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

Relief workers will tell you that disasters typically follow four stages, similar to those that Elizabeth Kübler-Ross identified in the grieving process. First, there's a "heroic phase," where people rally to save their town. Then comes a short-lived "honeymoon phase," where citizens are elated simply to have survived. Then, invariably, a "disillusionment phase" sets in, when survivors have to grapple with the long, frustrating process of rebuilding before finally moving on to the "reconstruction phase."

The disillusionment phase is the most dangerous. "All this energy gets released as you try to recover," says Maidenberg, "but that energy isn't infinite. As it begins to ebb, the routine of life comes back, and politics come back. When that curtain comes down, what you have built in that precious time is what gives you the base for going forward."

Within weeks of the flood, residents of East Grand Forks began returning to town, housed in FEMA trailers, and officials began planning for life in a dramatically altered landscape. Central to that plan was an emotional question: Should we embrace the river or abandon it? "The river had been our friend for all these years," says Steve Gander, an optometrist and former president of the town's planning-and-zoning commission. "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?"

The group unanimously decided to make peace with the river and to preserve it as the centerpiece of their revitalization plan. But they knew that it would be impossible to lure people back without guaranteeing protection against future natural disasters. It fell to Gary Sanders, a consulting engineer and project manager for flood recovery, to find a way to ensure that what the city planned to build would not fall victim to the river's next rampage. The easiest solution would have been to build a high dike -- the primary solution adopted by Grand Forks. But it would have cut off the view of the river from downtown.

Looking for other solutions, he turned to a Massachusetts-based company, Flood Control America LLC, which licensed a product called an Invisible Flood Control Wall. It had been developed in Cologne, Germany to protect the area around the city's famous cathedral from periodic flooding by the Rhine. Essentially a post-and-plank structure, the wall can be assembled to keep out floodwaters, then deconstructed and put back in the shed when the waters recede. "When I first brought up the idea, the Corps of Engineers laughed hysterically," Sanders says. Sanders persevered, however, and now the infrastructure for a 1,000-foot wall, protecting downtown, supplements the two concrete and earthen-ring dikes that guard the rest of the city.

With access to the river as the city's guiding principle, municipal leaders needed a new vision for the downtown area. The group's consensus was that the new and improved East Grand Forks should be a destination -- a place where families would come for shopping, camping, dining, and exploring along the river. "We asked ourselves, 'What do we have to build and what amenities do we have to offer to get people to come here?' " says Val Gravseth, the mayor's assistant.

For inspiration, they turned to the city's history, back to Prohibition, when the Minnesota side of the river was Sin City -- offering the most fun you could have west of Chicago. City planners envisioned a more family-friendly version of the Roaring Twenties town, with an emphasis on fine dining over honky-tonk and shopping over gambling joints. They lobbied the state legislature for four additional liquor licenses and began mapping plans for a Restaurant Row facing the river. The city's historic saloon, Whitey's, would be the centerpiece. Built in 1925, Whitey's had been damaged beyond repair by the flood. But the bar's owner, Greg Stennes, had salvaged its stainless-steel horseshoe bar -- the famous Wonderbar -- and pledged to rebuild the art-deco landmark in the new location. Similarly, the popular Blue Moose restaurant, beloved by locals for attractions like Walleye Wednesdays, agreed to move its flooded building to the Row.

To attract more visitors to downtown, East Grand Forks officials lured Cabela's, the famous outdoor outfitter, to town with $7 million in incentives. And they commissioned a city hall worthy of the "grand" in East Grand Forks. Stauss, a man who could never be accused of thinking small, had a vision of the building that would rise from a bleak little stretch of DeMers Avenue, the city's main thoroughfare. "The architect asked, 'What kind of building do you want?' I said, 'You know Thomas Jefferson's Monticello? Something like that,' " he says.