I had some free time this afternoon, so a co-worker and I decided we should volunteer some of our time to help those living near the Red River fight the flood.
It was a pretty nice day to be building dikes, which is what we ended up doing in south Moorhead today. We found a couple of different families that were building walls of sandbags around their houses, so we stopped and chipped in for a couple of hours.
You never know who you’re going to run into during the flood fight. I crossed paths with someone who was in the same wedding party as I was last September. I looked at him and said, "You look familiar," and was then reminded of who it was. Small world.
There definitely isn’t the sense of panic like there was last year during the flood fight. The so-called "Goethe Mobile Flood Unit" – a name that my car received last year when driving co-workers around to fight the flood – was kept much busier last year.
But once you’ve stopped a Red River that rose to 40 feet like last year’s did, a crest prediction of 37 to 39 feet this year doesn’t seem that bad. It still takes a lot of work, but now you know as a community that you’ve done it before.
Anyway, it was a good time out there considering it was hard work in the sandbag lines. Special thanks to the Salvation Army truck that stopped. I appreciated the sandwiches, granola bars and Gatorade made available to myself and the rest of the dike-builders.
Here’s a couple of photos I took during the Salvation Army lunch break.
