Mississippi Drive-By, sunset on the Mississippi, Minneapolis, Minnesota, July 2008, photo © 2008-2009 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
Spring thaw spills over
Mississippi’s swollen banks;
Red River rages
I’ve been thinking about rivers this week as the Red River border between Fargo, North Dakota and Moorhead, Minnesota spreads out over the land. Happy for Spring, this mighty south to north flowing river is swelled and overreaching her banks, leaving human devastation in her wake. The Red River stood at 40.71 feet shortly after 8:15 a.m., down a bit from the 40.8 feet at the stroke of midnight. That’s nearly a foot higher than the Red River has ever before reached in recorded history.
Rivers have minds of their own. And the Red River is a rebel. I remember a 1970’s flooding of the Susquehanna River when I was in college in Pennsylvania. Everyone was evacuated to higher ground; we were out of school for a week. My hometown hosts the mighty Mississippi, a river that writer Mark Twain knew intimately. He wrote about her history and human habitation in Life on the Mississippi. He also had this to say about trying to tame her:
The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise…
– Mark Twain in Eruption
The same appears to be true of the Red River. This week, citizens of the area have lost homes and businesses swallowed up by the river. Thousands of Midwesterners in the Great White North rose to the occasion, sandbagging between the echoing dribbles of basketball’s March Madness. Cheering for the home team kept their minds from spinning, a kind of in-the-moment relief.
But yesterday, officials in the flood-plagued Minnesota community of Moorhead asked about one-third of their households to evacuate ahead of the rising river. Moorhead along with neighboring Fargo, North Dakota, a city of more than 90,000, are preparing for further evacuations. The river is not expected to crest until Sunday afternoon, an all-time high of 42 feet. Thank goodness the cold weather this week left the Red frozen to the bone, unable to push the higher limits that were predicted.
Our prayers are with our communities to the North, though the odds may not be. It has always been this way with rivers; and so it shall always be. And if it’s true what Twain says that “we form our opinions of our country from what other people say of us,” then Midwesterners will always go down as a people who show up for each other when the chips are down. Middle of the country. Middle America. High regard for the land, the rivers, the habitat, and the people who commingle there.
It is strange how little has been written about the Upper Mississippi. The river below St. Louis has been described time and again, and it is the least interesting part. One can sit on the pilot-house for a few hours and watch the low shores, the ungainly trees and the democratic buzzards, and then one might as well go to bed. One has seen everything there is to see. Along the Upper Mississippi every hour brings something new. There are crowds of odd islands, bluffs, prairies, hills, woods and villages–everything one could desire to amuse the children.
Few people every think of going there, however. Dickens, Corbett, Mother Trollope and the other discriminating English people who ‘wrote up’ the country before 1842 had hardly an idea that such a stretch of river scenery existed. Their successors have followed in their footsteps, and as we form our opinions of our country from what other people say of us, of course we ignore the finest part of the Mississippi.
– Interview in Chicago Tribune, July 9, 1886, from Mark Twain Quotations
– For up to the minute coverage, photographs, and history, read about the Red River Floods of March 2009 at these links:
- Red River Valley Flooding at the StarTribune — aerial shot of the devastation
- Red River Floods of 2009 at MPR — lots of photographs and video of the Red River Valley
- The Fargo Flood Homepage — learn about the geology of the Red River Valley and the history of why the river floods
- City of Fargo — up to the minute flood information
-posted on red Ravine, Saturday, March 28th, 2009
-related to posts: haiku 2 (one-a-day), susquehanna haiku, savannah river haiku
Thank you for posting this. This morning, I saw photos in the Washington Post of a home surrounded by Red River flood water. The house itself hadn’t yet been immersed, but it was just a matter of time. I felt helpless, not knowing what to do and then came here and felt that at least reading about the history of Red River was one way to hold the whole catastrophe up in prayer.
I’d like to also share a song called “Requiem,” written by singer-songwriter, Eliza Gilkyson, a pal of Emmylou Harris, etc. She wrote the song after watching a fundraising event on television shortly after the catastrophic Asian tsumani in 2004, and “noted the poor connection between the moving humanitarian appeal of people’s words and the music performed.” Gilkyson states that the invocation of “Mother Mary” in her “Requiem” is “less Roman Catholic than an appeal to a more universal divine feminine.”
Here is the YouTube video link called “Requiem for Katrina,” with Gilkyson singing her song with her daughter:
Here are the words to “Requiem” which could be a prayer for those whose homes have been ravaged by the Red River.
mother mary, full of grace, awaken,
all our homes are gone, our loved ones taken,
taken by the sea,
mother mary calm our fears, have mercy,
drowning in a sea of tears, have mercy,
hear our mournful plea,
our world has been shaken,
we wander our homelands forsaken,
in the dark night of the soul bring some comfort to us all,
o mother mary come and carry us in your embrace,
that our sorrows may be faced,
mary fill the glass to overflowing,
illuminate the path where we are going,
have mercy on us all,
in funeral fires burning,
each flame to your mystery returning,
in the dark night of the soul your shattered dreamers,
make them whole,
o mother mary find us where we’ve fallen out of grace,
lead us to a higher place,
in the dark night of the soul our broken hearts you can make whole,
o mother mary come and carry us in your embrace,
let us see your gentle face, mary.
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Some areas have poor luck. If it’s not tornadoes, it’s floods.
I’ll send some positive energy out into the universe for the displaced folks. I hope everything returns to normal soon.
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Went through Fargo on a road trip coming back from Nova Scotia. Wonderful, hardworking, plain spoken people. It’s very sad to keep seeing good people go through these disasters. I can’t imagine the fear of being evacuated and leaving home behind. Bless them all.
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Flan, thank you for adding that beautiful prayer. I just checked the river levels at the National Weather Service’s Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service (LINK) and the current level of the Red River was 40.53 at 5:15pm.
It appears to have peaked at 40.82. It’s quite a relief since without the cold weather it might have gotten up to 44 feet. The river has frozen in places again. It remains to be seen what will happen over the rest of the week. But for now there is some relief.
There is great information at the links I provided at the end of this piece. Particularly about the history of the Red River Valley, one of the youngest geologically in the country.
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Heather, Stevo, Flan, thanks for the positive energy for the folks north of us. I’m a firm believer that every little bit helps those in need. The last big flood of the Red River of the North was in 1997. Some people chose to leave the area and not rebuild. Others rebuilt on the flood plain again and they were interviewing one family on the news tonight. It would be so hard to leave a river area you had lived in your whole life.
BTW, I should have clarified in the post that there are many Red Rivers, another notable one on the Texas/Louisiana border which is why the MN/ND river is named the Red River of the North. The Red River of the North originates at the confluence of the Bois de Sioux (river between South Dakota and MN) and Otter Tail River (which starts around Lake Bemidji in MN and flows south to meet up with the Bois de Sioux). The Red River of the North flows northward through the Red River Valley and forms the border between Minnesota and North Dakota before continuing into Manitoba, Canada. It empties into Lake Winnipeg, whose waters join the world’s oceans in Hudson Bay via the Nelson River. The towns at the confluence of the Red River of the North are Wahpeton, North Dakota and Breckenridge, Minnesota.
The Red River Valley is young because it represents the bottom or floor of what was a massive, ice-dammed lake: Glacial Lake Agassiz. The lake began to develop as ice from the last ice age melted back northward from our region, about 12,000 years ago. Lake waters finally drained completely away from the Fargo area about 9,300 years ago. Thus, the Red River of the North (as we know of it today) could not begin to flow until 9,300 years ago, when the lakewaters drained and land was finally exposed.
So the Red River Valley was not formed by a river, but instead is what is left of a glacier. Since the Red River Valley is not fully mature, the flooding tends to be wide but shallow. I had a friend from art school who was from Thief River Falls and we travelled up there a few times to do some research on Lake Agassiz. Geologically, it’s really got an interesting history. If there are other geology buffs out there, read the article by Donald P. Schwert, A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE GEOLOGY OF THE FARGO-MOORHEAD REGION NORTH DAKOTA – MINNESOTA (LINK). It takes the facts and adds a little romance from the days of the Ice Age that formed many of the lakes in the area.
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One more great link from the 1950 Red River of the North flood. U.S. Geological Survey Flood Photos — Red River of the North Flooding 1950 (LINK). Great black and white photos and follows the spring floods of 1950 in the Red River of the North and Winnipeg River Basins. It starts at the confluence of the Red River of the North at Wahpeton, North Dakota and Breckenridge, Minnesota, and follows the flooding all the way through the populated areas of Fargo, Moorhead, Grand Forks, and Winnipeg.
Something interesting from the article I mention in the last comment is that the soil around Fargo is: dominantly made of clays derived as meltwater rivers dispersed fine-grained sediments into Lake Agassiz. Most of these clays have their origins as churned-up shales, originally of Cretaceous age. The clays have expansive properties: they can absorb vast amounts of water and then give up that water during drought. As the clays absorb water, they expand and become weak and plastic. As they release water, they contract and become hard and brittle.
These expansive properties make it difficult to engineer and protect permanent structures in the Valley. Street surfaces, sidewalks, water lines, etc., rise and fall with the water content of the clays. Because the strength of these clays is generally low, heavier structures in Fargo must first have considerable foundation support, requiring piers (caissons) or pilings that pass entirely through the package of Lake of Lake Agassiz sediments to support the structure on firmer glacial materials beneath.
I had no idea that many of the buildings in Fargo have to be reinforced with pilings. Other contributing factors to flooding this year is the huge amount of snowfall, a streak of unusually warm weather a few weeks ago that added to the melt-off, and, as is happening in many areas of the country, build up of populated areas that causes faster water run-off rather than absorption of water deep into the ground (something I learned from the Raingarden workshop last week). I find the geology of an area and it’s impact so interesting. I also heard an MPR story that talked about how the more populated places become and the more global warming that happens, the more humans along flood plains or near the ocean shores will have to prepare for higher and higher cresting, build higher and higher levees. What worked 10 years ago, may not work today.
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We saw this on the news off and on Thursday, the day we were snowed in. It must be frightening to think what will happen as the river thaws and the runoff from upstream continues to thaw. I add my prayers to those already sent out from here.
QM, northern New Mexico has a town of Red River and a river, Red River. But it is small by comparison to some of the rivers mentioned in this post.
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ybonesy, I just checked to see how things are going in the Red River Valley and the river has fallen to just over 38 feet, more than 2 feet below its peak. The National Weather Service issued a new forecast that called for it to hit 36 feet by Thursday morning.
The story now is the blizzarding and snowfall that’s hit the area the last few days. We missed the snow but had lots of little hail and frozen rain where I live. It’s kind of miserable out.
It’s around freezing in Fargo and the wind was blowing out of the northeast at 22 to 29 mph but they were only getting 1 to 2 inch waves which was a relief. Wind and water can be deadly in a situation like that. They predicted 7 to 14 inches of snow but we’ll see what happens.
Here’s the whole story today on MPR: Wind and snow worry Red River residents by Dave Kolpack, Associated Press. March 31, 2009 (LINK).
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The Red River of the North continues to recede. It’s down to 34.11 feet as of 10:15 this morning. They are not ruling out that it may rise again with the new spring thaw. But for now things have calmed down.
There is still a lot of clean-up that needs to be done though. We saw on the news that in order to streamline donations and relief efforts for Fargo, a new website has been set up called Spirit of Fargo.
Here are a few links if you’d like to keep following the progress:
Spirit of Fargo Flood Fund (LINK) — donate to help clean-up efforts and those with property damage
The Fargo Flood Homepage (LINK) – ongoing river levels updated along with geology of area
City of Moorhead Flood Info (LINK) – not clear from the site where donations are going for Moorhead
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