Soggy Ghost Town A Few Refuse To Leave As Sewer-Tainted Water Rises

Ravaged first by record flooding and then by huge fires that spread unchecked in the swamped downtown district, most of this beleaguered North Dakota city was under mandatory evacuation orders and a 24-hour curfew Sunday.

Authorities threatened to use National Guard troops to arrest residents who have refused to leave their homes.

With the city’s water supply dangerously contaminated and its sanitary sewer system collapsed after the Red River spilled over some dikes and saturated others until they collapsed, tens of thousands of residents continued fleeing to emergency shelters.

But authorities said hundreds - perhaps thousands - of holdouts remained in the flooded downtown area, parts of which were left with nothing but burned-out shells of high-rise buildings from raging weekend fires that for the most part were inaccessible to firemen because floodwaters were was 10 feet deep.

One four-block area of downtown had an eerie look that was reminiscent of Dresden, Germany, after World War II, with at least 11 multistory buildings destroyed or damaged beyond recognition.

The skeletons of the gutted buildings rose from the muddy river overflow and, in some cases, continued to smolder despite the torrent of water surrounding them.

Grand Forks Fire Chief Richard Aulich said most of the blazes had been contained, but firefighters were still extinguishing hot spots using boats, helicopters and an oversized fire truck from nearby Grand Forks Air Force Base that can operate in water 8 feet deep.

Aulich said the cause of the fires was unknown, but he suspected that damaged gas pipes had ignited.

Incongruously, it is in this area where emergency management officials say many residents are refusing to leave, despite the worsening and potentially dangerous water and sewer conditions and no supply of fresh food.

Grocery stores and restaurants have been inundated and are closed.

Rescue operations with boats were stepped up Sunday afternoon as authorities pleaded with residents to hang white sheets from their roofs to identify inhabited buildings.

“I have no idea how many people are left downtown, but there is a very high level of concern for those people. We are going to have to get them out,” Jim Campbell, Grand Forks emergency management director, said at a news conference at a makeshift operations center at the University of North Dakota campus.

Because of continuously rising water, the operations center had to be moved twice in the last three days, and Campbell said even the university’s relatively high ground now threatened.

Officials said 3-1/2 square miles within the city were completely under water, ranging from a few feet to more than 10 feet deep.

Campbell said if recalcitrant residents downtown continue to ignore the evacuation orders, “We’ll forcibly remove them for their own protection.”

He said some of the residents seriously endangered themselves by going to roof-tops Saturday to watch as helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft dropped water on nearby burning buildings.

Campbell said the main emergency effort now will be a street-by-street sweep to remove holdouts from the 75 percent of Grand Forks that is under mandatory evacuation orders. Police said it was only a matter of time before the entire city was under mandatory evacuation.

At the same time, emergency workers were feverishly erecting makeshift sandbag dikes around critical facilities, such as the city hospital, electrical, power substations and essential government buildings.

City Engineer Kenneth Vein said the river had reached 53.7 feet but is not expected to crest at 54 feet for six or seven more days, meaning that it could be three weeks or more before Grand Forks will have safe drinking water and working sanitary sewer pumps again.

A visibly weary and shaken Mayor Pat Owens, whose own home is under water, said the flood had “taught me how vulnerable we are to nature,” but at the same time had stiffened the city’s 50,000 residents’ resolve to battle the elements.

“I don’t feel bad for one reason, and that is that we will rebuild and come through this,” Owens said. She pleaded with holdout residents to move to shelters: “While it’s very hard to leave one’s home, that home can be replaced, but people’s lives cannot.”

Even in a valley accustomed to periodic swelling of the Red River, this flood is unprecedented in 500 years, hydrologists said, and could get even worse because as the river flows north it is likely to hit ice near the Canadian border and back up again.

The flood and fires were just the latest disasters that have afflicted Grand Forks this year: A blizzard dumped more than a foot of snow on the area just two weeks ago and knocked out power throughout the Red River Valley.

It was the melting accumulations of snow from an unusually harsh and snowy winter that contributed to the swelling of the river.

Authorities said even their flood crest estimates could be wrong because a key water-level gauge used by the National Weather Service is under water and inoperable. “There’s always the potential for further flooding. The river is still rising,” Campbell said.

Although homeless families were transported to emergency shelters as far as Devil’s Lake, 90 miles to the west, 3,000 people were being temporarily housed at the sprawling Grand Forks Air Force Base, 14 miles west of the city.

Paul Dilling, a 47-year-old postal worker, who lived 50 yards from the river bank, said he fled with his family at 3 a.m. Friday. But he said it was not until he was watching television Saturday and saw what was left of his two-story house that the full impact of the flood struck him.

“There was just the top of my house showing above water,” said Dilling.