Finding Shelter For A City
For Brenda Pauley-Colter, drained by days of battling the inhospitable Red River, even a green military cot in a cavernous Air Force hangar looked inviting.
“They’re actually not too bad,” she said Saturday. “I’m so tired, I can sleep on anything.”
Her 2-year-old son, Patrick, was doing fine among hundreds of cots set up in the hangar for flood refugees. One made an excellent take-off ramp for his toy cars.
Pauley-Colter, awakened by warning sirens, fled her home at 3:30 a.m. Saturday as floodwaters advanced. By the afternoon, she was one of about 2,000 people camped out at the base about 10 miles west of Grand Forks.
Most of the city’s 50,000 people were gone Saturday as the rising Red overran dikes. While some headed for the Air Force base, others went across the river to Minnesota.
Unshaven in sweatpants and T-shirt, Roger Leblanc, 24, wound up at Crookston High School in Crookston, Minn., with his girlfriend and 5-year-old daughter. They registered there before going on to one of several other shelters.
Leblanc and his family abandoned their home when days of sandbagging failed to hold back the Red and the Red Lake rivers.
“I don’t ever want to go back there. You work that long and hard and then you lose it all,” he said, turning away, wiping tears.
His daughter, Miranda, shook a red and white pompom and twirled a glittery baton she picked out of supplies made available to flood victims in Crookston. Piles of plaid afghans, blue jeans and personal items like shampoo and razors were distributed.
“A lot of people look at it this way: They’re going for a little vacation because they know what they’re going home to (eventually),” said Garry Hadden, 44, as he sat outside the high school.
On the Air Force base, the hangar is just one of several places that can accommodate flood victims. There’s lots of room, including an enormous warehouse and a fitness club, said a base spokesman, Capt. Byron Spencer.
The hangar is partitioned into three sections, each the size of a football field. Each section is normally used as a maintenance bay for huge KC-135 tanker aircraft. Instead, cots were lined up 15 to 20 rows deep and 70 across.
Lights were dimmed to allow people to sleep, although the atmosphere was almost festive. Refugees read and swapped flood stories with neighbors.
The Salvation Army was overseeing one of the sections, said Capt. Mike Caudill, its commander for Grand Forks County, N.D., and East Grand Forks, Minn.
“After all this is over with, these same people are going to be going back home and they’re going to face their flooded basements and the reality of everything is going to set in,” he said.