The Flood of Ninety-Seven

The winter of nineteen ninety-six into ninety-seven was the kind that makes plains people speak in numbers. Eight blizzards. Snowpack ten to thirteen inches of moisture content, meaning unusually dense, wet snow. An autumn before it that had left the soil already saturated. When April came and the Red River began to rise, everything went wrong at once.

The Red River crested in Fargo at thirty-nine and a half feet on April seventeenth, nineteen ninety-seven, the highest level in recorded history at that point. But Fargo held. Starting in early April, the city had mobilized in a way that later became a case study in community response. High school students, college students, National Guard troops, and ordinary residents formed lines and filled sandbags around the clock. Three and a half million sandbags went into place along dikes and low points throughout the city. The mayor at the time, Bruce Furness, later said the city came very close to losing entire sections and that it took an extraordinary effort by an extraordinary number of people to prevent it.

Fargo held. Grand Forks, one hundred miles to the north, did not. The Red River there crested at fifty-four feet, well above the forty-nine feet the National Weather Service had forecast. Fifty thousand people were evacuated. A downtown fire started during the flooding and burned eleven buildings before firefighters, working in floodwater up to their chests, contained it.

The nineteen ninety-seven flood reshaped how both cities thought about the river. Fargo has since built a comprehensive flood protection system. Grand Forks converted entire neighborhoods into a two-thousand-two-hundred-acre greenway along the river. The Red River still rises in spring. The question now is how high, and whether the walls will hold.