Fargo Flood 2013

We made national news! Fargo almost flooded! The national weather service estimated that our city would flood at 50% and that we could have a record high flood at 10%. They estimated the flood levels up around 43 feet which would have put most of our town underwater... thank goodness it only peaked at 30-somthing feet and stayed away from anything record. Here are some of the days as we watched the waters rise...

Day 1

A nice day out and we could still walk most of the paths but most of the grass we would play on had started to disappear. It had recently snowed (which got everyone more worried about the flood) and you could see and hear giant sheets of ice floating down the river and slamming into one another. The dog park was unusable and they had started dismantling the fences so the river could flow through.

Day 2

Day two, some of the grass was still walkable, but most of the pathways were flooded and were un-walkable. At this point there were pretty confident that it wasn't going to flood so it was pretty exciting to watch the water rise so fast- I have never seen something flood before. They said that over night the water would rise over a foot and it just started engulfing the trees and grass.

Day 3

 

Day three the water rose like crazy! Where Scott is in the above photo is the dog park- completely submerged! Also in front of Scott off in the distance is where they had to build a clay dike to keep that big brown apartment building in the photo from flooding. They brought the national guard in to build the dike for 2 days. The walkway just below our house (where I am standing) is just starting to flood. The only place we were allowed to walk was on top of the dike and this is the day 'Keep Out' posters started to show up.It took the flood about a week to go down, but we probably didn't walk down there for about a week in a half to avoid the mud. After the water was down, the streets started to open up slowly and it took 8 days for the clay dike to come down. Then life started getting back to normal.

Casualties of the flood

There were some casualties of the flood, mainly huge trees and lots of debris. In the top picture is a tree stuck in the fence of the dog park and the above picture is Scott and Wesley standing on/near a tree that was trapped along another tree. It was pretty wild to see all the trees laying around. They just started cleaning up things this past week so hopefully the grass comes back in the dog park and we can go visit  all our dog friends soon!