After the water went down in Grand Forks in the spring of 1997, Tom Reiten and Joan Abraham stayed. They were the last residents on Lincoln Drive, a neighborhood of comfortable older homes in east-central Grand Forks that had filled like a bowl when the Red River overtopped the floodwall built to protect it. For four years they held out, mowing the lawns and trimming the hedges of neighbors who were already gone.
Six years earlier and 1,800 miles west, a physicist named Howard Matis was doing something that sounds like the opposite but carried the same weight. For months after the 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm reduced his house to a charred heap, he would come home from work, close his eyes, and try to reconstruct the contents of every drawer, shelf, cupboard, and closet. He was building an insurance inventory. He was also refusing to let the house disappear.
Two acts of holding on. What their communities built around them while they held diverged completely.
The Oakland firestorm of October 20, 1991, killed 25 people and destroyed 2,843 single-family dwellings and 437 apartment and condominium units across 1,520 acres. The fire started from an incompletely extinguished grass fire in the Berkeley Hills, reignited on a Sunday morning, and was driven southwest by Diablo winds gusting to 65 miles per hour through five years of drought-dry brush and freeze-damaged eucalyptus. The entire Hiller Highlands neighborhood was gone in minutes. By the time the winds died, the economic loss exceeded $1.5 billion.
The Grand Forks flood of April 1997 displaced more people but killed fewer. After a winter of eight blizzards that packed high-moisture snow across the Red River Valley, the National Weather Service forecast a crest of 49 feet, matching the worst flood in living memory. Grand Forks sandbagged to 52 feet. The river crested at 54.35 feet. Twenty-six feet above flood stage. The dikes in Lincoln Drive broke first, early on April 18. Mayor Pat Owens ordered the evacuation of over 50,000 people, the largest civilian evacuation in the United States since Atlanta in the Civil War.
"If I evacuate this city and nothing happens they're gonna impeach me."
The next day, with four feet of water standing in downtown Grand Forks, a fire broke out that damaged or destroyed eleven buildings across three city blocks. The city was simultaneously flooded and burning. Only about a thousand of Grand Forks' 52,000 residents carried flood insurance.
I keep coming back to that 49-foot forecast. The number that organized everything. Grand Forks sandbagged three feet above it and the river came in five feet higher. A single authoritative number can anchor an entire community's preparation, and when the actual event exceeds it, the failure feels like betrayal. It is a planning system calibrated to a past that no longer predicts the future. But it feels personal.
The two communities faced the same narrow window. Trauma was high. Political will was high. The federal government was paying attention. And each community had to decide what to do with the ground where the disaster had happened.
Oakland never really decided. That's the crucial thing. The rebuild became the default because no vote or policy ever interrupted it. The city stood up a one-stop permit shop where planning staff reviewed applications for setbacks and code compliance. Plans came in showing houses built right up to the setback lines, where before there had been yard space. Architects working in the permit shop commented on the pattern: larger "party" houses replacing simpler, smaller ones. But as long as the plans complied with city requirements, they were approved. No policy required or encouraged relocation. No one said wait. Large insurance settlements arrived. Developers bought vacant lots. The hillside, which before the fire had been scattered with small cottages from the 1920s and 1930s, French and English style, began filling with larger structures. Home theaters. Wine cellars. Bay views through floor-to-ceiling glass.
The median home price in the Oakland Hills before the fire was roughly $300,000. By the late 1990s, rebuilt homes averaged $700,000. Insurance companies paid replacement cost for older homes whose original construction methods were rare enough to generate enormous estimates. Developer Leonard Perillo explained that people "got huge settlements" because the replacement cost of the older houses was so high. Homeowners took those settlements and built bigger. Hiller Highlands was completely rebuilt by 1994 as modern townhomes with open floor plans.
I grew up in Oakland. The hills were always the hills, the place you could see from the flatlands, where the money lived above the fog line. What the fire did was accelerate a process that was already underway, concentrating wealth on terrain that fire had just proved was dangerous. Insurance checks arrived. Permits were approved. The hillside filled with houses that were individually safer and collectively worth more than anything that had burned.
Grand Forks chose differently, and the choice had authors. Mayor Owens set the tone immediately. City administrators and planners shaped the specifics. President Clinton flew in on April 22 and spoke to thousands in a hangar at Grand Forks Air Force Base. Congress moved quickly to fund a $409 million levee system. And FEMA's hazard mitigation grants, combined with state and HUD Community Development Block Grant funding, financed a voluntary buyout of properties in the floodplain.
The city's own records cite roughly 800 properties purchased in Grand Forks. Approximately half were in the Lincoln Drive neighborhood. Across the river, East Grand Forks received federal project approval within 75 days of the disaster declaration and made its first buyout offer on August 4, 1997. The speed was deliberate. Flood survivors needed to rebuild before winter.
What the city offered wasn't always enough. John Little, on Chestnut Street, was offered about $52,000 for his home. Not enough to buy a comparable house in Grand Forks. He figured he'd rent until he retired and moved to Mississippi. The Moens, nearby, hired their own appraiser and negotiated the city up to $66,000, but hadn't signed. The Cutshalls, a few blocks away on higher ground, were renting a rundown trailer in Emerado, not sure whether to clean up their house or wait for a possible buyout. Both the Moens' and Cutshalls' homes sat on what officials called the "wet" side of a proposed new dike.
The voluntariness of the buyout had limits when your house sat on the wrong side of a line someone else drew.
The president of the East Grand Forks planning-and-zoning commission put it this way:
"The river had been our friend for all these years. It had been like an old dog, sleeping comfortably at our feet, and then one day it jumped up and bit us. We had to decide: Do we put it to sleep or try to make amends?"
Oakland rebuilt in place. Grand Forks pulled back. Each community acted within the information and constraints it actually had. Oakland's hillside homeowners held insurance policies that assumed replacement. Grand Forks' floodplain residents held homes worth $52,000 in a city where the river had just crested 26 feet above flood stage. The window of high trauma and high political will opened for both. Reiten and Abraham kept mowing their absent neighbors' lawns. Matis kept reconstructing his house from memory. Around each of them, the landscape was already becoming something else.