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The historic floods along the Red River between Minnesota and North Dakota are serious enough to warrant Story of the Day treatment for the second straight day. The sandbag dikes along twelve miles of riverbank around Fargo are 43-feet tall. The problem is that the forecast for this weekend's flood crest is a 43-foot high water. With such a minimal margin of error, the city of 92,000 has prepared evacuation plans. NBC and CBS both led with the sandbagging effort. Oddly, ABC chose to kick off with another natural disaster, a tornado that touched down overnight in the small Mississippi town of Magee. The reason it was odd to convert a local storm into a national lead was that the twister killed nobody.

"Too much water everywhere," muttered ABC's Barbara Pinto. "The rising river forced the city to call on thousands of additional volunteers in a race to build the levees even higher." On NBC, Kevin Tibbles felt "a growing sense of urgency--the news the Red River will crest at higher than expected levels is pushing volunteers to their limits." CBS' Dean Reynolds explained that all that water was melting snow. It was "a winter with almost 25" more snow than usual, 67% above average."

Early Show weathercaster Dave Price boated into the countryside beyond the levees for CBS. "What is so difficult about navigating the waters at this point is that the current is normally just 2 mph but we are floating through someone's backyard and the current is coming at us at 20 mph, making getting people out of homes a job that only the Coast Guard can do." A case in point was the Frei household, who explained their plight from their roof: "Our dike broke at 6:45am--and big bang--and within 45 seconds there was water coming in the front door and it was up to waist level on the main floor within a matter of four or five minutes." A helicopter lifted the Freis to dry land.


Andrew Tyndall 3/27/09 7:12:19 pm

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