The number arrived in late February 1997: 49 feet. That was the National Weather Service's crest forecast for the Red River at Grand Forks, North Dakota, matching the highest level from the 1979 flood. The Army Corps of Engineers recommended building dikes to 52 feet, three feet of margin. Residents and airmen from Grand Forks Air Force Base filled 3.5 million sandbags. The city prepared for 49 feet.
The winter that preceded the forecast had been relentless. Between November and mid-March, the temperature reached 40°F only three times. A hundred and seventeen inches of snow sat on frozen ground with nowhere to go. When temperatures finally climbed above freezing in late March, they stayed there for 27 consecutive days, sending meltwater into a river already running out of room.
The NWS did not revise its forecast until April 16, the day the river actually reached 49 feet. It was still rising. Two days later, at 8:08 p.m. on April 18, a new number: 54 feet. By then, dikes in the Lincoln Drive neighborhood had already broken. Water was rising an inch per hour. The Emergency Operations Center at the police station had to relocate when storm sewers backed up and the basement flooded within 30 minutes. Only about 1,000 of 52,000 residents had purchased flood insurance. Researchers later found that more than 90 percent knew it was available but didn't buy it because they trusted the forecast.
Mayor Pat Owens ordered the evacuation.
"If I evacuate this city and nothing happens they're gonna impeach me. But if I don't, we're going to lose lives."
Ninety percent of Grand Forks' 52,000 residents left their homes. They sheltered in airplane hangars at the Air Force base, sleeping on rows of cots. It was the largest peacetime evacuation in American history at that point.
The next day, a fire broke out downtown. Firefighters waded through chest-high water. Eleven buildings across three blocks burned. The images broadcast nationally were surreal: a city simultaneously flooding and on fire.
The river crested on April 21 at 54.35 feet. Five feet above the number everyone had planned for. Someone spray-painted "49 feet my ass" on the side of a ruined house. No one died directly from the flooding. But 75 percent of the city was underwater. In East Grand Forks, across the river in Minnesota, 2,274 of 2,301 homes sustained damage.
FEMA worked with both cities to buy out more than 800 properties in Grand Forks, with additional acquisitions across the river in East Grand Forks. Entire neighborhoods were demolished. Lincoln Drive, where the dikes first broke, became a park. The cleared land was redesigned into the Greater Grand Forks Greenway: 2,200 acres of open space, a state recreation area, and a 21-mile paved trail sitting on the wet side of a new levee system built to 60 feet. The $409 million federal project was completed in 2007.
When the Red River reached 49.33 feet in 2009, the third-highest crest on record, the Greenway absorbed the water as designed. No structural damage to the protected city.
A few property owners had refused the buyout. Levees were built around the city, and in some cases, those homes ended up on the river side. The Shadyridge-Adams Drive neighborhood sits between a levee and the river today. When the Red River rose in 2019, residents there lost utilities while the protected city behind the wall stayed dry. The levee runs between Grand Forks and their front doors.
And then there is the river. According to the Grand Forks Herald, a majority of the Red River's top-ten recorded floods at Grand Forks have occurred in the past 25 years. In 2019 and 2020, back-to-back crests of 46.94 and 47.70 feet tested the system. It held. The city's engineer told the Herald that residents now feel "psychological comfort" behind the levees. The 21-mile trail fills with walkers on warm days, cross-country skiers in winter. When the river rises each spring, the lower sections go underwater. That is what they were built to do.
The levees protect to 60 feet. The 1997 crest was 54. The system has margin, designed against a historical record that keeps rewriting itself.