Local News

(WCCO) As the Red River continues to retrench into its banks, the people in the Fargo Moorhead communities are trying to regain a sense of normalcy.

From that standpoint, Wednesday brought an important milestone as they entered a transitional period between the flood "fight" and the flood "cleanup."

After days of mandatory closures to allow employees to help on the sandbag lines area businesses are reopening. Along the sidewalks of Fargo's Broadway Avenue, foot traffic has returned.

At Fargo's Atomic Coffee, the morning's brew never tasted so good; the business has never been more welcomed.

"It was pretty much a ghost town, especially in the downtown and the north part of Fargo. It seemed to be pretty quiet all weekend long," said owner Angelique Kube.

But it's quiet no more -- there's a constant flow of cars and people flowing along the downtown's busiest streets. Those are the same streets that were deserted as loads of sandbags and clay were trucked in to build miles of emergency dikes.

Some of the main thoroughfares between Fargo and Moorhead were plugged when it became necessary to span those levies along the entire length of the Red River, cutting off access to the streets.

By mid-morning, work was well underway cutting openings in the dikes to allow traffic through. Tons of clay were being trucked away and dumped in storage, just in case the clay is needed to shore up the dikes again if the crests dangerously high in a couple of weeks.

"It's that time when you kind of want to get your house in order and get things done," Fargo's Deputy Mayor, Tim Mahoney, told the morning news briefing.

But that appeal for a return to normal remains a long way off for residents of Oak Port Township, north of Moorhead. That's where the Red River flooding left behind the most severe damage.

Dozens of homes are still surrounded by water. Township and Clay County roads are crumbling under the constant swirl of high water.

The Swanson family lives along the river and was somehow spared the worst of it. Aside from having a little water in the basement and a torn up yard, the crest fell just shy of their foundation.

Still, Rocky Swanson said, he feels terrible for his neighbors who lost it all.

Wednesday, the family was busy moving furnishings out of the upstairs and back down to the basement.

When asked what kind of help residents of Oakport will need, Rocky said, "The need is going to be help taking the sandbags down. The last time we put them up ... everybody's here to put them up, but when you are taking them down it is kind of a lonely job."

Still, there's caution when it comes to removing any sandbags until mid- to late-April. That's because a smaller secondary crest is expected in the next two weeks. That will result when all the recent runoff from up to 20 inches of wet snow that fell across the region enters the Red River watershed.

At the morning's flood briefing in Fargo, city leaders said there have already been talks between the governors of Minnesota and North Dakota about permanent flood protection. Preliminary plans have already been made for a flood wall system that could carry a hefty price tag somewhere in the order of $800 million to $1 billion to build.

It won't be cheap and it won't be easy. City leaders said, if you need convincing that it's worth doing just look to the situation in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks. Those cities, devastated by the record flooding in 1997, are about to handle the Red River's floodwaters with ease.

Property buyouts and the construction of a costly mitigation system now cloak those communities with protection.

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