Scenes From The Flood
Hospital evacuates
Workers hurriedly bulldozed a levee around this flooded city’s only hospital Sunday as patients were evacuated because of a shortage of clean drinking water.
United Hospital set up a 20-bed mobile surgery center at the Grand Forks Air Force Base west of the city, said Rosemary Jacobson, the hospital’s president.
Patients also were transferred to hospitals in North Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa.
Nurses and hospital workers labored Sunday to pack off movable hospital equipment to the air base.
The flood had already overwhelmed Grand Forks’ water treatment plant, and city officials said municipal drinkable water may not be available for at least two weeks.
A National Guard water purification unit that had been operating on the hospital’s grounds was forced to move elsewhere.
Beginning Saturday, more than 500 people had been moved from the hospital and a nearby nursing home and residential elder care facilities.
The hospital has generators to provide electricity but the lack of clean water would make things difficult, Jacobson said. “We felt we couldn’t provide care to these patients for the very long haul,” she said.
Some hospital staffers will remain even when all the patients have been relocated.
City’s memory lost
Grand Forks lost its memory Saturday.
When fire gutted the Grand Forks Herald building Saturday afternoon, it took with it the newspaper’s archives, the file cabinets that held much of the rivertown’s history in brittle clippings and yellowed photos that took decades to collect.
Now, the records of births and of deaths, of political victories and defeats, of floods that came before this one, are ashes floating somewhere on a river that changed this city forever.
“It makes me feel like I want to cry,” said Jenelle Stadstad, manager of the newspaper’s library. “I feel helpless.”
Even after the dikes around downtown broke, Stadstad said she wasn’t worried. The rows of file cabinets bulging with tens of thousands of photographs and clippings were on the second floor of the building.
But when word came that a fire at the nearby Security Building had spread down the block to the Herald, her worst fears were realized.
“I can’t even imagine all of the files we lost,” she said Sunday from Manvel Public School in Manvel, N.D., where the newspaper staff continues to work to produce the paper. “Our microfilm went back to 1879, our first paper,” she said. “It’s just unbelievable.”
Floodwater not health risk
The murky floodwaters that have swallowed the Grand Forks area may be littered with assorted debris, but they do not pose a significant health risk, state health officials said Sunday.
But once the water recedes, residents will confront enormous mental anguish triggered by the overwhelming damage left behind by the overpowering wall of water.
Because of the huge volume, “floodwaters are some of the cleaner water that exists,” said Minnesota epidemiologist Michael Osterholm.
The water rushing through downtown Grand Forks is cleaner than the water that flows down the Red River during the summertime, Osterholm said, even though it is contaminated by human wastes flushed from flooded sewage systems and animal wastes washed from fields, feedlots and the carcasses of nearly 90,000 cattle that died in the early spring blizzard that preceded the flood.
The phenomenon is explained by the old saw, “Dilution is the solution to pollution,” he said.
Town embraces refugees
CROOKSTON, Minn. - The small western Minnesota river town of Crookston so far has been spared the devastation of this spring’s flooding that has wrecked homes up north and sent waves of families fleeing for higher ground.
Numb with fatigue after filling sandbags and mopping muck from their basements in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, men and women clutching little more than family photos and bags of clothes have poured by the hundreds into this farming community, which has welcomed them with food, beds and sympathetic hugs.
The outpouring of concern has overwhelmed people such as Diane Wales, who left her house in East Grand Forks on Friday without her pets and wondered Sunday afternoon whether her dog and kitten were still alive. She found shelter at Trinity Lutheran Church, where volunteers gave her blankets, a cot, all the food she could eat and the privacy to absorb the loss of her town.
“They’ve just loved us, and that will help us to heal,” she said Sunday afternoon as she wiped her eyes. “They say that one heart speaks to another heart, and I can hear it in the faces of people who say they’re sorry.”
Pastors Charlie Brown and Randolph Smith devoted most of their morning sermons to the floods, choking up several times as they told their congregation they should feel blessed to be able to help those in need. “Where is God?” Smith asked. “I believe God is right in the middle of the Red River with his arms stretched out across the valley, caring for his people, loving them and strengthening them as we battle this river.”
Programs at the service included forms for sending donations to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America to help the homeless victims. Normandale Lutheran Church raised more than $7,200 in donations at an “emergency” concert in Detroit Lakes Saturday night, Brown said.
Local fraternal organizations have fed the refugees pancake breakfasts and roast beef dinners.
Crookston started accepting refugees Friday night at its new, soon-to-be opened $10 million high school north of town. Local radio and television stations told people to register at the high school, where they were directed to one of 14 shelters housed in churches, schools and the University of Minnesota in Crookston. Their names and locations were entered on one of eight laptop computers, so relatives checking the list could find out where their loved ones had gone.
About 2,600 had registered by Sunday afternoon, but officials didn’t know how many had moved on and how many planned to stay the two weeks or more before they are able to return to their homes. Officials also couldn’t say how many more they expected from the evacuation of parts of Polk County.