Watching flood coverage

“Suits” premiered this week on USA, along with new episodes of “Burn Notice.” “Leverage” aired a third season rewind last Sunday on TNT in anticipation of its new season this weekend, and we had the series premiere of “Falling Skies.” FX has a guy in a dog suit paired up with a second season of “Louie.” Then this week we’ve got new episodes coming up of “Royal Pains” and the series premiere of “Necessary Roughness” on USA.

But that isn’t really what I’ve been watching this week.

This is Minot. The place with the flood. It’s my town. I’ve been here for a dozen years now. As the usually placid Souris River has drained first the melt from massive snowpack out of the region during a cool spring and, more recently, torrential rainfalls from Canada, thousands of my townspeople have fled mandatory evacuation zones in advance of jaw-dropping volumes of water.

Basically, there’s a swath through the middle of our town that has a river on it. As the initial, semi-controlled releases from upstream dams came through, the water made best efforts to hold to channels established post the 1969 flood this town experienced, 40 days and 40 nights of water on people’s property at that time.

Then we learned the middle of this week that a surge of water fueled by relentless rains in Canada were funneling through the Souris River Basin at exactly the wrong time in this cycle of snow melt and spring runoffs for the system of dams, dikes and control structures upstream to in any way handle them. They were moving toward us at the speed of gravity and this town was in the direct line of fire.

Evacuation

We’d had kind of a dress rehearsal for this a few weeks ago. There was an evacuation order for people to leave their homes so they could build up some dikes. The river came through, but it largely stayed within the dike system built up in anticipation of higher than average spring runoffs. People were allowed to move back to their homes. We sort of thought that was it, like whew, glad that’s over. Now things could go back to normal. I mean, there was still a lot of clay still in place from secondary diking because water levels were still high, but they were going down. There was still a maze to navigate through some parts of town and some homeowners were still unable to return to their homes, but we were sure everything would be cleaned up and back to normal soon enough.

Then this week happened. Torrential rains upstream meant projected water levels we hadn’t seen since the flood of 1969. People were ordered to evacuate once again and they knew this was not a drill. In the some 48 hours they’d been given to move – which became 36 hours when the water arrived faster than anticipated – they packed out their homes. It was made clear that the flood that was coming was way worse than last time.

As it came through, it started lapping back up the sides of dikes where it had been receding less than a week before. It started washing over bridges, flowing into city streets and we watched in fascinated horror as it crept into neighborhoods, swam up to buildings and began climbing up street signs and traffic lights.

Every day we woke to horrific new images. We told ourselves we'd braced ourselves, that we were ready for this, that it had been projected, reported, that we’d prepared ourselves mentally to see this happen, but every time new images came we saw familiar landmarks, our friends’ homes and property and we knew they were safely evacuated but how do you process that kind of loss?

Throughout this effort, the National Guard, state and local law enforcement and airmen from Minot Air Force Base have worked so hard to maintain order through an impossible time, directing traffic, moving heaven and earth – a lot of earth – to shore up temporary dikes and to keep services, sanitation and utilities operational, protecting public operations, patrolling evacuated neighborhoods and generally protecting life and safety. Together with local media keeping everyone current with new developments and all available information, community volunteers staffing the flood hotline at 858-9366 and assisting in innumerable ways, this town is dug in for the long fight.

And while some 11,000 people have been displaced by this disaster, the Red Cross here has so far only needed to shelter a few hundred people. Displaced residents in a town already suffering a housing shortage of crisis proportions have benefited from friends and neighbors opening their homes for the extended stay.

Because we know this water, which arrived both in record amounts and in record time, will not be leaving again any time soon. Water is several feet deep in parts of town where under normal circumstances it would be addressed by storm sewers, which won’t actually work again until the river goes down.

And with water lapping up against streets just down the hill from me in places people had hoped against hope were last resort, no-real-way places the river would go, it’s been harder to think of it as a river than what it most resembles right now, which is a lake.

A lake which may or may not be done rising. Which has managed to contaminate the town’s drinking water to an unknown extent and we’re on a boil advisory. Which so long as it is in place, could still breach dikes and knock out utilities, services and sanitation systems for the dry parts of town with no warning.

A lake which, while contractors race back and forth along the main arterial bridge connecting north and south Minot shoring up temporary dikes around critical systems – we hope, moreso, than critical dikes around temporary systems – has effectively chopped our city in twain, with nearly all the supplies, stores and businesses on South Hill and mostly homeowners and displaced residents on North Hill.

It’s quite frustrating, and of course for so many others it is far worse. For anyone who would like to help, help is desperately needed and will be needed for long after the national media has taken their leave. The local Mid Dakota Chapter of the American Red Cross has been working tirelessly throughout this effort to assist flood responders and provide food and shelter for displaced families. There's also a community assistance fund started to help with some of the public assistance that will be needed throughout the extended recovery period.

Naturally I've also been watching coverage of the flood in local and national media, watching video taken from air and from boats, heartbreaking images and some -- particularly the boat ride, eerily serene, floating down city streets.

On some level the repetitive nature of the coverage and the onscreen search for information is a bit jarring, but it’s also somewhat comforting. There’s a sense that we know what there is to be known about the situation, and we’re all in the same boat. And disturbing as these images have been, it’s better we’re able to see them than to worry, to have some information instead of none.

I’ll probably get back to something more closely resembling the usual commentary next week. For right now, well ... this is what I’ve been watching.