calculated, but they are worrisome,
if not daunting.
The state is building outlets and
pass. But this water stays year-
round.
The swimming pool of the Devils
Lake Basin is full.
The emotional toll this two-
decade-long flood has taken can be
experienced on the ground by
listening to people, flood victims,
talk about losing not just their land
or the roads necessary to reach
their homes but their very
livelihoods.
What was clear in the summer of
2011 is, nature is an abstract artist.
For the landscape of the Devils
Lake Basin is painted not so much
in greens and golds of a promising
harvest but also – in both physical
and emotional terms – in abstract
swirls of muddy browns and grays.
Kevin Bonham reports
for the Grand Forks Herald.
 “Outlets are a permanent fix. When MnDOT raises the road, it’s a temporary fix.
They can keep raising the road again and again, but it’s expensive.”
High lake levels
Closed basins create ‘unimaginable’ problems
By Nathan Bowe
Forum Communications Co.
Minnesota Lakes Country has
dealt with high water for nearly 20
years now, and even the extremely
dry weather of the past few
months may not signal the end of
the wet cycle.
Drive through lakes country and
you’ll see highways that have been
built up, sometimes more than
once – and others with flooded
shoulders and driving lanes
narrowed by rising lake water.
On lakes and sloughs with
outlets, the problem runs off
downstream unnoticed, but
property owners on lakes without
outlets have to deal with steadily
rising water that destroys
beaches, cuts off driveway access,
forces outbuildings to be moved
and eventually floods out homes
and cabins.
‘It was unimaginable’
That was the situation on Turtle
Lake, which straddles the Becker
and Clay county lines, in the late
1990s, when the high-water
problem first began.
“We all wondered how high it
would have to go to find a natural
outlet – it was unimaginable,” said
Greg Anderson, who had a
summer cabin on Turtle Lake.
That was before the Buffalo-Red
River Watershed District came to
the rescue – it installed a siphon
system in 1999 to keep a lid on the
rising water.
“I didn’t personally have water
in my home at the time, but a lot of
people did,” Anderson said. “If
they hadn’t put the siphon in, I
don’t think a lot of those homes
would still be there.”
The siphon hasn’t been without
glitches, but it’s worked well
enough that Anderson – as of
December – is now a year-round
resident of Turtle Lake.
“I couldn’t be happier with the
siphon,” he said. And as a
longtime resident of Oakport
Township near Moorhead, which
is always in the thick of the spring
flood fight with the Red River,
Anderson knows what he’s talking
about.
“I know more about water than a
guy ever wants to know,” he said
with a laugh.
One crisis after another
Turtle Lake was just the first of
a chain of high-water crises in
Minnesota Lakes Country that the
Buffalo-Red River Watershed
District has been dealing with
right up to this year.
“We’ve done 10 different high-
water investigations that have
turned into project areas,” said
Buffalo Red River Watershed
Administrator Bruce Albright.
One of the more high-profile
outlet projects was Boyer Lake on
U.S. Highway 10 near Lake Park.
The Minnesota Department of
Transportation had already raised
Highway 10 once and was
preparing to raise it again, at a
cost of about $2 million.
The watershed district solved
the problem permanently, and less
expensively, by installing an outlet
there for about $400,000.
“Outlets are a permanent fix,”
Albright said. “When MnDOT
raises the road, it’s a temporary
fix. They can keep raising the
road again and again, but it’s
expensive.”
As long as an outlet merely
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PAGE 7
Bruce Albright, Buffalo Red River Watershed administrator
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restores a lake’s level to its Michael Vosburg / Forum Communications Co.
ordinary high-water mark, no
Department of Natural Resources
permit is required, which can
speed up the process, Albright
said.
The district routinely shuts the
gate on outlets during spring
flooding to avoid making matters Detroit
worse downstream. It doesn’t Lakes
noticeably affect the lake levels,
he said.
The total cost of the outlet
projects has been about
$2.2 million – and the watershed
district has footed the bill for a
quarter of that. Pelican
“That’s $550,000 that hasn’t gone Rapids
to traditional (watershed projects
such as) drainage, flood control,
water quality and things like
that,” Albright said. “But these
are emergencies,” he added, and
may be the only time the
taxpayers on those lakes receive Map by Troy Becker
watershed services.
Forum Communications Co.
Blame the glaciers
They came down into Minnesota
like gangbusters 12,000 to 15,000
years ago. Not like most people
imagine – giant, ponderous
mountains of snow moving south
and crushing all beneath their
mass.
No. The glaciers that shaped
lakes country operated more like
rivers of ice that flowed out of the
northern wastes of Hudson Bay.
“People think of glaciers as
bulldozers, but they’re not; they
act more like a conveyor belt,”
said Phil Gerla, an associate
professor at the University of
North Dakota’s Department of
Geology and Geological
Engineering.
“It’s a gravitational thing,” he
said. “Once there’s enough
accumulation of ice and snow,
there’s enough feed to keep the ice
moving in this direction over
millennia.”
As material piled up along that
conveyor belt over time, it led to
soil, rock, sand and gravel (a
moraine) piling up in areas like
Becker County.
Most lakes in Minnesota started
as depressions formed by melting
ice, he said.
“When this conveyor belt
process occurs, you get
hummocky typography – it’s not
drained very well. Like a million
dump trucks dump loads
everywhere, you end up with these
basins that form lakes.”
Some have outlets, some don’t.
The ones that don’t are lucky to
end up in the Buffalo Red
Watershed District because
counties and individual lake
associations aren’t always willing
or able to build outlets.
In 1999, Albright was called to
Perham for consultation on high-
water problems afflicting Little
McDonald Lake, between Perham
and Vergas in Otter Tail County.
Like many areas of lakes
Homes are flooded July 22, 2011, by rising lake waters in Otter
country, it is not part of any Tail County west of Perham, Minn.
watershed district.
And 12 years later, its high-water asked to join the district, seeking changed its mind – the water level
problems are much worse. help with its high-water has fallen on its own over the past
It can be politically difficult for problems. few months because of dry
a county board to approve an But the watershed board is wary weather.
outlet in the face of strong of taking on more projects – Albright says that might signal
downstream opposition, Albright especially now when it appears the end of the wet cycle, or it could
said, and that appears to be the that all the outlets that can be – as has happened in the past – a
case in Otter Tail County. feasibly be built have been built. dry period within the wet cycle,
At least one lake association And on the short term, Mother which could go on for another 10 to
located just outside the Nature may lend a hand. Already 15 years.
boundaries of the Buffalo-Red one lake association that had Nathan Bowe reports
River Watershed District has asked for the watershed’s help has for Detroit Lakes Newspapers.
houstoneng.com
As community members, we experienced
firsthand the tremendous impact of
flooding throughout our region.
We support and recognize those who
worked in flood fighting efforts.
Services
ƒ Hydraulic modeling and flood
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ƒ Surveying, construction
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ƒ Levee, floodwall, diversion, and
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ƒ DSS (Decision Support Systems) -
Integrated/Interactive information
tools and applications
kljeng.com 800 213 3860
 Patrick Springer / Forum Communications Co.
PAGE 8
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SUNDAY,
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Susan and John Boyce,
who live in the Sandy
River Road area north
of Bismarck, were
forced out of their home
by the 2011 Missouri
River flood. The interior
of the house, which
suffered severe mold
infestation from the
floodwaters, had to be
gutted and restored.
Here, the Boyces visit
their home in October
2011 to check on the
restoration work and to
survey the flood
damage to their yard.

‘I guess this
is one in 500’
US

By Patrick Springer
Forum Communications Co.
BISMARCK – Count John and
Historic Missouri River flood of 2011
Susan Boyce among the many who
now know firsthand that the may change river channel for years to come
Missouri River can humble even
OVERWHELMS

Special to Forum Communications Co.

the gigantic Garrison Dam.
Their home, in the leafy Sandy
River Drive neighborhood north of
Bismarck, is normally a couple of
hundred yards from the Missouri
River.
The ranch-style house was built
in what was considered the 500-
year floodplain, thanks to Garrison
Dam, an earthen flood-control
fortress 70 miles upstream. For
almost 60 years, the dam kept areas
like Sandy River Drive and
numerous towns and subdivisions,
as well as farms and ranches, dry
during floods.
For the Boyces, that changed on
June 2, 2011, when a dike breached
and half a foot of floodwater
inundated their home.
“I guess this is one in 500,” Susan
Boyce, 60, said. “We never, ever
imagined that this would happen.”
Just the day before, for the first
time in history, the emergency
spillway gates of Garrison Dam
were opened for operation. The Garrison Dam during construction in 1951.
The historic flood of 2011 had
begun. It was the first significant Michael Vosburg / Forum Communications Co.
flood Bismarck-Mandan
experienced since 1952. Yet without
Garrison and the other dams, the
record flooding and resulting
damage would have been much,
much worse.
Uncontrolled, the Missouri River
flood crest in Bismarck-Mandan
would have been more than 5 feet
higher than it was – 24.43 feet
instead of 19.23 feet, according to
calculations by the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers.
The cumulative volume of water
in the 2011 flood was almost 1½
times greater than the 1952 flood,
which had the highest peak
volume. The crest of the 1952 flood
WATER

was more than 8 feet higher than

2011, 27.9 feet compared to 19.23
feet, because the dam spread the
releases over a longer period.
In the 1960s, once the six
Missouri River dams were in place
and operating, officials spoke
proudly of taming the mighty
Missouri River, which used to flood
with aggravating frequency.
Over time, as the dams withstood The Garrison Dam in 2009.
whatever nature threw their way,
public confidence in their flood- flood is so epic.” “I think it could have been much “We both started crying,” Susan
protection reliability only grew. Chased from their home by the worse,” said Cecily Fong, a Boyce said. “Sounds wonderful and
The Boyces were far from alone flood, the Boyces have been living spokeswoman for the North Dakota looks wonderful and seems to be
in believing Garrison Dam would in a condominium in Bismarck. Department of Emergency fine.”
protect their property against any They are among an estimated 1,600 Services.
conceivable flood. people in 700 residences displaced The Boyces are among those who Early warning
Todd Sando, North Dakota’s state by the historic 2011 flood in consider themselves fortunate the The first alarms of a possible
engineer, for instance, was among Burleigh County. damage wasn’t more severe. Still, severe spring flood on the upper
the many who had faith in the Across the river in Morton they had to gut the interior of their Missouri River were sounded in
Missouri River dams. County, more than 130 residences house, filling more than four roll- late January.
“I thought we solved our were damaged and about 760 away disposals with ruined An engineer for the Burleigh
SECTION 2
WHEN

flooding,” he said. “We had no
variability in river flow, really. The
dams protected us.”
In retrospect, a flood caused by
an ice jam that flooded low-lying
areas around south Bismarck in
2009 was a warning. But that flood
was minor and lasted only hours.
The 2011 flood lasted a bit more
than three months.
Freakish weather, producing the
highest runoff on record, was to
blame.
Heavy snowpack in the Rocky
Mountains, which drain into the
Missouri, was followed by
monsoon rains over a vast area of
eastern Montana and the western
Dakotas.
“It’s just the magnitude of the
runoff,” Sando said. “The system
wasn’t designed to handle it. This
people were evacuated – figures
that merely hint at the flood’s
human toll.
Evacuees scattered to rentals,
were taken in by friends or
relatives, or camped out in
recreational vehicles.
Most residences were damaged
by high ground water tables. The
high pressure buckled basement
walls, or the sheer volume of water
overwhelmed sump pumps.
As it turned out, the flood crested
almost 1½ feet short of the
prediction, sparing many
properties from even worse
damage.
Early estimates by state officials
put damage from the 2011 Missouri
River flood at $35 million, a
fraction of the $509 million
statewide total.
drywall, carpeting and belongings.
“My whole house is just one big
mold pit,” said Susan Boyce, who
teaches art in Mandan. “All our
books are ruined.”
In the scramble to prepare for the
flood, the Boyces weren’t able to
move their piano. The best they
could do was cover it, put it up on
blocks and hope the water didn’t
reach it.
The prolonged flood didn’t allow
them to even examine their
cherished piano until late summer.
When the couple unwrapped it,
they were pleased to see that it
didn’t appear damaged. But the
real test would be how it sounded.
The Boyces braced themselves,
then John, 60, a veterinarian,
played the first chord. It sounded
surprisingly good.
County Water Resource District
sent an email telling the Army
Corps of Engineers that the public
was “a bit jumpy,” and spoke of the
need to “get rid of water.”
The basin’s January runoff was
170 percent of normal, with
precipitation running 175 percent
of normal. The National Weather
Service described water stored in
the snowpack as “near historic
highs.” Much of the basin was
saturated.
In February, Jody Farhat, who
manages the Missouri River dam
system, was aware that Bismarck
lacked river channel capacity. She
warned fellow corps officials that
managing the spring runoff would
be “a tricky operation.”
MISSOURI: Page 9

Jim Volk stands outside his home in the Fox Island subdivision south of Bismarck, which was surrounded by water during the 2011 flood.
A foot of water filled the garage but didn’t reach the Volks’ main floor, which was built 2 feet higher than recommended.
Meanwhile, nature kept piling up
the warning signs – abnormally
high snowpack and high snow-
water equivalents across much of
the basin.
Still, in March, Farhat was saying
the reservoir system still had
plenty of room, if needed, to store
floodwaters.
By late March, the corps was
projecting releases from the
Missouri River dams to reflect
“slightly above normal to above
normal” runoff.
Soon, however, it would be clear
that spring runoff from the
mountains and plains would be
well above normal.
The corps began increasing dam
releases in early April to make
room for heavy runoff. Internally,
according to emails that since have
been made public, some corps
officials wondered if Farhat wasn’t
downplaying the chance of heavy
rain.
In mid-April, a corps general sent
out a mass email from
headquarters warning that all the
ingredients were in place for major
flooding.
Sando wrote a letter dated April
20 to express concerns to the corps
that its reservoir discharges
seemed inadequate for the
snowpack and possibility of heavy
rain.
Those worries proved prophetic.
The corps started ramping up its
releases in early May.
Then, in mid- and late May, it
started to rain heavily in the Upper
Missouri River Basin, with more
rain expected.
On May 21, the corps was notified
that 8 inches of rain had fallen in
48 hours in areas of Montana. It
kept raining in Montana, where a
record 3.12 inches fell in Billings,
and the western Dakotas.
There was little the corps’ dams
managers could do now but open
the floodgates. The schedule of
planned releases quickly
accelerated – and kept changing,
bewildering and frustrating local
officials.
Crews scrambled to build
emergency levees in Bismarck-
Mandan and elsewhere in a mad
race against the river.
A flood bigger than the dams,
something that once seemed
impossible, now was inevitable.
The peak releases from Garrison
Dam, a torrent running 150,000
cubic feet per second, would be
more than twice the previous
record, set in 1975.
The peak flows would be
sustained for two weeks in June,
and the river would be above flood
stage for several months.
Once protections were in place,
there was nothing to do but wait as
troubling questions nagged at
officials and homeowners.
How high will the river rise? Will
the levees hold? What should we
do?
Destructive flood
With a destructive flood on the
way, homeowners in low-lying
sections of Bismarck-Mandan
nervously read elevation charts
and compared them to the river
forecasts.
Jim and Cathie Volk knew their
home, in the fashionable Fox Island
subdivision south of Bismarck,
would flood.
Their house suffered minor flood
damage in 2009, when an ice jam
caused a flood that came and went
within hours. Little did the Volks
suspect then that the ice-jam flood,
broken up by dynamite, was a
portent of worse to come.
Based on the flood forecast, the
Volks expected the main level of
their home would have 2 feet of
water.
To prevent damage, they removed
their carpet, furniture, appliances
and cabinets from the main floor.
MISSOURI
From Page A8
Water flows into the Missouri River from the Garrison Dam.
To keep his foundation from
buckling, Jim, a semi-retired
stockbroker, flooded their shallow
basement crawlspace. “It was
terribly painful to do,” he said.
The river crested at 19.23 feet,
well below the 22 feet predicted, but
3 feet above flood stage for Fox
Island, which once actually was an
island.
A foot of water filled their garage
but didn’t reach the Volks’ main
floor. They’d built their home 2 feet
higher than their builder
recommended when they moved to
Fox Island 16 years ago.
Jim Volk’s boyhood home in
Mandan had flooded several times,
including the 1952 flood, so he
decided to take precautions, even
though he had confidence in
Garrison Dam.
Although their main floor
escaped water damage, the couple
confronted a major cleanup job.
Spiders had moved in, and walls
and other surfaces had to be
scrubbed clean or painted.
“There’s so much cleaning to do
when a house sets dormant for that
many months,” Cathie Volk said of
their five-month absence. “It’s like
building a new house.”
When the river subsided in late
summer, the Volks went to inspect
the river delta that has formed
from years of sediment buildup –
blamed as one of the culprits in the
2009 flood.
Deltas and large sandbars
exacerbate flooding because they
diminish the capacity of the river
channel.
“It’s much, much larger than it
was,” Cathie Volk said, with
dismay of the delta that has
become an unwelcome neighbor.
“It’s much bigger than anybody
thought it was.”
Enlarged delta
As the enlarged delta off Fox
Island attests, the Missouri River,
its banks and floodplain, have been
dramatically rearranged by the
flood of 2011.
It will take years for the changes
to become fully apparent, experts
predict.
Joel Galloway, a hydrologist for
the U.S. Geological Survey in
Bismarck, has been keeping a close
eye on the river during and after
the flood.
In early fall, he went up in an
airplane with colleagues for an
aerial view of the transformation.
From an altitude of 800 feet,
Galloway could see ample signs of
changes along the reach of the
Missouri below Garrison Dam to
the headwaters of Lake Oahe.
Some banks had eroded
significantly. Some sandbars were
wiped clean; elsewhere, new
sandbars have formed.
Through Bismarck-Mandan, the
record volume and high velocity of
water significantly scoured the
North Dakota State Water Commission
river channel, increasing its
capacity.
That natural dredging of the
channel, many agree, was largely
responsible for the lower-than-
expected flood crest.
But as the river’s level dropped
after the flood, and as it slowed
down, it began once again to
deposit sediment in areas,
Galloway said.
USGS has embarked on a study of
the changes along the Missouri
River from the 2011 flood, and the
North Dakota State Water
Commission also is studying the
effects.
“We’re really in the early
phases,” still compiling data,
Galloway said of the USGS study.
“Ten years down the road, we
could still be seeing the effects of
this,” he said. “Those effects are
going to be hard to overcome.”
A report by the North Dakota
Game and Fish Department
concluded that habitat along the
Missouri River has changed
profoundly as a result of the flood.
The least affected area likely is
the portion of the river including
Garrison Dam’s Lake Sakakawea
and above.
The upper Missouri River in
North Dakota experiences
sediment deposits every spring
from the free-flowing Yellowstone
River, making the 2011 flood not so
unusual.
But the 70-mile stretch south of
Garrison Dam, including the
channel through Bismarck-
Mandan, is likely the most altered
in North Dakota, in the Game and
Fish analysis.
That segment of the river
experienced unprecedented river
volumes equaling or exceeding
100,000 cubic feet per second for 68
straight days.
“Extremely high releases over a
prolonged period will greatly scour
the river bed, and hundreds if not
thousands of acres of bottomland
will erode,” the report said. “In
some cases, the main river channel
itself may reclaim some of its
former self by incising a new path
of least resistance.”
In many ways, the flood of 2011
created a new Missouri River.
Spillway problems
Garrison Dam’s spillway gates
encountered a few hitches when
they opened for the first time.
Sealant had to be reinforced in
spots and later, after water was
observed flaring on the spillway’s
apron, officials shut the gates once
again and discovered the water had
chipped some of the concrete.
Quick-curing concrete was
trucked in overnight for repairs.
Once the initial problems were
addressed, the floodgates and
spillway performed as designed in
their first real test, officials said.
In the midst of the flood, Todd
Patrick Springer / Forum Communications Co.
PAGE 9
A FORUM
COMMUNICATIONS
SPECIAL PROJECT
SUNDAY,
FEBRUARY 5, 2012
Lindquist, operations manager for
Garrison Dam, found himself
reminding people who were angry
over the huge releases of water that
the spillway gates had been built
for a reason.
Officials, including Gov. Jack
Dalrymple and North Dakota’s
congressional delegation, have
questioned the corps’ response to
the flood, and an independent
review has been ordered.
A major critical theme has been
that officials were too slow to react
when it was clear the basin’s
snowpack could leave little room to
maneuver if heavy rains followed.
Before winter, officials in North
Dakota asked for reassurances that
the corps would be fully prepared
for a possible spring flood in 2012.
Some, including Sando, the state
engineer, called for the corps to
release more water from the
reservoirs to create more flood
storage capacity.
But the lower Missouri still
remained above flood stage in early
fall. Later, after residents and
officials pleaded for the release of
more water from the reservoirs to
make more room for a possible
flood this spring, the corps
increased the flow.
The dams must be managed as a
coordinated system for a river that
runs more than 2,300 miles through
the heart of the country.
Although Garrison and the other
dams could not prevent widespread
damage in the 2011 flood, the corps
calculates that the dams prevented
$44.2 billion in damage throughout
the Missouri River system as of
2010. Garrison, which alone
accounts for a third of the system’s
flood storage, was credited with
preventing $13.7 billion in damage.
As for criticisms that the corps
could have avoided damaging
flooding by acting more swiftly and
aggressively, Lindquist said
preliminary calculations show
Garrison simply was overwhelmed.
Even emptying the reservoir – a
drastic step no one would
recommend – wouldn’t have been
enough given the magnitude of
runoff for the system, which was
almost 1¼ times its previous
record, Lindquist said.
“If Lake Sakakawea was empty,
we still would have filled it one and
a half times,” he said. “People don’t
understand the volume.”
And people forget how quickly
conditions can change. Just six
years ago, at the end of a prolonged
drought, Sakakawea fell to its
record low level – almost 48 feet
below its record peak in 2011.
Uncertain future
Susan and John Boyce aren’t sure
whether they’ll rebuild their
flooded home in the Sandy River
Drive area north of Bismarck.
With ground water tables still
high, and the stubborn wet pattern
showing no sign of fading, many
around Bismarck-Mandan fear
what spring has in store.
The Boyces have time for the
questions to be resolved.
“If we weren’t able to purchase a
condo, I don’t know what we’d do,”
Susan Boyce said of her temporary
Bismarck home. “We feel very
fortunate.”
Just two years after their house
was built, in 1995, homes in the
Sandy River Drive area had to be
built up an additional 2 feet. The
Boyces aren’t sure it would be
practical or affordable to raise their
home.
“We’re still trying to do it one day
at a time and do the wise thing,”
Susan Boyce said.
A lot of people along the
Missouri River, their eyes opened
by the 2011 flood, are trying to do
the same.
Patrick Springer reports
for The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead.
 Patrick Springer / Forum Communications Co.
PAGE 10
A FORUM
COMMUNICATIONS
SPECIAL PROJECT

SUNDAY,
FEBRUARY 5, 2012

Walt Bailey stands outside his boyhood home in the Sertoma Park neighborhood of Bismarck, which was flooded in 1952. It was
the last major flood on the Missouri River before Garrison Dam provided flood protection. The current owner of the home had
placed sandbags as a precaution in 2011, but an emergency earthen levee kept the neighborhood dry.
US

Race to escape
OVERWHELMS

Bismarck man remembers the ‘52 Missouri rampage

By Patrick Springer Glenn Sorlie / The Bismarck Tribune
Forum Communications Co.
BISMARCK – Walt Bailey and
his family had just sat down to a
Palm Sunday roast dinner after
church when someone pounded on
their door.
It was an auxiliary police officer
going door-to-door to deliver a
message that remains vivid in
Bailey’s memory almost 60 years
later.
The Missouri River had jumped
its banks due to an ice jam,
spilling water 2 feet deep in the
low spots of the neighborhood –
and now was heading toward the
Bailey home.
“He said you have an hour to get
out,” Bailey said. “So we dove into
the essentials.”
The family scrambled to gather
important items to take with them:
food, cooking utensils, dishes,
clothing and bedding.
“Whatever seemed to be
important,” Bailey said. “Nobody
knew quite what to expect. We
decided to take those things that
you might need for two or three
weeks.”
Bailey’s mother and aunt, whose
family lived next door, went to a
tourist resort on high ground in
Bismarck and reserved two cabins
– their home away from home.
Before they left, Bailey’s father
and older brother hastily stacked
furniture on the living room floor,
putting the most precious pieces at
Bismarck Tribune photographer Glenn Sorlie, a staffer at the time and later owner-publisher of
the top in the hope they would stay the Tribune, was aboard one of the National Guard duck boats involved in rescue work in 1952.
dry. The rescue crew saw a dog floating on a packing crate. As a crew member reached to save the
WATER

“From floor to ceiling, they had
this stack of stuff,” Bailey said.
“The top item of all that was my
mother’s sewing machine, a
beautiful walnut cabinet. That was
about all the time we had.”
The Baileys were able to make
one or two car trips to carry
belongings to the cabins, near
where the Bank of North Dakota
now stands. Then, as time ran out,
they loaded the car for the final
trip.
“By that time, there was water in
the streets,” said Bailey, who was 8
years old at the time. “We drove
out of there as a family through
water.”
The worst in 42 years
It was April 7, 1952, a day that
remains etched not only in
Bailey’s memory but in history.
SECTION 2
dog, Sorlie snapped this photo.
The Salvation Army and the Red
“From floor to ceiling, they had this stack of stuff.
Cross.
The top item of all that was my mother’s sewing Bailey returned to his boyhood
home in July, as the Missouri
machine, a beautiful walnut cabinet. That was
River flood was receding. The
about all the time we had.” current owner, Debbie Gienger,
Walt Bailey, recalling how his brother and father stacked items still had sandbags protecting
window wells.
as his family raced to evacuate their home in 1952
The sandbags were untouched by
floodwaters. Her neighborhood
near Sertoma Park was protected
covered with 3 or 4 feet of water. years. And the last before officials
Huge cakes of ice, some as big as declared that Garrison Dam and by emergency levees.
“I knew there was flooding, but I
houses, tumbled as they were the other dams had tamed the
swept along the river. unruly Missouri. didn’t know it was that bad,”
Gienger said, when Bailey spoke of
As the flooding progressed,
many houses were chimney deep. The one dry thing his childhood experience.
Hundreds of cattle drowned. When the Baileys were able to Before the emergency levees
Debris and dead livestock floated go home, they found the high- were built, and the river rested 2
downstream. A horse breeder was water mark halfway up the living feet below early forecasts, Gienger
able to save only half his herd. room wall. It neatly bisected a and her neighbors were worried
framed mirror Bailey’s parents

The devastating flood of 1952 One Bismarck couple and their that history would repeat itself.
WHEN

would mark the last time the
Missouri River caused widespread
damaging flooding in Bismarck-
Mandan and other cities for six
decades – until the flood of 2011.
Before Garrison and five other
main-stem dams were built, mostly
in the 1950s and 1960s, the
Missouri River rampaged with
destructive regularity – 39 times in
69 years, starting with 1883, which
still holds the record crest at 31.6
feet, and 1952.
Ice jams frequently caused or
exacerbated floods, often with
little warning, as in 1952.
“The speed with which the
waters rose caught most residents
unprepared,” The Fargo Forum
reported.
Within minutes, some areas were
10 children saw their house float
off its foundation and roll down
the river.
South of Bismarck, a farmhand
spent the night in his attic and
later on the roof as the water rose
swiftly. He was rescued by
helicopter after spending anxious
hours on the roof, holding a
kerosene lamp in the dark.
“The ice was pounding the
house so hard I thought it would
fall over,” he told a reporter.
The Bailey family was among an
estimated 1,000 people who were
driven from their homes in
Bismarck and Mandan. Three
hundred homes were inundated.
The river crested at 27.9 feet,
almost 8 feet above major flood
stage. It was the worst flood in 42
had hung.
Water had reached all but the
top of the pyramid of furniture
the Baileys had stacked. Only his
mother’s prized sewing machine
had stayed dry.
“That was the only thing that
was above the water,” said Bailey,
now 67, a retired historic
preservation administrator. The
refrigerator was full of silt.
Once dried, much of the
furniture still could be used. Even
many family photos and other
mementos were salvaged.
“Nobody threw anything away
in those days,” Bailey said.
There were no government
assistance programs to help flood
victims recover. “Everybody was
really on their own,” he said.
They managed with help from
“It all started happening on
Memorial Day weekend,” she said,
recalling the first warnings of a
possible catastrophic flood. “It was
the worst Memorial Day of my life.
Nobody in the neighborhood knew
if we were going to be safe or have
1 or 2 feet of water.”
For his part, Bailey was pleased
that his boyhood home had been
well kept. He ended up working his
whole career in Bismarck. When it
came time to buy a house, he chose
a neighborhood on high ground.
But because of Garrison Dam, he
didn’t worry about floods like the
one that swept his family out of
their home in 1952, following that
unforgettable knock at the door.
Patrick Springer reports
for The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead.
 From meandering PAGE 11
A FORUM
COMMUNICATIONS
SPECIAL PROJECT

to marauding SUNDAY,
FEBRUARY 5, 2012

Terrain can do little to slow Sheyenne’s overland flooding

By Kristen M. Daum Michael Vosburg / Forum Communications Co.
Forum Communications Co.
FESSENDEN, N.D. –
Tammy Roehrich, Wells
County emergency
manager, keeps stacks of
files documenting the
damage recent floods have
wrought.
She pulls out just a single
folder, paging through
photo after photo detailing
what flooding left behind in
2011 alone after the
Sheyenne River tore
through northwestern
Wells County.
Drenched fields. Culverts “The diversion
carried hundreds of feet. allowed us to solve
Gravel roads gouged and
left with 3-foot drop-offs. the problem
“Fargo, Bismarck, Minot, without any dikes
Devils Lake. Those are
disasters. We just have an around the river. I
inconvenience,” said don’t think you
Roehrich, a lifelong
resident of central North could find anyone
Dakota. The channel of the Sheyenne River winds through flooded Cass County fields in April 2011. in West Fargo now
But that inconvenience
still packs a punch costing who would say it
hundreds of thousands – lakes and constant detours, annual flooding.
Harwood as the Sheyenne spills out “If I lived out there, I
was not a good
sometimes millions – of
dollars in repairs. over land. The sight of would probably feel the device.”
Jamestown submerged farmland same way,” he said. “It’s
The trouble isn’t confined Jake Gust, Sheyenne
to rural areas. From Harvey Valley
Valley City West Fargo
West continues until the hard to look at West Fargo
Sheyenne meets up with the high and dry, and then drive Diversion superintendent
to Sibley, Valley City to
Red River a few miles to the a mile over the diversion and former West Fargo
Harwood, riverside
communities face the same Kindred east. and it’s all water.” city commissioner
obstacles and consequences Some residents in that While communities such
Lisbon as Harwood can put up
of neighboring the stretch blame the diversion
Sheyenne River. Edgeley for the flooding, but Gust dikes each year as
Not so long ago, the said there is no proof the temporary defense, some
Sheyenne simply diversion is the cause. communities such as the
meandered through the The same amount of small towns of Wells Map by Troy Becker
Roehrich said, the waters Moving southward, the water would still flow County don’t have that
plains of North Dakota, usually linger for up to landscape varies from total Forum Communications Co.
throwing a tantrum only through the area, he said, option.
three weeks before moving flatness, generally but without the diversion, it Roehrich said dikes,
every so often. But the on and leaving the preventing the lashing of
Sheyenne has shown in would flow uncontrollably sandbagging or even a
wreckage behind. overland flooding. costly diversion wouldn’t do
recent years its new across the landscape.
But 2011 was different. But by the time high any good against the
normal is a bit more Instead, the diversion
The spring flood carried waters reach Kindred, overland flooding there.
temperamental. channels most of the
over into summer, lasting southwest of Fargo, the
Floods along the pressure, literally diverting “There’s no way you can.
into August. Sheyenne River will again
Sheyenne don’t pass it away from the It just comes through so
In July, Wells County was bulge out of its banks
through swiftly with the communities it protects. fast, takes out the roads,”
deluged by 20 inches of rain across farmland.
ebb and flow of water But Gust said he she said. “Usually it’s the
that washed out more roads The problem continues as
levels, as other rivers the river pushes northeast – empathizes with residents same spots every year, but
than the spring runoff did, some are new.”
might. The river acts more but many residents of who live outside the
Roehrich said.
like a moody teenager bent “Water makes its own Horace and West Fargo protected area and must Kristen M. Daum reports
on rebellion just to prove a way,” she said. “It takes out have been spared in recent still face the threat of for The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead
point. the culverts, the roads.” years for one reason.
When the waters rise, the For the past three years, The Sheyenne Diversion,
Sheyenne overflows its Roehrich said, spring floods constructed in the late 1980s
banks and breaks out have cut off access to every before the current climactic
across the horizon like a east-west road in three wet period began, has
glass of water spilled on a townships, forcing proven a godsend to those
table. It often takes weeks numerous detours for rural two communities, said Jake
before the floods recoil back residents, many of whom Gust, superintendent of the
into the riverbed. are farmers. project and a former West
It’s a consequence of Roehrich’s early Fargo commissioner.
topography – the estimates projected a “The diversion allowed us
Sheyenne’s riverbanks are $2 million price tag to to solve the problem
naturally higher than the repair the damage left without any dikes around
surrounding terrain. So behind by 2011 overland the river,” he said, making
when the Sheyenne note of initial opposition to Get
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doesn’t really threaten saturated that minor The contrast is drastic
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wreaks havoc on the miles a quick rain shower, he West Fargo and Harwood,
of farmland and township said. north of where the
roads that crisscross the “It’s wet here. It’s that diversion ends.
prairie. way over the whole state,” Dry fields and roadways
After spring melt, Brooks said. shift abruptly into endless

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Land Surveying sent to me via e-mail. *Orders will be mailed by March 1, 2012
West Fargo, ND Minot, ND Fergus Falls, MN
701-282-4692 701-839-1590 218-998-4041 mooreengineeringinc.com
Mail this form and a check to: The Forum, Living with Water,
R001677624

PO Box 6022, Fargo, ND 58107 or order online at theforumplus.com


PAGE 12
A FORUM
COMMUNICATIONS
SPECIAL PROJECT
SUNDAY,
FEBRUARY 5, 2012
In this April 11, 2011, photo, Woodcrest Drive in Fargo forms a peninsula, jutting into the flooding Red River.
Oakport battles
US
Red’s annual flood
OVERWHELMS
Where ‘the plough ought to be at work, the waves roll’
By Marino Eccher
Forum Communications Co.
OAKPORT TOWNSHIP, Minn. –
Jay Leitch keeps his canoe parked
on his driveway. When the Red
River – located a cozy 200 feet away
– overwhelms its banks and
surrounds his house, the boat
ferries him to the outside world.
When Leitch moved into his
Oakport home in 1992, it was
thought to be well above the 100-
year floodplain. It’s stayed safe
since then, but not without a few
close calls. This summer, he
finished work on a small dike in
his backyard, just as a precaution.
“You can’t sandbag a deck and a
patio,” he said.
It’s a common narrative up and
down the Red River Basin, where
residents have flirted with two
catastrophic floods in the past
three years and still harbor fresh
memories of the one that
devastated Grand Forks in 1997.
Spring flood fights have become
so common that when Cass County
deployed 1.5 million sandbags in
2010 to combat a river that crested
in Fargo at 37 feet – 7 feet above
major flood stage – Fargo Mayor
Dennis Walaker called the effort
“an exercise.”
For Leitch, 63, those flood fights
have been both personal – as they
must be, for neighbors of the river
– and professional. With a
background in natural resource
management and applied
economics, Leitch has been a
consultant on water issues in some
WATER
50 countries. In the 1980s, he was
SECTION 2
WHEN
Floodwaters 3 to 4 feet deep in 1997 turned Reeves Drive into a reflecting pool for this stately white house, a Grand Forks landmark.
“There’s no one jurisdiction that can look across
the basin and say, here’s what we ought to do.”
Jay Leitch, water consultant, author and former North Dakota State
professor and dean of the school’s college of business
the science adviser to the
secretary of the Army. In 1993, he
co-authored “A River Runs North,”
a book about managing the Red.
Of course, being an expert in the
field is one thing; getting decision-
makers to listen to what he has to
say is another.
“People don’t put much faith in
the local expert,” he said.
Especially when he criticizes
policy or planned development.
When Leitch helped write a report
in 1998 with a number of flood
policy recommendations, “A lot of
people said, ‘let’s use those reports
to build dikes,’ because they didn’t
want to read them,” he said.
A former North Dakota State
University professor and dean of
the school’s college of business,
Leitch taught the two most certain
things in Fargo: water and taxes.
The trouble with those topics:
Everybody has an opinion – and
plenty of people think they know
better.
“I would’ve almost rather taught
something like nuclear physics,”
he said.
Part of the challenge is getting
any kind of consensus from all the
stakeholders along the Red. The
river affects about 1,500
jurisdictions, from townships to
states to countries.
“There’s no one jurisdiction that
can look across the basin and say,
here’s what we ought to do,” he
said.
That collection of far-flung,
disparate actors puts the river at
the mercy of what Leitch calls “the
tyranny of small decisions” – the
patchwork set of policies crafted
in the best interests of individual
municipalities that ultimately
detracts from the best interests of
the basin as a whole.
He’s seen the impact of those
decisions in his own backyard,
quite literally. In 2003, he got into a
spat with a local developer who
wanted to build six houses near
his own house at 1313 40th Ave. N.
He said the land in question was in
the floodplain, and he had video
from 1997 that showed the site
under water.
The Buffalo-Red River
Watershed District agreed, but the
township board said there was no
recourse to stop the development.
The people who sold the land to the
developer accused Leitch of sour
grapes, saying he wanted to be the
last house on the block.
The homes went up. When the
river floods, Leitch says, they are
(predictably) surrounded by water.
Michael Vosburg / Forum Communications Co.
Drowning by numbers
Flooding on the Red, of course,
is hardly a new problem. As long
as there have been Red River
settlements, there has been a
struggle to keep them dry.
The worst to date came early on,
when a mammoth flood struck
settlements near the Canadian
border and what is now Winnipeg
in 1826. It remains the most potent
Red River flood on record,
discharging perhaps 40 percent
more water than the 1997 flood.
Accounts from the time paint a
picture of widespread devastation.
Residents were blindsided by
water levels that seemed to climb
without end. A Hudson’s Bay Co.
governor said the river spilled
over “to such an extent as to give
the whole country as far as the eye
could carry, the appearance of a
lake.”
Another resident wrote: “All the
arable land is now under water
and where according to the season
of the year, the plough ought to be
at work, the waves roll by the
agitation of the piercing north-
wind.”
The same journal tells of boats
working day and night to rescue
stranded settlers from their
rooftops, as the river swept away
“houses, trees and everything else
that came in its way.”
Fifteen people died in the flood,
and most everyone else in the
region was displaced.
RED: Page 13
Forum Communications Co.

The Security Building in Grand Forks still smolders two days after it was gutted by a fire that demolished much of the flooded city
center on April 19, 1997.
Subsequent settlers weren’t so
easy to deter, and in spite of a
handful of major floods through
the mid-1800s, the basin’s
population grew steadily as Fargo
and Moorhead blossomed as
transportation hubs.
The next standard-setting flood,
1897, didn’t catch residents as off-
guard as the 1826 disaster. In
March that year, The Fargo Forum
ran a story titled “The Coming
Flood,” which predicted a high
water based on 5 feet of snowpack.
A few weeks later, the forecast
came true, and most of Fargo-
Moorhead wound up submerged.
Each day, people figured the river
must have crested, only to see it
rise again the next. The highest
point in Island Park was 5 feet
underwater, and heavy equipment
was deposited on the bridge
between Fargo and Moorhead to
keep it from being washed away.
The flood left 50,000 people
homeless up and down the basin,
and set a record crest at Fargo of
40.1 feet.
Because of differences in
measurements, that mark is up for
debate, but it’s generally agreed
that the Red didn’t reach that level
again for another century.
In the interim, a handful of
lesser floods wreaked occasional
havoc on the area:
왘 In 1943, 270 residents – most of
whom lived in what’s now
considered floodplain – evacuated,
along with 111 St. John’s Hospital
patients who left after the
hospital’s heating plant flooded.
왘 In 1982, the Red crested a
record five times in one year, the
last coming as late as July 25. A
sixth was predicted but never
materialized. By today’s standards,
none were catastrophic – the
highest was 28.44 feet – but
historians say the prolonged
Cruising through the intersection of Third and Demers, a Coast Guard skiff patrols the heart of downtown Grand Forks during the
1997 flood.
RED
From Page 12
“Every once in a while, some kind of idea
comes along to develop along the riverfront.
People see it in Winnipeg, people see it down
in San Antonio – ‘why can’t we have our
river walk somewhere along the Red?’ “
Don Schwert, North Dakota State University geologist
headache prompted city planners
to begin mulling a pullback from
the river.
왘 In 1969, the city faced its worst
flood since 1897, with a crest of
37.3 feet. One of the iconic images
of the extensive (and expensive)
battle: A group of North Dakota
State University football players –
the “Red Hats,” as they were
known – rushing from site to site
to sandbag, flanked by police
escorts.
Between the Red and the
Missouri, flooding damages that
year topped $100 million.
Then, in 1997, the so-called 100-
year flood arrived right on
schedule. Grand Forks got
swamped. Damages from the Red
totaled $5 billion. Fargo and
Moorhead, with the help of
3.7 million sandbags and a late
cold spell that slowed the water’s
advance, dodged the worst of it.
“We were nothing short of
lucky,” Fargo City Engineer Mark
Bittner said the following year.
“We’re all patting ourselves on the
back about the great job we did.
But could we have handled the
kind of water other cities had?”
It didn’t take long to find out.
Twelve years later, in March 2009,
the Red set a record crest at Fargo
of 40.84 feet. This time, the crisis
was compounded by unexpected
urgency: Six days before the crest,
city leaders were told the forecast
was a foot higher and a day sooner
than anticipated. Everyone from
students to Cass County Jail
inmates mobilized to fight the
water.
At the time, Moorhead Mayor
Mark Voxland recalled fighting a
sense of desperation as well.
“I went home that night and I
felt, ‘How can we beat this flood,
when every day they raise the
crest a foot?’”
Pulling back
In spite of the risks, convincing
people to give the Red a wide berth
isn’t always easy. The appeal of its
banks dates back to the earliest
days of settlement here, when the
trees of the riverfront offered both
a physical barrier against the
wind and a psychological barrier
against the vastness of the open
prairie, said Mark Peihl of the
Clay County Historical Society.
“It took the people a long time,
like 100 years, to figure out right
along the river is not a good place
to build houses,” he said.
Don Schwert, a North Dakota
State University geologist and
expert on the Red, said historically
it’s been difficult for the cities to
come to terms with the fact that
development near the river – an
economic boon elsewhere – is
problematic here.
Forum Communications Co.
PAGE 13
A FORUM
COMMUNICATIONS
SPECIAL PROJECT
SUNDAY,
FEBRUARY 5, 2012
FARGO
TOP FLOODS
1) 40.84 ft on 03/28/2009
(2) 39.72 ft on 04/18/1997
(3) 39.10 ft on 04/07/1897
(4) 38.75 ft on 04/09/2011
(5) 37.34 ft on 04/15/1969
(6) 37.13 ft on 04/05/2006
(7) 36.99 ft on 03/21/2010
(8) 36.69 ft on 04/14/2001
(9) 35.39 ft on 04/09/1989
(10) 34.93 ft on 04/19/1979
“Every once in a while, some
kind of idea comes along to GRAND FORKS
develop along the riverfront,” he
TOP FLOODS
said. “People see it in Winnipeg,
people see it down in San Antonio (1) 54.35 ft on 04/22/1997
– ‘why can’t we have our river (2) 50.20 ft on 04/10/1897
walk somewhere along the Red?’” (3) 49.87 ft on 04/14/2011
Schwert, who has studied the (4) 49.33 ft on 04/01/2009
river for three decades, has seen (5) 48.81 ft on 04/26/1979
his share of mind-boggling flood
(6) 48.00 ft on 04/18/1882
policy decisions. In 1989, when he
lived on Oak Street in Fargo, he (7) 47.93 ft on 04/06/2006
watched in disbelief as volunteers (8) 46.09 ft on 03/20/2010
fought tooth and nail to keep water (9) 45.93 ft on 04/21/1996
out of the El Zagal golf course. (10) 45.73 ft on 04/11/1978
“I’m watching this tremendous
Source: National Weather Service
effort to save the golf courses from
being flooded, to save the
floodplain from being flooded,” he
said. “Those of us who are
appreciative of the natural aspect
of the river think this is lunacy.”
But it’s getting better. Both cities
have chipped away at flood-prone
neighborhoods over the decades,
and have bought out hundreds of
low-lying homes since 1997. Fargo
and Moorhead have bought out
hundreds of low-lying homes since
1997, and tightened flood
protection in at-risk
neighborhoods.
After staving off disaster year
in and year out for the past decade
and a half, Fargo and Moorhead
have taken steps to accommodate
the river.
But those steps are only as good
as they are permanent, Leitch
said. And as he learned in his own
neighborhood, people have short
memories.
“We need to keep reminding
people,” he said. “One of these
years, the wet cycle will be over,
and we’ll be in a dry cycle again,
and then we’ll forget all about it
and crowd the river.”
Marino Eccher reports
for The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead.
Forum Communications Co.

PAGE 14
A FORUM
COMMUNICATIONS
SPECIAL PROJECT
SUNDAY,
FEBRUARY 5, 2012
Graphic by Troy Becker Rural Municipality of St. Laurent (Man.) Councilman Derek Johnson surveys the damage caused by the spring 2011 flood of Lake
Forum Communications Co. Manitoba, a 100 mile-long lake an hour northwest of Winnipeg. A wet spring combined with additional water diverted from the
Assiniboine River created a flood called by officials as a 1-in-400-year flood.
Devastation
north of
US
the border
Winds, high water wipe out parts
OVERWHELMS
of Lake Manitoba’s cottage country
By Brad Dokken
Forum Communications Co.
ST. LAURENT, Man. – On the
good days, Derek Johnson says,
Lake Manitoba is a sleeping giant,
a freshwater ocean 100 miles long
and 30 miles wide that seems to
extend forever from his beachfront
home about an hour north of
Winnipeg.
“The lake doesn’t look like it
could hurt a fly some days,” said
Johnson, 41, a financial adviser
who dipped his feet into the waters
of local politics in 2010 when he
successfully ran for a seat on the
Rural Municipality of St. Laurent’s
council. “I was born here, I grew up
here, and I like it here.
“It’s very peaceful, very serene.”
Beware, though, when the big
lake shows its ugly side.
That’s what happened one
fateful Tuesday afternoon in late
May, and life for Johnson and
hundreds of other home and
cottage owners along the
southeast shore of Lake Manitoba
hasn’t been the same.
And it won’t be anytime soon.
“All I can say is, thank God we got
everybody evacuated without a
single death,” Johnson said. “Boat
rescues, helicopter rescues. They
had to drive some heavy equipment
where fire and RCMP (Royal
Canadian Mounted Police) couldn’t
go in.
“We used whatever we had, and
luckily, we had no deaths,” he said.
Rough spring
WATER
The spring of 2011 already had
been bad. All seven of the
drainages that enter Lake
Manitoba from as far away as
Alberta were flooding, Johnson
said. The Portage Diversion, a
man-made drain built in the early
1970s to divert water from the
Assiniboine River into Lake
Manitoba to protect Winnipeg, was
flowing beyond its capacity.
There was little choice: The
Assiniboine had swollen to 54,000
cubic feet per second where it
entered the diversion at Portage la
Prairie, Johnson said – three
times the river’s downstream
capacity.
Johnson said the rural
municipality, similar to a U.S.
county, had learned early in May
that the province was going to
divert the extra water into Lake
SECTION 2
Manitoba.
WHEN
Officials were calling it a 1-in-400-
year flood.
That meant homes and property
along the RM’s 15½ miles of
beaches would be at substantial
risk from northwest winds.
Sandbag dikes and other
protections were hastily erected.
“We had three weeks to prepare
that the water was coming up,” he
said.
By May 31, Johnson said, Lake
Manitoba was at an elevation of
815.5 feet above sea level – 1½ feet
above flood stage and 3 to 5 feet
higher than the province’s
preferred levels.
Calm before the storm
Johnson said the southeast end of
Lake Manitoba was calm when a
wind warning for the northwest
side of the lake was issued about 11
a.m. May 31.
There wasn’t a breeze, but still
the lake was rising from the storm
brewing 100 miles to the northwest.
The reason: a phenomenon known
as “fetch,” which Johnson likens to
water sloshing in a bathtub; the
more it sloshes, the more the
momentum builds.
The sloshing is even more
pronounced on shallow Lake
Manitoba, which has a maximum
depth of 23 feet.
The wind started mid-afternoon,
and RM officials called for a
mandatory evacuation of the area
and its 900 lakeside homes and
cabins. Johnson, who rushed home
from the RM office about 4:30 p.m.
to fetch a few belongings and hitch
up his camper, said he watched the
lake rise.
“From the 15 minutes I was
home, the water was coming up an
inch a minute,” he said.
When the gale hit, it came
roaring out of the northwest at 60
mph. Johnson said the waves were
10 to 12 feet high, and the fetch
pushed the lake 5 feet higher than it
was that morning.
The sleeping giant had awakened.
“It made property disappear,”
Johnson said.
Lingering disaster
On a sunny Thursday in late
August, Lake Manitoba again was a
sleeping giant as Johnson led two
visitors on a tour of the
devastation. Security still manned
each of the seven entry points to
the beachfront properties, which
remained under mandatory
evacuation.
The lake, which peaked at 817.5
feet above sea level in mid-July and
stayed there for 10 days, finally was
receding.
South Twin Beach, which was in
the direct path of the northwest
wind, took the hardest hit. The
waves swamped roads, demolished
concrete retaining walls and swept
homes and cabins off their
foundations, in some cases washing
them away completely.
“It’s as devastating, if not more
so, than a hurricane,” Johnson
said. “And this was only with 60
mph winds.
“We had a 1-in-100-year wind
event on top of a 1-in-400-year flood
event,” he said. “The combination
of the two is what did us in.”
Nearly three months later,
backyard lawns appeared green at
first glance. A closer look revealed
the green was stagnant floodwater
covered with duckweed and algae.
Gas jugs, septic tanks, water
heaters and boathouses were
strewn everywhere.
“It looks like a junkyard,”
Johnson said. “You can’t see any of
our beautiful beaches.”
Scott Millar, 64, had made the trip
from Winnipeg for the day to survey
his property. Stopping to talk,
Millar said the cottage and land had
been in his family 65 years.
His voice quivered with emotion
when he talked about the
province’s decision to divert more
water into the lake to save
Winnipeg.
“They sacrificed us is what they
Photos by John Stennes / Forum Communications Co.
In late May 2011, Lake Manitoba stood 3 to 5 feet above normal
and by July, it had risen another 2 feet.
did,” said Millar, semi-retired after
a long career at a Winnipeg food-
processing plant. “They threw us
under the bus, and we’re stuck
with it.”
Millar said his cottage probably
can be fixed, but it’s going to be
costly.
Where, he wonders, is the
compensation?
“Buy me out,” he said. “This is a
big part of our retirement, and it’s
gone. It’s worthless. I need to be
dealt with now.”
‘Mass confusion’
Johnson said he hears similar
frustration in his position with the
RM. The government has various
disaster programs for permanent
residents, but there’s less recourse
for cottage owners.
“It’s pretty much mass
confusion,” Johnson said. “People
don’t know where to go for funding.
There are so many different boards
people are confused where to go to
access different programs.
“They saved so many homes and
billions of dollars from Portage
east to Winnipeg,” he said. “But
bring out the checkbook and help
these people.”
The local economy and tax base
also took a hit, Johnson said. With
beaches evacuated and off-limits,
no one was going to the hardware
store, eating out or buying beer.
At the same time, RM
expenditures soared. Johnson said
the RM’s check run just for July
was $4.5 million – an amount equal
to their budget for 4½ years.
The government covered the
RM’s property taxes from May 31 to
Dec. 31, he said, but bills are
relentless, and property that’s
either gone or damaged beyond
repair is worth a lot less than it was
before the storm.
“Our RM is in bad shape” for
2012, Johnson said. “We’ll be
reassessing everything, and we’ll
have our work cut out for us doing
our budget. Lowering the
assessments really hurts us.”
Johnson, whose property is on
Johnson Beach farther north,
escaped the worst of the winds, and
he was able to protect his home
with sandbags. The house never
lost power, but his patio was buried
under 3 feet of sand, and his septic
system inundated.
By late August, Johnson had
spent every day since May 31 living
in a 27-foot RV, renting a separate
camper for his teenage son and
daughter.
“It’s definitely been interesting,
he said. “Let’s put it this way – the
novelty of camping wears off
pretty quickly.”
He also put his full-time job on
hold to deal with constituents.
Quite a burden, that, for a
position that pays $325 a month.
“Every time I meet someone who
voted for me, I kick them,” Johnson
joked.
Gradually, Johnson and others
whose property wasn’t devastated
are putting their lives back
together. By early October, he was
making plans to move home –
against the advice of other local
officials.
“There has to be a time when we
can get our life back,” he said.
For now, Johnson and others are
putting their hopes on an outlet
being constructed to direct more
water during the winter months
from the east side of Lake
Manitoba through Lake St. Martin
and the Dauphin River into Lake
Winnipeg.
The outlet was supposed to have
been part of the Portage Diversion
project in the early 1970s. There’s
been lots of finger-pointing at the
current government for not acting
sooner, Johnson said, but previous
administrations also ignored the
project.
“They’ve been playing Russian
roulette with Lake Manitoba for
years,” he said. “This time, they
lost.”
Brad Dokken reports
for The Grand Forks Herald.

Homes in the Southport area of Bismarck are diked against the rising Missouri River in June 2011.
A FINAL FLOOD
By Chuck Haga
Forum Communications Co.
As he farms by the Wild Rice
River near Kindred, N.D., lovely
country where he was born 64
years ago and has worked the land
since 1967, Jerome Nipstad frets
about water: spring floods, summer
floods, but mostly the water that
may come with a Red River
diversion project designed to
protect Fargo.
“They’ve got me under 5 or 6 feet
of water,” Nipstad said on a bright
and blessedly dry summer day,
citing projections in a diversion
study.
“I don’t think there’s anything we
do that’s not affected by this
uncertainty,” he said, as neighbor
farmers Trana Rogne, 67, and Todd
Trappen, 52, nodded. “We sit in
tractors that steer themselves, and
this is all we think about.”
In Burlington, Pete McLaughlin,
48, walked through his gutted house
after the Mouse River returned to
its banks last summer. The water
was gone, but now he was in the
way of Burlington’s determination
to not let this happen again.
“I’m supposedly being bought
out,” he said. “The new dike they’re
putting in will go right through …
here. It will go right through my
living room.”
In the Sheyenne River Valley
north of Valley City, just below
Bald Hill Dam and a brim-full Lake
Ashtabula, Pete and Lori Paulson
fret, too. They fear new discharges
from Devils Lake into the Sheyenne
River will force them from land
they’ve loved and farmed for nearly
four decades.
“We felt terrible about Minot,”
Lori Paulson said. “We feel bad
about Devils Lake, too. They don’t
know what to do with all their
water. But we don’t want it.”
From the Red River and its
tributaries to Devils Lake, the
Sheyenne and the Mouse – and the
Missouri River, which bruised
Bismarck-Mandan last year and,
more than a half century ago,
forced a mass migration as it
fattened into Lake Sakakawea –
people are always in the way.
Whether their homes are swept
away by floodwaters or by society’s
efforts to fight a flood or prevent
new ones, people are always in the
way: people young and old, rich and
poor; families, neighborhoods,
communities.
On the Mouse River,
grieving a home
Pete McLaughlin’s ranch-style
house was set among oak, ash and
box elder trees on Cherry Street in
Burlington, about 8 miles
northwest of Minot.
For 19 years, since he had it built
next to his father’s house in 1992, it
had been home to McLaughlin and
his wife, Carma, and eventually
five children.
“I bought the land, an acre and a
half, from Dad for $10,” he said.
“I’ve lived in the neighborhood all
my life, and I’m living on land
that’s been in my family for 60
years.
“I liked living on the river. It was
just nice and quiet here, with a mix
of young families and people who
had been here forever. If neighbors
were outside building a deck or
something, you’d go over and help
them.”
As he prepared to walk through
the house one more time last
“We felt terrible about Minot. We feel bad about Devils Lake, too.
They don’t know what to do with all their water. But we don’t want it.”
Keeping the water out of town means
creating permanent lakes in the country
summer before it was demolished
to make way for Burlington’s new
permanent dike, McLaughlin
pointed to one of those neighbor
decks, lying at a sharp tilt now in
the barren, crusted landscape that
had been his front yard.
“I don’t know where it came
from,” he said, shaking his head.
“It just floated in here.”
He was deeply invested in this
place, and not just financially.
“About five years ago, my wife
and I ripped off the roof to the
garage and built a master suite up
there,” he said. “It took a while, but
it was well worth it. We had a
master bedroom, a bath, a sitting
room. We did it all ourselves. We
spent $13,000 doing something a
contractor would have charged
$50,000 to do.”
A woodworked sign had hung
above the garage door: “The
McLaughlins.” When the flood
came in June, the water covered a
third of Burlington and reached a
height of 5½ feet on McLaughlin’s
main floor, lapping against the
proud sign above the garage door.
“A city cop took a video of that,
and he showed it to me,” he said.
When the water receded, he tore
out ruined cabinets, sopped carpets
and doughy Sheetrock, working
around his job as a technician with
Midcontinent Communications. He
and his wife moved into a camper
parked outside his brother-in-law’s
place in Minot.
“Before the city came up with the
buyout plans, we were going to
remodel here,” he said. “I was
going to do it all myself. We had the
new bedroom and bathroom
upstairs, and I would start with
getting the rewiring done and then
live up there while we worked on it.
“I had the house 80 percent gutted
out when I stopped because of the
potential buyout. It made no sense
to continue.”
As he walked through the main
floor, the walls and flooring
stripped, he paused at what had
been his “Harley Room,” fitted with
a bar and painted orange and black
in honor of the motorcycle
company. A painted slogan, “Live,
Laugh, Love,” remained over the
party-room door.
“I’m a Harley guy,” McLaughlin
said. “We had one good party there,
and then it was gone. But I must
have built a good bar. See? It didn’t
even move.”
When he learned how badly the
house had been hit, he rushed to
his wife. “I didn’t want her to see
the house on some video on
Facebook or TV, so I went to her,”
he said. “She broke down.”
He walked into another room,
empty and scraped bare.
“This room here is where we had
all the pictures of our children and
grandchildren,” he said. “Carma
walked in here and broke down
again.”
Several weeks after the flood,
cuts and ravines showed where the
dike behind his house had failed,
and bloated, busted sandbags
remained scattered out front.
Trees, their branches broken and
leaves turned a dull brown, lay
about near the river, where new
bars of silt had formed and, a half-
block away, the approach to a
bridge was washed out.
Lori Paulson, who farms with her husband, Pete, north of Valley City, N.D.
Anyone who witnessed the flood
of 1997 and its aftermath in Grand
Forks would recognize the sights,
sounds and smells of what had
been McLaughlin’s neighborhood.
Flood junk lined the street: a
toilet, an electric fan, heaps of
ripped insulation, a copy of Taste
of Home Magazine, ruined sofas,
stoves and refrigerators. Homes lay
off their foundations. Boulevard
trees leaned with eerie uniformity,
showing the force and direction of
the water, and nearly all the grass
was gone. Mobile homes, once lined
up straight in a wooded courtyard,
lay at the odd angles where the
river’s current had pushed them.
And it was unnaturally quiet.
“It’s heart-breaking,”
McLaughlin said, walking along
“the little circle,” a roundabout
street where traffic used to be light
enough that he and other
neighborhood kids could race their
bicycles.
“I feel bad about young people
who just got in here,” he said.
“They’re not going to be able to pay
off their mortgages. What are they
going to do?”
The city is planning new
housing developments, hoping to
keep the McLaughlins and people
like them in Burlington. But that
will take time.
“I have to find a place to store my
stuff,” McLaughlin said. “I’ve
called to Mohall, Bottineau – every
place within a 75-mile radius –
looking for storage space.”
He was offered close to $150,000 in
the buyout and received an
additional $30,000 from the Federal
Emergency Management Agency.
“But with prices what they are now
in the area, we’re looking to get
into a smaller space and pay twice
what my house is priced at,” he
said. “That’s the case anywhere in
this area. I’d love to stay right
where I’m at, but …”
He is disappointed and uncertain,
but he does not come off sounding
angry or bitter that he was in the
way of the water. He accepts that he
and his family and their house
were in the way of recovery.
“I have nothing bad to say about
the city,” he said. “They fought hard
to fight the flood, and they always
let us know what they were
planning. I’ve got nothing bad to say
about FEMA, either. The inspectors
came in and did their jobs. And the
dike, I accept the fact they’re doing
it to protect the rest of the city.”
He was reassured, he said, by the
way his neighbors and the entire
region responded to the disaster.
“There was no hesitation in
people about helping other people,”
he said. “There were 4,100 homes
affected in Minot, but only 300
people went to shelters. FEMA was
amazed that so many people could
be taken in by family and friends.
“Having to leave … it hurts me. It
hurts everyone here who’s affected
by it. It’s hard to pull up everything
you’ve known and try something
else. But it supposedly will make it
so the guy across the street and
other people will be protected.”
On the Missouri,
a historic sacrifice
There had been talk of taming
the Missouri for decades when
major flooding occurred in 1943 –
John Stennes / Forum Communications Co.
PAGE 15
A FORUM
COMMUNICATIONS
SPECIAL PROJECT
SUNDAY,
FEBRUARY 5, 2012
aggravated, as in 2011, by heavy
rains and greater than expected
runoff from the Rocky Mountains.
The flood that year swamped many
farms, towns and cities downriver,
including Omaha, Neb.
The response was to build a
series of dams and reservoirs that
would hold back water at times of
heavy flows, providing protection
for downstream states and
irrigation, recreation and other
benefits for North Dakota.
But that put people in the way.
Construction of Garrison Dam
began in 1947, and the rising waters
of the reservoir forced the removal
of thousands of people from more
than 460,000 acres of wooded
bottomland. A third of that land
was home to Mandan, Hidatsa and
Arikara Indians, the Three
Affiliated Tribes of the Fort
Berthold Indian Reservation.
The tribes had long lived on this
land, and the Mandan famously
had sheltered and arguably saved
the Lewis and Clark expedition of
1804-06.
This was the land left to the
Indians through the Fort Laramie
Treaty of 1866. Eight small villages
with such evocative names as Shell
Creek, Beaver Creek, Red Butte,
Lucky Mound and Charging Eagle
had lain in the bluff-sheltered
valley, connected by the muddy and
sometimes troublesome river that
angled past old stands of
cottonwood trees. As the reservoir
filled, the villages disappeared.
“I grew up over there, under that
water,” Malcolm Wolf said,
pointing to an arm of Lake
Sakakawea as he drove along N.D.
Highway 23 in summer 2010,
guiding a reporter to an Indian-
owned and operated oil well.
Hundreds of people at Fort
Berthold today can start their
personal stories that way: “I grew
up over there, under that water.”
Born long after the reservoir
filled, Tessa Sandstrom grew up in
the area around New Town, the
“new town” created by people who
had to leave old Sanish, Van Hook,
Elbowoods and other flooded river
towns. In a thesis prepared for her
bachelor’s degree through the
University of North Dakota’s
Honors Program in 2006, she
confessed she had known nothing
of the sacrifices until she started
her research.
“Some of the state’s richest
farmland, rangeland, mineral
resources, and 370,000 acres of
‘river-bottom ecology’ would be
given over to the Garrison
Reservoir,” she wrote.
“But what the residents of the
valley would be asked to give up
were not only lands and homes but
their entire livelihood and the
places where they had grown up
and built their lives – the places
where their fondest memories were
made.”
Sandstrom quoted a
contemporary observer, a writer for
the Minot Daily News:
“There is, of course, no way to
measure the heartaches of many of
the several thousands of people
who are required to move from
chosen homes, even (though)
humble, and from a way of life that
was satisfactory to them,” Robert
Cory wrote. “But that is part of the
sacrifice and part of the
contribution North Dakota is
making to allow the Garrison Dam
project to come into existence.”
FLOODING: Page 16

PAGE 16 FLOODING
From Page 15
The contribution was made
A FORUM through tears. In a famous
COMMUNICATIONS photograph of the time, George
SPECIAL PROJECT Gillette, then chairman of the
Three Affiliated Tribes, stands
SUNDAY, with federal officials in
FEBRUARY 5, 2012 Washington, D.C., on May 20, 1948,
as contracts are signed
transferring 155,000 acres of the
reservation’s best agricultural
land. It is a celebratory moment,
but Gillette appears to be weeping.
“It is hard to explain the law of
eminent domain to people like that,
with whom the government has
made a ‘treaty,’” Cory wrote. “This
broken pledge – however justifiable
it may be in the light of changes
unforeseen – also must be weighed
and added to the loss side of the
balance sheet.”
On the Sheyenne,
a home for ever?
The Sheyenne River Valley is a
narrow but rich mosaic of
habitats: prairie, farmland, upland
forest and riparian bottomlands, a
scenic preserve supporting ducks,
wild turkeys, hawks, bald eagles
and sharp-tailed grouse. Stands of
basswood, American elm, green
oak and burr oak mark the river
and shelter the wildlife – and the
occasional canoeist.
The U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers finished work on
Baldhill Dam in 1951, and the river
eventually became a 27-mile-long
reservoir and playground, a linear
oasis. About 45 feet at its deepest,
Lake Ashtabula has a surface area
of 5,500 acres.
About two miles below the dam,
Pete and Lori Paulson farm 2,500
US
acres bordered by the river and
bluffs to the east, just beyond the
road that meanders from the dam
south to Valley City. They run 100
cow-calf pairs on grazing land and
raise wheat, soybeans, corn for
feed, alfalfa and sunflowers. Pete’s
father, George, has a place on the
farm, and an uncle, 80, also helps
with the farm work part time.
OVERWHELMS
George Paulson is 90. “Looking
out and seeing all that water this
spring was really hard on him,”
Lori Paulson, 51, said. “He said he
had never seen water like that
before.”
When the 2011 floodwaters
subsided, Lori Paulson defiantly
reclaimed her yard by planting
hundreds of snapdragons, salvia,
impatiens and alyssum plants. Told
that it almost seemed she was
flower-diking against the river, she
smiled. “I guess I’d better get busy
then behind the house, too,” she
said.
Pete Paulson, 53, farmed. It’s
what he does.
“Dad’s home farm is two miles
down the road,” he said, folding his
work-weathered hands at the
kitchen table. “Mom’s home farm
is three miles north. We’ve been on
this farm since 1972. My father
always wanted a farm on the river.
Now he doesn’t want to live here.
He’s old, and he doesn’t want to get
flooded out.”
George Paulson may move into
Valley City. But it will be a sad day.
“When you’re a farmer, the farm
is all that matters,” his son said.
“Farmers are emotionally attached
to their land. You grow up here,
work here and probably expect to
die here. It’s your home, your life,
your livelihood. You don’t build it
to sell it and make money. You
build it to be forever. I’ve never had
a paying job off the farm. I started
working when I was 10, and it’s all
I’ve ever done. I don’t want to do
anything else.
“We don’t take three days off a
year. This year, we went to
Minneapolis once to see a Twins
WATER
game. It was a good time. But I
hated being away,” he said.
Pete Paulson’s parents struggled,
he said, raising eight children on
their small farm. His wife’s parents
are farmers near Oriska, about 20
miles to the east.
“There were tough years, but
we’re doing fine now,” Pete
Paulson said.
Except for all the water.
“Usually the river here is a
trickle, and you can walk across it
in late summer,” Pete Paulson said
back in August. “Until the 2009 and
2011 floods, we never had a sump
pump in our basement. We had
three this spring, and one is still
going.”
As persistent heavy rains filled
the reservoir last spring and
summer, the Army Corps of
Engineers raised discharge levels
SECTION 2
WHEN
from Lake Ashtabula. “Water was
coming over our driveway, and we
sandbagged standing in water in
mid-April. For three weeks, the
yard was full of water. We had the
cows up in the hills, calving.”
In 2009, they had water over the
yard for the first time. “And this
year, it was 2 or 3 inches higher
than in 2009,” Paulson said.
Lori Paulson shakes her head
when she recalls the 2009 flood.
“They said that was a once-in-a-
lifetime event, and it happened
again two years later! We had to
park cars by the road and come in
and out by tractor for three weeks.
And it was a 40-mile trip to town,
instead of the usual eight miles.”
“We were interviewed three
times on TV,” her husband said. “I
said that’s not a good sign. It means
Sandbag Central in Bismarck was going full throttle in spring 2011.
“If we’re going to take their water, we need to have
some say. As it is, Richland County is to be a holding
pond for Fargo, and we don’t think that’s fair.”
Trana Rogne, a farmer who lives east of Kindred, N.D.
you’re either a criminal or you’ve
been flooded.”
Now, with talk about new outlets
from Devils Lake adding more
water – maybe 3,000 cubic feet per
second more at critical times – they
fear for their future.
“The cows we can move,” Pete
Paulson said. “But the house is 110
years old; I don’t think we could
move it. And we’ve put a fortune
into it.”
They’ve considered building a
permanent dike to protect the
farmstead, or seeking more local
control over releases from Bald
Hill Dam. Others have suggested
building more dams on the
Sheyenne and a tributary, Bald Hill
Creek. “But that would take 20
years,” Pete Paulson said, “and it
wouldn’t be enough to help us.”
Another dam near Cooperstown
“would flood more farms,” he said.
Others along the river have
organized and tried to influence
what’s done at Devils Lake,
including a group called People to
Save the Sheyenne. “It’s a good
group – people who are worried
about water quality,” Paulson said,
but he had not joined.
“I’m not angry,” he said. “It’s just
nature. I know that farmers up
there by Devils Lake have lost land.
We’ve had crops underwater here,
but we haven’t protested the Devils
Lake thing. We’re not protesters or
complainers. I just wish we could
go back to normal rainfall.”
As a farmer, he has always had to
pay close attention to weather. But
as this wet cycle continues, it
becomes more and more
frustrating.
“You think about it every day,” he
said. “Every time they say it’s
going to rain, we hope it rains
south of us, not north of us.
“We were always dry when I was
a kid. It seemed to hardly ever rain,
and an inch of rain in early August
was a blessing. It perked up your
pastures and got the hay growing.
Now it just doesn’t quit, and all
this water has to go somewhere.
Right now, it’s going right by us.”
On the Wild Rice,
a plea for a culture
Farmers must deal with
uncertainty all the time: the
weather, the markets, the decisions
of a host of local, state and federal
policymakers and bureaucrats.
But as they sat and talked near
the great old burr oak that presides
over Trana Rogne’s farmstead east
of Kindred, three farming
neighbors agreed that Fargo’s
diversion plan leaves them mired
in uncertainty.
“We’re in limbo,” Jerome
Nipstad said. “We don’t know
what’s going to happen. Do I have
any interest in planting trees in a
certain spot? Do I build dikes
around my fuel tanks? That’s
expensive. Do I spend that money
now and in 10 years it’s gone?
“Our cemetery, where my father
and grandparents are buried, will
be flooded. That’s the North
Pleasant Cemetery, at the former
site of the Hickson Lutheran
Church. What to do about that?
“I don’t think there’s anything
we do that’s not affected by this
uncertainty,” he said.
Nipstad was born on a farm by
the Wild Rice River about three
miles from the Rogne place. Leslie
Rogne, Trana’s father, was his 4-H
leader. Nipstad’s wife, Sandy, grew
up in nearby Kindred.
He started farming in 1967. “I
farmed with my dad until he died,
and then I took over,” he said. Now
his son, Scott, 41, farms with him.
They raise wheat, soybeans and
sugar beets on about 4,500 acres.
Todd Toppen, 52, lives a mile east
of Rogne on the Wild Rice River, on
a farm his parents bought in the
mid-1950s after leaving a place the
family had homesteaded a few
miles to the west.
Toppen and his wife, LeAnn, 51,
have raised three children on the
farm, and all have a stake in what
happens as the region deals with
too much water; they are all in the
way. Daughter Erin, 27, is married
to a farmer by Kindred and teaches
music in a West Fargo elementary
school. Daughter Leslie, 25, works
in flood-prone Fargo. Son Kyle, 20,
a sophomore at UND, hopes to take
over the farm someday.
These neighbors and others in
southern Cass County and
Richland County organized last
year to challenge the diversion
plan they saw coming out of Fargo,
arguing that planning should have
included more people from a
broader area. They objected that
promoters didn’t include loss of
agricultural production in
projected impacts, and they said
the cost of relocations and
acquisitions was underestimated.
Beyond economics, they faulted
the plan for not recognizing the
social and cultural impact of
turning a broad area south and
west of Fargo into a holding pond.
“Fargo feels they’re in control
and they can do as they please,”
Nipstad said. “They want future
growth to the south. We feel they
could dike up more green space
and remove houses along the river
in Fargo, just like Grand Forks
did.”
Rogne said that Fargo should use
the floodplain just to the city’s
south for water storage at times of
flooding, “instead of draining it to
build houses.” Instead, he said,
“they’re moving the flood onto
their neighbors. In the spring,
they’ll hold the floodwaters south
of Fargo and pond the water on all
these farms: 54,000 acres flooded.
And flooding from the Sheyenne
would meet up with it.”
Toppen said, “It’s a basinwide
problem that deserves a basinwide
solution.”
Leah Rogne, Trana’s sister, also
has jumped into the fight. A
professor of sociology at
Minnesota State University,
Mankato, she filed a detailed
statement of opposition to the
diversion plan with the Corps of
Engineers in June.
The area that is to become a
holding area for floodwaters “is a
rural area that, after decades of
declining social and economic
infrastructure in other parts of
rural America, has established a
level of social and economic
health, viability and equilibrium,”
she wrote.
“The removal of ‘hundreds or
thousands’ of residents and the
relocation of farm operations
threaten the health of all these
communities. … No project as
radical as this one should move
forward without community
studies that assess the impact of
the proposed changes.”
In a flier prepared by a group
called the MnDak Upstream
Coalition, people opposed to the
diversion project as designed
conceded that “there is no silver
bullet” for dealing with the very
real threat to Fargo-Moorhead. “All
valley residents need to cooperate
in basinwide planning for
reasonable solutions at a
reasonable cost,” it states, with
“alternatives that don’t require one
area to be destroyed in order to
benefit another.”
Trana Rogne is a member of the
coalition. Kyle Toppen works on
the group’s Web page.
Rogne left the area in 1966 for
college in California. He raised his
family there, but in 2000 he and his
wife, Gail, returned to the home
farm.
“Mom and Daddy needed
someone to take care of them,” he
said. “And it’s a nice place, a
John Stennes / Forum Communications Co.
familiar place to come back to.”
He rents out the farmland, 160
acres, to neighbors who raise
beans and wheat. The spacious
house he shares with his mother,
Katherine, 97, is surrounded by a
small forest of hackberry, ash and
oak, lorded over by the magnificent
burr oak his father planted in 1930.
Rogne’s grandfather, Peter, a
Norwegian immigrant,
homesteaded the land in the 1880s.
Nipstad said he’s planning to
retire in a few years. He has a dike
around his farmstead now, which
has held out the flooding Wild Rice
River every year, but the diversion
may force an exit before he’s ready.
“They say they will relocate
you,” he said. “But where?”
Toppen said he waited 25 or 30
years for other farmers to retire so
he could obtain the land he farms.
He could protect his farmstead
with dikes, but he doesn’t want to
have to haul equipment for miles to
get at new land. “It’s awfully nice
to farm around where you live,” he
said. “And when you’re talking
about flooding six miles to the
north and eight miles to the east,
there’s not a lot of high spots.”
The MnDak Upstream Coalition
was formed in April and by
summer had up to 200 members
meeting monthly. A steering
committee met weekly. Other
groups organized among
homeowners in Oxbow, Hickson
and other small towns south of
Fargo.
“This project was planned by
people who benefit from this plan,”
Trana Rogne said. “They didn’t ask
us about it. They only told us about
it when they told us we would be
flooded out.”
The plan was designed by the FM
Metro Study Group, which
included representatives from the
city of Fargo and Cass County.
“We’ve asked if we could start a
new study group, to have
everybody at the table,” Rogne said
in August, but they hadn’t heard a
response.
“If we’re going to take their
water, we need to have some say,”
he said. “As it is, Richland County
is to be a holding pond for Fargo,
and we don’t think that’s fair.”
Toppen said Fargo was wrong to
continue developing into the
floodplain, including building the
new Davies High School there.
“None of us have ever done
anything that stupid,” he said.
“Fargo knew they were putting
Davies High in a low spot,” Rogne
said. “They did it to drive growth
there. They seem quite cavalier
about the impacts to their
neighbors. If the extreme event
anticipated by the plan occurred,
the diversion would flood out
Kindred, Davenport and other
towns. All you’d have left is Fargo
and the valley.
“We’re not saying we can’t
handle some water here. We’re
already handling water. But to buy
us all out on the 0.02 chance of a
500-year flood is wrong.”
There is pretty country here,
these residents say, and history
that spans generations – with more
on the way.
“People come into my yard and
say, ‘God, this is beautiful!’”
Nipstad said. “I have a 13-year-old
granddaughter who comes to visit
and says, ‘This is where I want to
live.’ It’s a 60-year-old house, and
she says it’s her favorite house. I
joke about selling it as lake
property. I could guarantee that
every spring there will be water all
around it.”
Kyle Toppen was home from
UND and working at a farm
equipment dealership last summer.
“Before I started at the
dealership, I think the chances that
I’d go back to the farm were maybe
50-50,” he said. “But as I worked
there, I missed it. That’s when I
realized I wanted to farm. I didn’t
realize how much I enjoyed doing
it until I wasn’t doing it.
“I would love to go back and farm
after college. But this diversion
plan has created a lot of
uncertainty.”
Chuck Haga reports for The Grand Forks Herald.