Pre-1997 Flood Walls and Levees in Grand Forks

This week, I’ve been trying to work a bit on an almost overdue project on pre-1997 flood wall in Grand Forks, North Dakota. For those who don’t know the story, the cities of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks were devastated during the flooding of the Red River of the North in 1997. The destruction was so extensive that the cities were evacuated in the largest peace time evacuation in the US prior to Katrina. Part of the reason for the destruction was that the river breached the cities’ flood walls which originally dated to the 1950s and had shown signs of being inadequate in the 1970s. As a note, I’m conflating built masonry flood walls and earthen levees here because they’re all part of the same system. As part of the upgraded flood protection system the 1950s levees were largely removed.

I regularly walk through Lincoln Park here in Grand Forks. It’s part of the Grand Forks park district and on the “wet side” of the current flood wall and levee system. In my decade of wandering in this park, I’ve often tried to identify fragments of the 1950s flood wall and had many false positives and theories about where it runs.

Earlier this year, we discovered a complete set of topographic maps of the city from 1994. That means these maps show the pre-1997 flood protection system for Lincoln Park.

The University of North Dakota’s Chester Fritz Library’s Department of Special Collections has kindly agreed to digitize these maps for us and I’ve started the process of georeferencing them. This allows me to locate the pre-1997 flood wall in post-1997 space and add topographic detail to earlier aerial photos of the area. Below is an image of the 1994 topographic maps and an aerial photograph from 1962 (I think).

The 1950s flood wall protected up to about 830 feet ALS (which is 30 feet above the level of the river). The current flood walls protect up to about 860 feet ASL (or 60 feet above the river level).

Here’s the 1950s flood walls, which I realize are not terribly visible in these images, so I’ve also included a detail.

Finally, for fun, I’ve superimposed the pre-1997 flood walls on the 2009 Red River floods when the river crested at nearly 41 ft. Of course, this shows nothing of note as the pre-1997 flood walls were long gone by 2009, but it does show the extent of an inundation from which our current flood walls and levees protect us.

This exercise has several points. First, and most proximate, the 1994 topographic maps will allow me to reconstruct the Lincoln Park neighborhood (and now lost addresses in Riverside and Downtown) so that we can connect the census records to specific properties.

There is a more conceptual consideration which is how to mark significant lost features in the landscape. As someone who came to Grand Forks after the 1997 flood, I struggled to make sense of a fluvial landscape that had changed radically in less than a decade when I arrived in 2004. Casual conversations with folks who were in Grand Forks during the flood indicates that the trauma of events in 1997 and the significant changes to the flood protection system has muddled memories of earlier levees and flood walls.

In some ways, commemorating these now lost levees and walls could serve as a reminder how much the fluvial landscape has changed. In the biggest picture, it can remind us of the character of supermodernity and the contemporary capacity to transform landscapes in short order. In smaller picture, it reminds that our current relative security behind the major flood wall and levee system is not a guarantee of safety in the future any more than earlier, now vanished walls, were a guarantee in the past.