Last Wednesday morning Mike & I were sandbagging. Our friend Jackie lives on South River Road. With the river crest expecting to come over the weekend, there was a big push in these neighborhoods to raise their backyard dikes with sandbags. City crews had worked long into the night on Tuesday dropping off pallets of sandbags. My pictures will show pallets of sandbags in the street. At 9 am  a labor force of at least 2 busloads of students from Shanley High School were dropped off. Those kids were really great pitching in to help out people they didn’t even know. It only took a couple of hours to sandbag the area behind Jackie’s house and 2 of her neighbors. After laboring several days to sandbag during last year’s flood this just seemed too easy.  The city was raising the dikes only 2 feet in this area–to meet a level of 41 feet whereas last year it was raised to 45 feet (if I remember correctly).

Mike was wearing a yellow rain slicker  and must have looked official. He talked to both a local newspaper reporter and a national TV producer. The next day our names were mentioned in the paper and, don’t blink you’ll miss us, we were briefly on the CBS Morning Show. Not quite 15 minutes of fame–more like 10 seconds.

Here are sandbagging pictures. Click on any picture for a full size view.

There’s an old Johnny Cash song that goes “how high is the water mama? 10 feet high and rising.” As the song progresses, the water levels (in the song) rise. As Fargo goes into flood mode, that song always plays in the back of my mind.

We officially hit flood stage somewhere during the night last Friday into Saturday. On Sunday, I walked the dog, where I could, in Lindenwood Park along the river.  The channel is open and water is clearly spilling out of the banks. There is still plenty of snow to melt yet. Here are some pictures I took yesterday. The water level was probably around 21 feet high yesterday, as of this writing, the water level is at 24.6 feet (and rising). Click on a picture for the full size image.

After walking through the park, I stopped at Jackie’s house, (she lives right on the river) to see how things are progressing. Her back yard is cleared of snow and ready for sandbagging. No word yet on when that will take place. She said you can visibly see the river rising hour by hour. I can only imagine how nerve wracking that must be for her. We’ll be ready to help sandbag when the time comes.

If anyone is interested, there is a website dedicated to the flood you can check out. The Forum also has a blog dedicated to the flood watch that you can also read.

Water is now at 24.72 feet–and rising