By Calvin Palmer
The Red River breached a dike in Fargo, North Dakota, early today, flooding a school campus and providing what the mayor called “a wakeup call” for the city.
Emergency crews managed to contain the flooding to the campus of Oak Grove Lutheran School, preventing more widespread damage.
“The campus is basically devastated,” said Mayor Dennis Walaker. “They fought the good fight. The lost and there’s nothing wrong with that. Those things will continue to happen. I guarantee it.”
Principal of Oak Grove Lutheran Morgan Forness said city crews, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the National Guard unsuccessfully tried to contain the rushing water to one building after a permanent flood wall panel at the school buckled around 1:30 a.m.
“We couldn’t contain it,” Forness said. “It’s inundating all of the buildings.”
The breach occurred at a spot along the river where the current is especially fast, and the flood was so powerful that it shot water 3 to 4 feet in the air at times.
By early Sunday, the Red River had dropped to 40.15 feet, still more than 22 feet above flood stage. The river may fluctuate up to a foot and remain at dangerous levels for a week.
“What happened up in Oak Grove this morning was a wakeup call,” the mayor warned at this morning’s briefing.
The city requested more volunteers to resume sandbagging today. Many were expected to turn out after church services in the heavily Lutheran city of more than 90,000 residents.
Mayor Walaker began his briefing with a prayer, and Gov John Hoeven encouraged everyone “to say a prayer for everyone in harm’s way”.
To prevent additional dike breaches, officials planned to begin dropping one-ton sandbags from helicopters today to deflect the violent current of the Red River and keep it from eroding vulnerable sections of the levees.
Volunteers were asked to inspect the levees for problems, joining National Guard inspection teams on the more than 35 miles of levees around Fargo.
“I don’t think there’s an inch of riverfront on the Fargo side that doesn’t have some kind of levee,” said city engineer Mark Bittner. “We encourage neighborhoods to get together and have their own dike patrols and assist us.”
The main focus now is whether the levees will be able to withstand the weight of the river water, regardless of its level. Engineers say that when water is pressed up against a levee for a considerable period of time, there is a risk of catastrophic flooding.
“The saturation usually becomes the enemy of a levee over time,” Jud Kneuvean, chief of emergency management for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Kansas City. “It can cause the embankment to be less stable and slide.”
[Based on a report by newsday.com.]
