Flood Fighting

The last two days have been hard. Fighting floods can be tough. Every muscle in my body aches. Last night was the first night this week that I got more than three hours of sleep. Many people have lost their homes, but for the most part, Fargo is doing pretty good today. The river rising has slowed, and it might have crested, but their not sure yet. It could still go up a bit if the weather warms up. The city is a mess. It’s like a war zone out there. Helicopters are patrolling the dikes, along with national guardsmen. Most of the dikes are built up high enough now. Now we just have to keep an eye on them 24/7. Sandbags are strategically placed throughout town to keep them warm and to have them ready to repair leaks as soon a possible. The river will remain high for a week or so.

Our house is pretty safe. We are five blocks or so away from the second line of dikes. I still moved most of our stuff up from the downstairs, and plugged all of our sewer drains down there, so we should be fine.

The people in this town are amazing though. Countless volunteers worked their ass off. Today they had to turn them away, because we have plenty of sandbags made up already for emergencies. At the beginning they were saying we would need 1.5 million sandbags to protect the city and they weren’t sure if we would be able to fill that many. Well, the last I heard volunteers have filled 3 million sandbags. Just amazing. Most of them were college and high school kids, but many people traveled from surrounding cities to help.

I love this city more than ever now. It truly is the people that make this city great. We are not out of it yet, but we are winning the battle. It would have been easily lost if it weren’t for the people. Everything was super organized. The city officials had great plans, and everybody in the city followed them. The two days that I was working with the volunteers not one of them complained, and some of them were on the third or fourth day of hard labor. Together we all fought to save our city, and for the most part we have. I’m not too sure if many other cities could have done what we have.

**Update**
Here are some great pictures of what we have been going through.