After a Sunday Afternoon Lookey-Lou
Dad and I just got back from a Sunday afternoon lookey-lou and I thought it would be a good opportunity to update you on how the flood is going on in North Dakota. Actually, we did receive a bit of relief the past couple of days thanks to freezing temperatures and and lowering flood waters- but the fight isn’t over yet! Even though the “record crest occurred Friday at midnight”, we are looking at a severe blizzard tomorrow and more water coming from the south, as well as the release of dams and other hydrological problems- but for now, we are all sitting tight.
On Friday, NDSU closed for the entirety of next week. The administration is still discussing how the academics will be handled when we return, but they couldn’t justify opening the university when so many folks have evacuated. This leaves me in a precarious position both as a student and as an instructor- I have no idea how my school work is going to be affected, nor how I am going to handle missing 2 weeks of school for my own class! For instance, this Wednesday I had my seminar presentation scheduled- a presentation that each of us have only once a semester. It will be difficult to make this up since there are just as many students in the seminar as there are weeks of the school year; and my entire grade is based on that presentation! Rumors abound that in the flood of ‘97 NDSU simply canceled the rest of the semester, giving students whatever grade they had when the school closed. However, in ‘97, the flooding happened much later (middle of April, not the end of March), and frankley, I can’t imagine that happening again without a major disaster occurring.
Minor disasters have been occurring around the area. Today a fixed damn around a school broke, and even after two hours of fighting the water, it simply couldn’t be stopped. As you might imagine, one crack in a dike quickly becomes a big one. Other people have literally lost loved ones (as in misplaced) because of the medical evacuations out of Fargo. A fellow parishioner at our church struggled to find his wife over the weekend because he was told she was medevaced to Minneapolis when in fact she was transferred to Bismarck. So the after affects of even the amount of flooding we have had so far are going to be far reaching.
As always, here are more pictures taken today during our lookey-lou, which are probably more interesting to you than my reporting! (Leave comments!)
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- View from the Sand and Gravel Bridge
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- Thick Ice Blocks Create Natural Dams
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- Rapid Water
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- Lisbon Main Street Bridge
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- Sheyenne against the Dike
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- Farmhouse in Trouble
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- Flood takes the Golf Course
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- Lisbon Dam
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- USGA Hydrometer
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- Ice under the Lisbon Bridge
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- Earth and Sand Dikes
About The Author
Benjamin
Graduate Student and Instructor at NDSU
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Author's web sitehttp://www.bengfort.com
Today’s Post reported that helicopters were dropping 1-ton sandbags into the Red River. Anything like that being done in the Sheyenne? Also, explain “lookey-lou!”
I know- they’ve been using these one ton sand baskets that have been used by the military in Afghanistan to create dikes- it’s actually pretty cool. I don’t know how much of that has been done on the Sheyenne, but we haven’t seen any as we’ve been around.
Actually, they have been pretty creative- especially with methods for blowing up ice blocks. Now they are using an invented device to apply salt directly to an ice floe– I’m pretty sure no one has told the EPA about that yet!
I mentioned Lookey-Lou in my post the Civicus of Floods; apparently this is the term for when someone goes out into the flood to simply watch or gawk and not to fight it. These people are targets for conscription into sand bag armies or can actually be arrested because people hate them so much!
But don’t worry: we are engineers trying to determine patterns in rural flow rates so that we can correctly strategize our flood fighting efforts (yeah, we’re getting arrested)!