Residents Take A Look At Damage Some Grand Forks Families Go Home Briefly To ‘An Ugly Sight’

Slogging through streets caked in stinking mud, families chased from their homes nearly a week ago by the Red River returned for the first time Thursday to fetch some belongings and look over the damage for a few painful hours.

Brent and Roxanne Miller trudged five blocks, passing mailboxes, baseballs, sandbags and garbage that had been swept through the flooded streets, and nervously approached their two-story house, not sure what to expect.

Peeking in the door of the home they had bought three years ago, they caught the stench of soaked, soiled carpets and walls.

Brent Miller took one step inside and glanced down at his recently refinished basement.

“I can’t believe how much water is still sitting there. Good God.”

Passing through National Guard checkpoints intended to keep out looters, family after family entered a 1-1/2-square-mile area evacuated last weekend.

Only the southwestern part of town, the least damaged, was reopened. Other sections will be opened as the water recedes, and families will find homes much worse off than the Millers’ residence. Some houses are believed to be floating.

It will be weeks before families will be able to move into their homes for good. About 95 percent of the city, North Dakota’s third-largest at 50,000, was evacuated.

Power is still out, and water and sewer systems are inundated.

Farther downstream, the crest of the worst Red River flooding on record pushed toward Canada in a slow-motion disaster, swamping small towns and table-top-flat farmland in the remote northern prairie.

In towns such as Drayton and Pembina, N.D., volunteers frantically stacked sandbags and nailed together wooden walls atop earthen dikes. The river already was more than 13 feet above flood stage in Drayton.

Canadian authorities ordered the evacuation of 17,000 people in Manitoba’s Red River Valley, mobilized soldiers for sandbagging duty and cleared out a neighborhood near Winnipeg.

Winnipeg, population 660,000, is the largest city on the Red River. The crest is expected to reach it around May 5, but Winnipeg is counting on a large floodway to spare it the kind of damage seen in Grand Forks.

In the Millers’ basement, two bedrooms, a family room, bathroom, office and laundry room were filled with 4 feet of filthy floodwater. Marks on the walls showed the water had been 3 feet higher, a half-foot from the ceiling.

“That’s an ugly sight,” a disgusted Brent Miller said as his wife discovered a box of drenched high school yearbooks and photo albums. Tears welled in her eyes.

“I never thought to …,” she said, her words trailing off.

Neighbors George and Linda Wolf, who brought over a video camera to document the Millers’ damage for the insurance company, found their own basement flooded, too.

The Millers, married 15 years, have been staying with relatives in Carrington, about two hours away. Their children - Tom, 11, and Tara, 14 - did not come to see the house. And their parents will not show them the videotape.

“They don’t want to see that,” Roxanne Miller said. “Tom had his Barry Bonds baseball cards down there. That’s your life for a kid. He was pretty crushed.”

The Millers watered their plants and packed clothes, insurance papers and blank checks, then left, unsure of when they would return.

At the least, the 1-1/2-hour inspection offered a certain amount of relief.

“We’re two hours away. You feel so out of touch,” Brent Miller said. “We had no idea for sure what it was. Knee-high? Waist-high? Now today, we actually know.”