The Flood of Ninety-Seven: Grand Forks Burns and Drowns

In April of nineteen ninety-seven, the Red River of the North did something it had done before but never quite like this. It rose. And it kept rising. And when it finally crested, it was at fifty-four point three five feet, nearly twenty-seven feet above flood stage, the highest level ever recorded at Grand Forks. Virtually the entire city went underwater.

The disaster had been building all winter. Blizzard after blizzard had loaded the watershed with snow, and then a rapid thaw sent it all downriver at once. The National Weather Service predicted the river would crest at forty-nine feet, high enough to cause major flooding. Their models were wrong by more than five feet, a catastrophic miscalculation that meant flood barriers protecting the city were simply overtopped. On April eighteenth the dikes failed. Within hours, seventy-five percent of Grand Forks and a substantial portion of East Grand Forks across the river were submerged.

Then, on April nineteenth, fire broke out in downtown Grand Forks. Eleven buildings in the historic downtown core caught fire, and because the streets were six to eight feet deep in floodwater, fire trucks could not reach the scene. Firefighters and National Guardsmen watched from boats as the downtown burned. The images broadcast nationally that week, smoke rising from submerged buildings with their upper floors in flames, water surrounding everything, became one of the defining disaster photographs of the nineteen nineties.

Sixty thousand people, virtually the entire population of both cities, were evacuated. It was at the time the largest peacetime evacuation in American history since the Civil War. President Clinton visited the smoldering, drowned downtown and pledged federal support. Rebuilding took years, and the downtown that exists today was substantially reconstructed. The flood also led to a permanent ring of earthen dikes around the city, completed by two thousand seven, designed to hold water to a level well above what nineteen ninety-seven produced.