Heath and I went up to Moorhead to help my Mother and her husband with the flood from Friday AM 3-27-09 to Sunday. Their home is about 100 yards from the river normally and they have a levy built to protect them from any past flood level.
They night before we drove up to Moorhead my mother and her husband believed they would lose the lower level of the house and likely the main floor too. This second pic is the back yard pool, levy/sandbags, ice and water.
A pic from the wall. Note the helicopter. There were a bunch of military, coast guard and news type helicopters around much of the time.
The next door neighbors shed and top of our wall. The wall had to be added to on multiple occasions. This is a problem because the plastic on the outside of the wall doesn't go up high enough and the wall does not have the 3 wide to 1 high proportion it needs.
When you needed more fresh sand bags they often seemed to just show up along with a bunch of firemen.
Here is our favorite fireman. He did a great job of directing the show and making sure people were safe. I was very impressed with every level of of this operation. They had a great info on the city
website to update people and the city leaders televised every morning meeting. You rarely saw people being the boss but everything just seemed to get done very efficiently. I am convinced that without this level of execution much of the city would be wet.
We had some wall seepage likely from freezing and thawing each day. Not bad since most others around us needed to pump water from inside their walls.
Two doors down the old Horn family home lost the lower level of the house.
The city needed to put a pipe that pumps 8800 gallons of water a minute next to the house. A little unnerving to have all that extra water and agitation next to the wall but the guys in the dry dive suits set it up well.
The mail must go through. Note the peoples homes on the left are on the river side of the earthen wall. To bad for them if their walls fail as the last one did.
And finally hope. Hovering ice on the tree = lower river.
As of today Susan and I have been married for 9 great years. Great does not mean free of stress especially when married to me with two small girls. Maya has been a total fuss butt for a few days and Susan like a trooper took her into the Dr. at 8pm last night returning home at 9:30PM to find that she was a fuss butt because she had ear infections in both ears and eye stuff. I thought it might just be allergies. This morning Susan woke Maya up and had to pry her pussed over eyes apart then do a water board imitation when giving her the new antibiotic medication. After this crying spell Susan drove Ella to school and then for the next half hour drove to her mothers home while Maya cried in the back of the van. 20 minutes into this I got a call from my wonderful wife. She said "I am going to kill myself and I just wanted you to know before I do that this all started the day I married you." Full of tact and empathy I suddenly realized it was our aniversary and said "It only gets better each year doesn't it?......" Later today I brought flowers and a card by her work.
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