Working against the tide

Students like Traynor who are from Fargo and surrounding areas have been waiting anxiously to see whether the city’s dikes will be able to withstand flooding, as North Dakota’s Red River has risen from its normal level at around 18 feet to a high of 41 feet on March 27.

Concerned for the safety of his hometown, Traynor flew home last Thursday and spent the weekend manning pumps and reinforcing dikes with sandbags, his mother, Mary Beth Traynor, said in an e-mail.

“The raging waters of the Red River have threatened to engulf our home and neighborhood,” she explained. “You cannot imagine our relief to see Michael on Thursday evening. We had been working for four days on very little sleep with not much relief in sight.”

Several factors contributed to the flooding crisis, including heavy rain and snowfall from this winter that has melted in the recent warmer weather.

“Near the end of spring break, there were a couple really warm days and all this snow started melting,” Kevin Moch ’10, of Braddock, N.D., said in an e-mail. He added that on March 22, when his parents drove him to the airport for his flight back to campus after spring break, they saw water already starting to flood the roads.

“Later that night, I talked to my mom, and one of these roads had been closed because floating ice chucks had been stuck on the road as the water was overflowing, and another one of the roads that we had driven earlier that day now had four feet of water on top of it,” he said.

Moch, whose family lives on an 800-acre farm with roughly 100 head of Angus cattle, said that many of the dirt and gravel roads leading up to his home were now underwater. “My parents now have to drive my little sister ten miles to meet the bus in the morning, because the school bus refuses to drive these washed-out roads,” he added.

For Jayden Ziegler ’11, the floods have also devastated his family’s property in Bismarck, N.D.

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“My pasture … nearly flooded over, trapping our horses onto an island, from which they couldn’t be rescued until the next day,” he said. “Now, our pasture is strewn with a mixture of torn fencing and broken posts.”

He added that when southern Bismarck flooded last week, more than 100 homes were evacuated, including his uncle’s.

In the town neighboring Ziegler’s high school, the local Garrison Dam was shut to decrease flooding, he said.

“The closing of the dam shut off Stanton’s water supply, causing its inhabitants to have to conserve water for the week in order to survive,” Ziegler said.

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Though the Red River continues to threaten the area, students said they are hopeful the crisis is coming to an end. “If the dikes hold for the week, everything should be good,” said Devany Schulz ’12, who went to high school in Fargo and lives 15 miles outside the city.

In the face of this disaster, North Dakotans have united to protect their communities, students said.

Many residents of the area, including Traynor and his family, have been filling plastic bags with sand and piling them on top of each other to reinforce the weakest sections of the city’s dike system.

Fargo Mayor Dennis Walaker asked local volunteers to help stack hundreds of thousands of sandbags on top of the city’s 12-mile-long dike, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

Walaker told the Times that he believed the dike must be built another foot higher to adequately protect the city.

Colleges in the area, such as North Dakota State University in Fargo, have even closed for several days so students can participate in the community sandbagging effort, Schulz said.

“It’s pretty amazing … to see how everyone back home has come together through all of this,” Moch said. “I couldn’t sign onto Facebook this last week without seeing one status update or another mentioning how someone had spent the day sandbagging; it seems almost everyone I know that’s currently in the area has basically dropped their normal schedule and is working as hard as possible to keep things from getting worse.”

Traynor, who posted four Facebook photo albums of his sandbagging efforts, echoed that sentiment.

“North Dakotans are a remarkable group of people,” he said in an e-mail. “I have never witnessed so much compassion, concern, love, and humor in the face of adversity.”