His deadpan tone says as much as his words. Most disasters stir deep emotions: witness the panicked south Florida victims of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, or the St. Louis suburbanites who wept inconsolably during the Mississippi River flood a year later. Now it’s North Dakota’s turn. Through the winter, 13 massive snowstorms –one newspaper even named the worst of them, like hurricanes–buried houses to the rooftops. With the spring melt came epic floods and, in downtown Grand Forks, the paradox of a fire consuming buildings surrounded by water. Across the Upper Midwest and neighboring Manitoba, flooding has pushed 100,000 refugees from their homes–a diaspora now settled in motels, campers, casinos, Bible camps and fishing resorts. Damage estimates range higher than the gross national products of some small nations, and federal disaster aid could approach $1 billion for Grand Forks alone.
In North Dakota, though, the reaction to this devastation is almost uniformly stoic. On the northern plains, nature is less an enemy than a sparring partner, trading rounds in a grudge bout that never ends. Blame a perverse pride in its harsh climate for North Dakota’s unofficial motto: Forty below keeps out the riffraff. The most naive question now is whether places like Grand Forks will rebuild, knowing that the next calamity–drought, blizzard, flood –is only a matter of time. “People have already sacrificed to live here,” says historian David Danbom of North Dakota State University in Fargo. “Now they’ll sacrifice to stay.”
The sacrifice–and the sharing–has already begun. Flood victims have been given everything from teddy bears to insulin needles. Schools in dry towns quickly enrolled homeless students; one boy’s new classmates welcomed him with seven hockey sticks. Most of the dislocated wouldn’t dream of moving away. Paula Haney’s family fled on April 18 from a Grand Forks home now awash in sewage and fuel oil. “I feel very fortunate,” Haney, 34, says over lunch at Mayville State University, where hundreds of victims are bivouacked. “My three children are safe. The rest is just stuff.”
If, as she hopes, Haney’s kids stay in North Dakota, they’ll share the benefits of a place both out of sight and out of touch: low crime, excellent schools and one of the longest average life spans in the United States. Resilience is part of the North Dakotan creed. In the 1870s a series of unusually warm winters suckered thousands of pioneers to the state. When the Blue Northers returned in the next decade, they prompted one of the strangest episodes in the history of the West: wagon trains headed east. Those who stayed made the best of it, just as they will this year. Take the millions of waterlogged sandbags around Grand Forks: though the dikes were futile, the sand will come in handy on icy roads once winter strikes. And in North Dakota, that is never far away.
SNOW, SUN, ICE AND THE RED RIVER’S RISE It was a flood 500 years in the making, a disaster provoked by a combination of circumstances high on the Great Plains. A primer on why the Red River swept away so much of North Dakota.
Spring Thaw: Soaring temperatures melted a record snowfall in a matter of days, causing rapid runoff into the Red River.
Gradual slope: Due to the valley’s shallow slope, the river pools inplaces during floods and can form a massive, shallow lake.
Levees: These high walls may protect a town from floods, but they also speed up the river, worsening flooding in towns without them.
Ice jams: Ice concentrations in the North can slow or block the flow of water, causing river levels to swell.
Flat plain: The Red River flows across an extremely flat expanse of land. This makes coverage of floodwaters dramatic.
