Red River Rising: The Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City

7. Angels and Devils

7 Angels and Devils Old Testament prophets were obsessed with disasters because they presaged a great change or because they were delivered as retribution for bad behavior, a grave transgression. What, people in Grand Forks wondered, was their transgression, and how would their city change? Grand Forks citizens had already suffered the loss of almost everything material, the possessions they believed comprised their lives, the objects that had been proof of a meaningful life. The documents that mark birth, marriage, and death. Baby albums. The corsage a boyfriend tied on your wrist before a high school dance; the bouquet you decided to keep instead of throwing to your bridesmaids; the wreath that was placed next to that boy’s coffin at his wake sixty years later. In the next months, the flood would continue to plunder. It seemed unsatisfied with mere belongings. It wanted whole neighborhoods, and got them. With their houses emptied and their downtown reduced to blackened brick and ash, the people of Grand Forks were going to have to fight the flood for what seemed the only commodity they still had: their community. Ken Vein had watched the city’s infrastructure and flood protection systems —his domain—collapse under the pressure of the river. The dikes were his responsibility. People were using the word “failed.” The word bothered Vein. The dikes hadn’t failed; they had been overtopped. While the dikes were not able to hold back the flooding river, that doesn’t mean the engineering was flawed, and Vein was quick to point that out to the media . “I’m not blaming anybody at this point,” Vein told the Herald days after the river crested. “But as an engineer, I feel that protecting the popu127 lation from a flood, given the right information the right amount of time, is something we could have done.” His were some of the first, and gentlest, censures of the National Weather Service. In fact, a tempest was brewing over the NWS forecast—not only in the Midwest media, but nationally . The National Weather Service brass in Washington braced for the onslaught and began to form a plan for damage control, keeping a firm hand over the mouths of its employees, who were themselves bewildered by the criticism. Meanwhile, the staff of the Grand Forks branch of the agency had been moved out of its offices. Many employees were relocated to offices in Bismarck , Duluth, the South Dakota town of Aberdeen, and Minneapolis. Newspapers reported that although the Grand Forks office was not flooded, “officials were worried about the possibility of losing telephone service and other communications.” In the days immediately following the crest, however, the National Weather Service headquarters’ P≤ machine had not yet grasped just how bad it was going to get in the ≤ed ≤iver valley, just how angry people were becoming, and just how deeply it was all going to affect the men and women who had spent the last four months eating, breathing, and dreaming of the ≤ed ≤iver of the North. After deliberating, the National Weather Service allowed its hydrologists and other employees to grant interviews to the press, teaching, as Mike Anderson later put it, “Hydrology 101” four or five times a week. Anderson found himself faced with a seemingly endless line of reporters who had never seen a rating curve, never considered the relationship between discharge and stage. Anderson’s challenge was to take a subject that he had spent his whole life mastering and translate its principles and operations into simple English. “We tried to bring it, literally, down to a non-technical level, which is very hard.” In the first interviews with the press, agency employees were unguarded: “It’s an act of God,” Minneapolis office meteorologist-in-charge Craig Edwards told the St. Paul Pioneer Press. “A little bit beyond the capabilities of science.” “This was very personal to us,” nc≥fc hydrologist-in-charge Dean Braatz said. After the flood crest, visions of the perfidious rating curve haunted the hydrologists’ waking hours. “It was dynamic for a month and a half; you 128 / ≤ed ≤iver ≤ising didn’t know what you were walking into the next day,” Anderson said. But it was the images of destruction that clicked through Mike Anderson ’s mind like a never-ending slideshow: the leaking dikes, the people fleeing Lincoln Drive, the burning buildings...