In the aftermath of spring's record flooding in the Red River Valley, Mainstreet Radio’s Leif Enger reports on one of the most visible and immediate legacy of disaster…trash.
In Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, entire buildings have been transformed into trash; in Fargo, used sandbags form a whole new geography at the local landfill. Further upstream in the community of Breckenridge, hit hard by flooding, trucks trash off city streets.
The Red River flood of 1997 was a major flood that occurred in April and May 1997 along the Red River of the North in Minnesota, North Dakota, and southern Manitoba. The flood was the result of abundant snowfall and extreme temperatures. It was the most severe flood of the river since 1826. Water spread throughout the Red River Valley and affected the cities of Fargo and Winnipeg…but the greatest impact was in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, where floodwaters reached more than 3 miles inland. Damages in the Red River region totaled $3.5 billion. As a result of the 1997 flood and its extensive property losses, the United States and state governments made additional improvements to the flood protection system in North Dakota and Minnesota, creating dike systems.
Transcripts
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DOUG SCHMIDT: Dig into the pile, guys. Dig into the pile.
LEIF ENGER: The last of the sandbags came up in south Breckenridge this week. 100 bused-in volunteers formed one last human chain, this time to lift sandbags from a neighborhood dike, pass them to the street, and empty them in the path of a waiting front-end loader. Doug Schmidt came all the way from Long Prairie to help lay these sandbags weeks ago. He came back to help clean up.
DOUG SCHMIDT: Dump them in the street. Dump them in the alley. Wherever they want it, we dump it.
LEIF ENGER: Is there a little less pressure this time around?
DOUG SCHMIDT: I guess, for sure. It's not life or death right now.
CLIFF BARTH: Hi, I'm Cliff Barth. I'm on a city council in Breckenridge here in Minnesota. And right now, we're in the process of de-sandbagging. We fought flood for about a month now. Tomorrow, we're going to start with debris removal. And we have a lot of it. It looks like a war zone over here on the south side of Breck.
LEIF ENGER: The mounds of trash here breed similes-- a neighborhood looks like a war zone. It looks like a shipwreck, like a third-world country. Weeks past high water, you can stand at the railroad tracks and look down the street and see not many mounds but a single one, continuous serpentine, a dragon of trash.
JIM LUTZ: Furniture, sheetrock, paneling, insulation, appliances, on and on and on.
LEIF ENGER: Jim Lutz is operations manager for Northern Waste Systems across the river in Wahpeton.
JIM LUTZ: I haven't seen the total tonnage reports yet because we've just not had time to catch up with the paper. But I will tell you that the day that we started in the south side, which was a Sunday, we put nine hours in with four dump trucks being loaded by payloaders. We hauled over 100 tons. And that really only covered about four city blocks. And that was not complete. Those houses were not even near being finished. They were still hauling stuff out after we left them.
LEIF ENGER: The Prairie View landfill these days rumbles constantly with dump trucks. Its name is optimistic. You can see a lot of clay here, a lot of garbage, a few seagulls, not much prairie. But these towns are lucky in a couple of ways. For one thing, this landfill is close by, right on the edge of Wahpeton. For another, it's fairly new. There's a lot of room left. Good thing, says Brad Reilly, with all this traffic.
BRAD REILLY: It's tenfold what's going to go in there normally.
LEIF ENGER: Reilly works for Disposal Services, the company operating the Prairie View.
BRAD REILLY: We have projected time periods that this landfill is good for. And this, in the scope of things, is a very young landfill. We're not even to a tenth the capacity yet. But it'll have an impact, a definite, definite impact.
LEIF ENGER: In fact, the burden on Prairie View landfill has multiplied exponentially. It's supposed to be a demolition landfill reserved for sheetrock, paneling, and other construction materials less threatening to groundwater. But the record flooding prompted the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to relax certain guidelines. Now, household trash corrupted by sewage-- and that's almost everything from every basement-- is also being dumped at Prairie View. The MPCA says it weighed the possible risk to groundwater against the more immediate risk of disease from contaminated garbage sitting even longer on city streets.
The first floor is being rebuilt at the Wilkin County Environmental Office. Floodwaters chased some county employees to temporary quarters in a construction trailer. But environmental officer Bruce Poppel stayed dry. He's up on the second floor, tabulating the results of a recent collection drive for hazardous household trash, the kind of stuff everybody has on their basement shelves.
BRUCE POPPEL: 495 gallons of oil-based paint, 660 gallons of latex paint, 440 gallons of fuel products, gasoline, diesel, paint thinners.
LEIF ENGER: And residents are still calling with fuel oil leaks, pesticide spills, you name it. The environment, Poppel says, took a beating from the flood.
At a home in south Breckenridge, a volunteer named Dave hoists boxes of soaked sheetrock up from the basement and into a waiting wheelbarrow. The driveway is mounted high with wallboard, appliances, and history. The owner of the house, Connie Nennig, was born in Fargo in 1941. She was one of a set of quadruplets. She had a lot of newspaper articles.
DAVE: We wonder ourselves what they're going to do with it all. But they'll find a place for it.
LEIF ENGER: Leif Enger, Mainstreet Radio, Breckenridge.