The Two Thousand Eleven Souris River Flood

In the summer of two thousand eleven, the Souris River did something it had never been measured doing in the recorded history of the region. It rose higher than it ever had before, and then it kept rising.

The flood began with an exceptional snowpack in Saskatchewan that spring, compounded by heavy summer rains across the drainage basin. The Souris, which loops down from Canada through Minot before turning back north into Manitoba, was already running at record levels when Canadian authorities at the Rafferty Reservoir began releasing water at a rate the downstream infrastructure could not absorb. By the end of June, the river crested at a height of fifteen hundred and sixty-one feet above sea level, smashing the previous record from eighteen eighty-one by more than three feet.

The flooding inundated roughly four thousand homes, more than a quarter of Minot's housing stock. Around twelve thousand people, roughly a third of the city's population, were displaced from their homes. Some neighborhoods were under as much as five feet of water. The old railroad infrastructure along the valley floor was submerged. Entire residential districts that had stood for generations disappeared beneath the Souris.

The recovery took years. Federal disaster funds helped rebuild flood control infrastructure, and portions of the city that had been in the floodplain were bought out rather than rebuilt, converted to green space and additional levee capacity. A major flood protection project was completed in the years following, raising and extending the levee system that protects the valley floor.

For residents who lived through it, two thousand eleven remains a dividing line. There is Minot before the flood, and Minot after. The river that gave the city its valley and its water has never quite been looked at the same way since.