Worries ebb, flow in towns downriver

Even as the flood fight in Fargo and Moorhead is easing, the swollen river continues to bedevil residents of smaller downstream communities.

The small Minnesota communities of Hendrum and Oslo struggled Sunday and Monday to protect towns that are normally secured from the Red by permanent ring dikes.

And residents of Grand Forks, N.D., and East Grand Forks, Minn., ground zero of the catastrophic 1997 floods, have stiffened their defenses even as it appears they will be spared anything resembling a repeat of 12 years ago.

"We were scrambling here for a while yesterday," Mike Smart, the emergency commander for Hendrum, said Monday. "But everything's much better -- we think -- this morning."

On Sunday, at least seven ice jams north of the city of about 300 about 30 miles north of Moorhead, caused the floodwaters of the Red and Wild Rice rivers to rapidly back upstream and nearly overtop the city's permanent dikes.

The rise caught emergency officials by surprise because they weren't expecting the Red to crest until midweek.

Volunteers spent the afternoon frantically piling sandbags on top of the dikes and prevented any breaches.

At least one neighboring farmstead was inundated, and several rural residents were brought to higher ground.

"I expect we're going to be at this for a long duration," he said.

Massive ice jams also were the problem Sunday in Oslo, a city of about 350 about 20 miles north of East Grand Forks.

A Minnesota National Guard Chinook helicopter tried to use a concrete-filled steel basket to break up the jams. Repeatedly dropping the 3,000-pound weight onto the ice, the helicopter crew was unable to break the jam.

"So now we've got to look at other options," said Oslo Fire Chief Rodney Cote. "The Army Corps [of Engineers] is going to try some other ideas, but they haven't told us what they are yet."

Guard troops have been helping ferry rural residents into town or to relatives' homes.

As a precaution, the ice jams have prompted officials to place boxcars on a railroad bridge in hopes that the extra weight will keep the span in its moorings.

At Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, sandbagging operations were temporarily suspended Monday as the threat from the 2009 flood continues to appear to be easing. The rise of the river has tailed off and is not expected to crest in those cities until Friday.

The crest is currently predicted to reach lower than 51 feet, 3 feet shy of the level it reached 12 years ago and nearly 10 feet lower than the flood walls in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks.