Kindred waits for Sheyenne
by Mike Nowatzki - 04/18/2009
KINDRED, N.D. – Despite the Sheyenne River standing a foot deep in her garage and her husband vacuuming water out of the basement, Nancy Anderson wasn’t frazzled Friday. “We’ve been down this road before,” she said, standing on the sandbagged deck of her home 1½ miles south of Kindred.
Up and down 55 miles of the bloated Sheyenne River between Kindred and Lisbon, emergency crews used boats, four-wheelers and patrol vehicles to check on the welfare of residents who live along its banks.
Cass County Sheriff Paul Laney said most residents appeared to be better prepared than during the first crest in late March. By noon, no one had to be rescued by boat or truck. [note by Barb: tonight's news said that this afternoon two people were evacuated by air boat.]
Still, the flood threat remains high with water from embattled Lisbon and Valley City on its way. “We know there’s a lot of people swamped, and as the water comes up, they’re being surrounded,” Laney said.
The city of Davenport built a clay dike about 300 yards long on its west side, where overland flooding from the Sheyenne is expected to bump up against the dike and railroad tracks as early as Sunday. “It’s a slow, agonizing, watch-it-come-this-way kind of thing,” Mayor Jason Lotzer said.
Davenport firefighters plan to use 10,000 sandbags trucked in from Fargo to protect a half-dozen rural homes between Davenport and Kindred.
Water spilling from the Sheyenne’s banks was running through Jim and Julie Gunkelman’s farmyard southwest of Kindred. Jim Gunkelman’s pickup pulled a trailer with three horses inside as he followed a Richland County sheriff’s deputy across a flooded gravel road. He was moving the horses to a neighbor’s place at the top of a nearby hill. “We’re just erring on the side of caution,” he said. “If we lose the road and we need to get them out, we’ve got a problem.”
To the east, two U.S. Border Patrol agents on ATVs plowed through water after checking on residents in three houses cut off by overland flooding. The neighbors were helping each other build ring dikes, said Agent Chris Michaloski, who usually is stationed in Oswego, N.Y., on Lake Ontario. “It’s just amazing how the communities all come together,” he said.
Gunkelman was hopeful the rising waters wouldn’t reach his house, but he said he hasn’t seen so much water since he moved to the farm in 1975. “It’s gonna be close,” he said.
Anderson and her husband, Dale, and other family members and friends took turns every two hours manning two wet/dry vacuums, a squeegee and two sump pumps to suck water out of the basement. She expects they will be housebound for a total of four or five weeks as the Sheyenne slowly recedes.
Anderson said that while the driveway into their yard is under several inches of water, this year’s flood hasn’t been as bad as the ’97 flood, when they had to canoe to their mailbox. The couple have endured several floods since they bought the home in 1976, but they love the beauty of the riverfront property, she said. “I always say to my husband, ‘It’s been 33 years, do you think we should move now?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘this is just temporary.’ And it is,” she said.
In Cass County, volunteers built ring dikes around farmsteads in the “hot zone between Kindred and Davenport,” said Matt Palluck, assistant fire chief in Davenport.
Local farmers hauled in pallets of sandbags from surrounding communities no longer in the midst of a flood fight.
“We’re keeping our fingers crossed,” Palluck said Saturday. “We could be done sandbagging today or tomorrow, then we’ll keep an eye on the water. We’ve had a lot of volunteers. We’ve had some of the best cooks in the valley here.”
The earthen dike west of Davenport was to be completed by Saturday afternoon, but local officials were keeping an eye on a railroad crossing two miles south and one mile east of town.
“If that were to break, then we’d have water coming into the south and east,” Palluck said. “It would start filling up a couple sections on the south end of town, which would give us a different problem.”
The Cass County Sheriff’s Department continued boating operations Saturday, including one rescue operation in Richland County. Two adults and three dogs were evacuated.
