Bengfort.com

Crest time is now approaching rapidly- and final preparations are being made as quickly as we can. I know many of you have seen the news on CNN and thought maybe that the flood has already happened- but in fact it hasn’t! Here is the deal- there are several “stages” that are determined by certain flood heights. For instance, on the Sheyenne in Lisbon, “Action Stage” is 11 feet- which means that it’s time to start building dikes. Actual flood stage- when the flood spills out of the river banks is a mere 15 feet. Moderate flood stage is what we have been in for the past few days both here in Lisbon and in Fargo- which is where you guys have been seeing most of the news out of. Moderate flood stage is 17 feet. What the predictions are talking about and what we are preparing for is the major flood stage- 19 feet in Lisbon (with a record river height set in 1897 of 19.3 feet). As of 9 AM this morning, the river level was at 19.19 feet. Similar numbers exist for Fargo, except they are much higher since the Red River is much bigger than the Sheyenne. Fargo is predicting a crest height of 45.1 feet- and their dikes are only built up to 43 feet (which is two feet above major flood stage).

The dike that protects our farm is at 19 feet- so you might imagine that we are overflowing right now- strangely enough, we aren’t. This morning we started moving sandbags into the garage of a neighbor and turned the heat up (to defrost them, they were frozen solid)- and we walked down to the river bank, and to our surprise the water was a foot below the dike! We suspect that this is because of an ice jam farther upriver, which means that when that jam looses we are going to get it. So as soon as our bags are defrosted we are going to raise the backup dike a few feet to try to protect ourselves that way. So far it is hard to know what is going to happen- the NOAA predictions keep showing that the river is supposed to decrease in height, but actual measurements have been going up– they have revised the forecast in light of that several times, but have still been inaccurate. Track the river heights for: Lisbon and Fargo at the NOAA Advanced Hydrologic Prediction service.

Fargo is definitely getting the worst of it, and NDSU has been closed for the entire week. No word if the campus has been closed or not, but hospitals and a few neighborhoods are being evacuated over there. Even if I wanted to get to Fargo, I can’t because the roads between us and Fargo are closed by floods over the roads that have frozen and won’t release. (I guess I could just say they are covered in ice, but that really doesn’t describe why they are closed!) So that is my update- if you have any specific questions, I recommend not listening to CNN- they tend to over-dramatize and underplay actual facts- so leave me a comment and I will do my best to answer more scientifically!

I’ll leave you with a few more pictures of the flood for your interest!