Grand Forks and East Grand Forks: After the Flood (Literally)

Spring has a certain smell in the Red River Valley. It's the earthy fragrance that is created when the melting snows of the bitter winter meet the prairie's rich, black loam, signaling the rebirth of the land. Kris Compton, a banker with Alerus Financial in Grand Forks, North Dakota and a devoted gardener, always loved that smell. It lifted her spirits, augured the end of the region's annual hibernation, and promised that the flat, barren plains would soon flower again. The scent means something quite different to Kris's 18-year-old daughter, Meghan. "She says she hates that smell," Compton says sadly. "It reminds her of the flood."

The flood. It's the marker against which all time is now measured in Grand Forks and in its little-sister city, East Grand Forks, across the river in Minnesota. Five years after April 18, 1997, that terrible day when the river rose up and swallowed both communities, people are still struggling to rebuild. The progress has been remarkable. There are restaurants and shops where there was once nothing but a five-mile-wide swath of muddy water. There are offices and boutiques where a fire once raged, gutting downtown Grand Forks. There are expansive plans and earnest committees, as well as political casualties, stalled construction, and a lot of people who still feel the effects of the flood weighing heavy on their bank accounts and hopes for the future.

But despite the enormous pain of the past five years, the one sentiment that you hear over and over from the region's stoic residents is this: We're so lucky. Not many people have a chance to build something so significant in their lives.

Lynn Stauss, mayor of East Grand Forks, remembers the horror of the day that changed his life forever. "The entire community was covered with water," he says. "Every business in town was flooded. Only a few houses were spared."

More than 58,000 people from the two cities fled with just their children, their pets, and the clothes on their backs. It was the largest evacuation of an American city in that century. Many had to be rescued by boat as sirens wailed and helicopters circled overhead.

On the Grand Forks side, things became even worse as the flood triggered a fire that destroyed much of the downtown area. The image of the charred hulk of the National Security Building is eerily prescient of what the remains of the World Trade Center would look like five years later. Total losses were pegged at more than $1 billion.

Each family had personal crises to contend with, but city leaders, many struggling with their own losses, had even more-urgent questions before them: How do you rebuild two cities, in two different states, when there are so many competing priorities -- housing, water, power, schools, businesses, communications -- and find funding to support them all? Or do you simply shutter what's left of the city and move on?

"We were having a near-death experience," remembers Mike Maidenberg, publisher of the Grand Forks Herald and a member of the former Grand Forks Downtown Development Committee. "After the flood and the fire, we could have gone into a death spiral where people would have felt that it was too hard to rebuild. There was the realization that it was now or never. If we were going to get together as a community, we had to act."

As the larger of the two cities, Grand Forks got most of the national media's attention. The haunting image of the fire-ravaged downtown; the scope of the devastation; the valiant story of its newspaper -- which never missed a day of publication; and the down-home appeal of the city's mayor at the time, Pat Owens, a 57-year-old grandmother, made it an irresistible story. But on the other side of the river in East Grand Forks, Stauss and his team of city leaders were facing huge devastation as well. The entire town of 9,000 people had been evacuated, and only 7 of the town's 3,500 houses were spared flood damage. The commercial district was wiped out. City hall was underwater. "We joked that East Grand Forks stood for 'Everything Got Flooded,' " Stauss says.

Stauss, attired for weeks in a ratty sweatshirt emblazoned with "USA" -- the only thing that he had managed to salvage when the waters swamped his house -- became the group's spokesman and the voice of hope for his beleaguered city. "My main job as mayor was to be a cheerleader," says Stauss, a genial former fourth-grade teacher. "Just like Rudy Giuliani was for New York. It would have been easy for people to say, 'Let's just get out of here.' But you have to show people that there's hope, and then come through with something."

Officials in both cities knew that they had to act fast -- not only because it was critical to restore order to a city whose residents were all homeless, but also because natural disasters have a predictable emotional arc whose effects can best be mitigated by speed.