Question

Describe a
disaster that
happened in your
country​

Answer 1

In March 1997, I bought a house in Grand Forks, North Dakota, right along the Red River of the North (differentiated from the Red River in Texas, much more famous.) We moved in, and in April, took a vacation to Disney World for a week.

A few days after we returned from Florida, we had a pretty bad blizzard, the eighth of the 1996–97 winter season, named “Hannah” by the Grand Forks Herald newspaper. Preceded by freezing rain, the blizzard knocked out power to a lot of the city, including my house… we huddled in the family room, using the wood fireplace for both heat and cooking.

A few days later, spring hit, with temperatures in the 60s.

Eight blizzards, high temperatures, and a river that flows north are not a good combination, as 1997 was about to prove. The National Weather Service predicted that the river would reach 49 feet, the highest it had ever been.

As the city had done numerous times in the past, sandbags were produced, en masse, by the city, and distributed along the banks of the river. Pretty much everyone in the town turned out, at various locations, to form lines of human labor, throwing sandbag after sandbag, in an effort to fend back the ever rising river. I remember being at a huge house, just south of mine, where the owner brought in a catered lunch for volunteers, and at a low lying house, trying to firm up a sandbag levy that was already holding back six feet of river water.

Later that day, the city announced that the Riverside and Central Park neighbourhoods were being evacuated — both were along the river, low lying, and within a few hours, were inundated by the Red.

That night, I was scheduled for dike patrol in my neighbourhood, starting at 3AM. About a half hour after I started walking along the sandbag wall, looking for leaks, the National Guard came through the streets in Humvees, with loudspeakers blaring “Get out! This area is under mandatory evacuation, effective immediately!”

I woke up my six year old daughter, told her to pick a few stuffed animal friends to take with her, with the knowledge that anything left behind might be gone for good, grabbed the cat, stuffed it in a carrier, and left.

The next few days are a bit of a blur. Along with 50,000 other residents, we were exiled. Some found shelter with friends or family (as we did, about 60 miles away,) others were put up in common areas at the Grand Forks Air Force Base, some left the area entirely, never to return.

The day after we left, downtown Grand Forks burned, as an electrical fire started and, with six feet of water in the streets, the fire department was largely helpless to fight it.

I returned to my home a few days later, to find five feet of water in my finished basement (a result of the sewer system backing up through my washing machine drain — the river stopped about ten feet from the house, which was built on higher land.) Although I quickly removed the wet walls, I wouldn’t refinish the basement until 2006. All of the furniture that had been left in the basement (one bedroom, washer and dryer) were thrown away. I needed a new electrical panel and I needed to rewire the basement by myself, and that was about it, for me, personally.

Ultimately, in spite of the 49′ forecast by NWS, the river had risen to 54′. T-Shirts were produced that said “49 feet? My ass!” Almost every single home in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, sustained damage, and more than half of the homes in Grand Forks sustained damage. Whole neighbourhoods, like Riverside or Central Park, were wiped out, flood waters coming up to the second floor. The evacuation ordered was the largest since Atlanta was evacuated in the Civil War.

Although it was predicted, not without reason, that Grand Forks would be wiped from the face of the Earth, following such an upheaval, thanks to both national and local officials, the city rebuilt. The Army Corps of Engineers designed a levee system that will protect the city, and in the years that followed its construction until I left in 2011, we never worried about the river, come spring.

The cities (Grand Forks, ND and East Grand Forks, MN,) now boast a large greenspace that runs along both sides of the river, providing amusement, through most of the year, and protection, in the spring.

That little statue there? That was the height of the river, in 1997.