[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 51 (Friday, April 25, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3718-S3721]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       DISASTERS IN NORTH DAKOTA

  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I just returned from my home State of 
North Dakota. And I know my colleague has spoken as well about the 
challenges that we are facing in North Dakota and in our region as a 
result of the disasters that have occurred. I wanted to visit with my 
colleagues and explain to those who watch these proceedings what is 
happening in this State, and in this region.
  North Dakota, as everyone knows who has watched the news in the last 
couple of weeks, has been dealt about as tough a blow as you can deal a 
State or region with a series of tough storms, floods, and fires.
  It is normally, for those who visit and especially those of us who 
live there, a State blessed with enormous beauty and with sturdy, 
determined, and wonderful people. But for much of the past 6 months our 
State has been hit with some of the worst weather known to man. We have 
been hit with five to seven major blizzards, and additional minor 
blizzards, during this winter.
  This photograph is of a farmer in North Dakota who stands on flat 
ground. But as you can see, the snowdrift is somewhere around 15 to 18 
feet high on his farm. He sent me the picture just to demonstrate what 
kind of snow has come to his farm, and what these blizzards and winds 
have done to him. These nine blizzards that we have seen have dropped 3 
years' worth of snow in North Dakota, and in 3 months. Anyone who knows 
about North Dakota winters knows that we have some pretty difficult 
days in the winter from time to time.
  But when you give us 3 years' worth of snow, over 10 feet of snow in 
a several-month period, that is an enormous quantity of moisture, and 
if that was not bad enough, that 3 years' worth of snow this winter 
arrived after 4 straight years of rainfall that was far above normal. 
So that snow fell on a ground that was already saturated. So when the 
spring thaw came, there was nowhere for melting snow to go.
  Most Americans have now seen on the front pages of their newspapers 
and on their television sets and heard on radio news programs the 
result of all this. Today I want to report to you on some of the things 
that you may not have seen.
  This is an aerial view of Harwood, ND. This is just a few miles north 
of Fargo, ND. This is land that is in the Red River Valley, some of the 
most fertile land in our entire country. It is flat as a table top. 
There is not a hill that you can see anywhere. And you can see what has 
happened. This city of Harwood, incidentally, is one of the only cities 
that built a little ring dike and you can see that this city is dry. It 
is a very small community but the flood is all around it. It gives you 
some dimension of this flood. I have flown over the flood about three 
or four times in the last week or so and all you see are miles and 
miles and miles of water. And you cannot see any evidence of a river. 
The tiny river, which is the Red River, normally not very substantial 
at all, has now become a 200-mile lake.
  I want to talk to you about the scope of the disaster. There isn't 
anything that I have seen, and I have seen a fair number of disasters, 
both in North Dakota and around the country, that compares with it. It 
is deeper, it is wider and it is longer reaching with longer-term 
implications than any I have ever seen, and it touches almost everybody 
and everything. The people who keep statistics on these things tell me 
that about 20 percent of North Dakotans have been severely affected by 
this ongoing disaster. The damage to property alone will likely exceed 
$1 billion and probably run into the several billions of dollars if you 
include all of the other ancillary problems that will result from this 
including preventing planting for agricultural crops and more.
  Property damage is just one part of the story, and one of the reasons 
I have come to the Senate Chamber today is to say that even though we 
have lost a staggering amount of property in these floods, much more 
than property has been and is being destroyed. This is a challenge to 
our State and our region's economy that is unlike any other challenge I 
have ever seen.
  It is really a significant blow to an economy of a region in our 
country.

[[Page S3719]]

 The disaster is, of course, in our cities but it is also on our farms. 
You have seen the pictures of the cities and you perhaps know that 
Grand Forks, ND, the second-largest city with 50,000 people, is now 
virtually a ghost town.
  Two days ago, in the City of Grand Forks--and this picture, by the 
way, is a picture of one of the bridges. None of the bridges are usable 
in Grand Forks. All of the bridges are closed and most of them are 
underwater. This is just before this bridge went underwater. But you 
will see the Red River inundates all of the buildings on all sides of 
the river.
  Two days ago I was in a boat on the main street of Grand Forks, ND, 
with the water, I would guess, up to a person's neck. I was not out 
standing in it. I was in a Coast Guard boat. We ran over a car, as a 
matter of fact, ran over the top of a car and did not know what we hit. 
We knew we hit something with this Coast Guard boat, and we looked back 
and saw there was an antenna, a radio antenna of a car sticking out of 
the water about 2 inches. That is how we knew we hit a car in this 
boat. Cars are under the water, submerged under the water on the main 
street of this town. And it demonstrates what this town faces. It is a 
community of 50,000 people where there is no water, no sewer system, 
and no electricity in most of the town. Virtually all of the people 
were evacuated during this flood.
  So when you go through this community, you discover a town of 50,000 
people with no one home and most of the houses and businesses submerged 
or with water up to their windows, in some cases up to the eves 
troughs. Most people have seen pictures of the destruction of this 
city. And it is only one city, as you know.
  We have seen the destruction of the downtown area of Grand Forks, 
with a fire in the buildings which destroyed nearly a city block. This 
is a picture of the firemen in Grand Forks who were fighting the fire 
in waist-deep floods. I talked to the fire chief and to some firemen 
and almost nowhere will firefighters be confronted with standing in 
ice-cold water, water up to their waist and their chest, water filled 
with sewage, water filled with fuel, standing their trying to fight a 
fire, incidentally, without water in their fire hoses. Some of these 
valiant firefighters were trying to fight a fire that was destroying an 
entire city block with fire extinguishers because that was all the 
tools they had at their disposal.
  Well, you have seen the pictures of what occurred in downtown Grand 
Forks. That is only part of the story. The other part of the story is a 
picture of North Dakota farms. This is a picture of a North Dakota farm 
and, of course, it looks like a picture of the Great Lakes. There is, 
indeed, a barn and a silo, but all of the rest of what is farmland now 
appears for all other purposes like a lake because it is all 
underwater.
  We have a substantial disaster on our farms. During all of these 
massive blizzards and the flooding, farmers and ranchers in North 
Dakota alone have lost over 150,000 head of cattle--150,000 head of 
livestock dead from these storms.
  By itself, that would categorize this winter as a pretty tough 
winter, but there is much more. The damage to farm buildings, farm 
homes, barns, and granaries from the most recent blizzard alone is 
estimated to be about $21 million, according to early estimates.
  As you know, about 2\1/2\ to 3 weeks ago, just as the spring thaw 
began to occur and just as calving season began in North Dakota on our 
farms and ranches, we were hit with a blizzard that dumped up to 20 and 
in some cases 24 inches of snow on our State, with 50 and 60 mile an 
hour winds and another whiteout blizzard where people could not see. Of 
course, now all of that is beginning to melt and it has caused, along 
with all of the other moisture, the catastrophic flooding in our State.
  This is another picture of what is farmland, probably land on which 
either wheat or sugar beets or potatoes are grown in the Red River 
Valley. Now, we are at a time of the year when people should be in the 
fields with tractors and seeders, planting. Instead, their fields are 
flooded. We have 1.7 million acres under water at this point and much 
of those 1.7 million acres of flooded farmland will probably not be 
planted this year at all. That is a very difficult blow to our 
agricultural economy.
  Where oceans of wheat would wave in the wind, we now have oceans of 
water this spring in the Red River Valley. And when the water does 
recede, it is still going to take weeks to get into those fields. It is 
going to be touch and go as to whether much of them will be planted 
this year.
  Those are some statistics and images of the disaster with respect to 
dead cattle, inundated farm land, ravaged cities.
  Much of the disaster is also taking place in our small towns. Towns 
like Pembina and Drayton, and Harwood and scores like them in North 
Dakota, all have had to fight these floods in 1997. In fact, in Pembina 
and Drayton right now as I speak the crest is just beginning. Up in the 
Pembina area, they are fighting like the devil to try to save their 
homes. They have been evacuated. They have had to abandon most of the 
sandbag lines, and it appears that this entire city will have to be 
completely evacuated, and whatever the flood does to Pembina it does to 
Pembina. All of us are hoping and praying that that small community is 
able to get through this, but because of the evacuation we will not 
know what the fate of Pembina, ND, is until the water is gone.
  There is a meeting this weekend that President Clinton is hosting 
with President Ford and President Bush and Colin Powell and others on 
the issue of voluntarism. That meeting could probably learn a lot from 
the last several weeks in North Dakota. The general who heads the Corps 
of Engineers told me that up and down the Red River Valley, in 
Wahpeton, Breckenridge, Fargo-Moorhead, and on, he said he has never 
seen a more aggressive flood fight by people than he has in the Red 
River Valley this year. Thousands and thousands of people have decided 
to volunteer their time to be on sandbag lines and to do all of the 
things that are necessary to help build dikes and try to fight this 
flood. So what I want to do is talk a little about the people in North 
Dakota as well, and some of the real heroes in our State that we do not 
hear quite as much about.
  I have described a little about all of these volunteers. I want to 
talk a little about some of them as well.
  I spoke in this Chamber one day some while ago after we had another 
one of those whiteout blizzards in North Dakota, the kind that came 
raging in and no one could see their hand in front of their face. That 
is called a whiteout blizzard, the wind blowing 50 miles an hour and 
snowing. You cannot see a thing. It is dangerous and takes lives and 
kills livestock.
  I told them about a fellow named Don Halvorson, who is a farmer near 
Grafton, ND, and a woman named Jan Novak, who was going home from work 
at 10 in the evening. She drove into this whiteout blizzard outside of 
Grafton, ND, could not see, and pulled off the road and became stuck. 
There she was at 10 or 11 at night in a desperate blizzard, 
temperatures were way below zero with massive winds. And she told me 
that she prayed and prayed and she worried very much that she may not 
survive this.
  The county sheriff got a call from Jan Novak's husband who said that 
his wife had not returned home and he was very worried about her being 
lost in the blizzard. The county sheriff began a search with members of 
law enforcement and they discovered that they could not search because 
they could not see anything either. They could not be on the roads 
because there was no visibility. They began to call the farms up and 
down the line where she might have driven, and they called a farm that 
was operated by Don Halvorson and his wife. Don was in bed; it was 3 
a.m. They woke him up and asked him if he had seen Jan Novak. He did 
not know her, of course. But they said she was out in this blizzard and 
had not been heard from. And he, of course, said, no, he had not seen 
her, and he went back to bed.
  He told me that he laid there but could not sleep, and so at 3:30 
a.m. he got back up. He bundled himself up, went out in this whiteout 
blizzard, got on his tractor that had a cab over it. And in his tractor 
without visibility beyond his front wheels he went up and down the 
roads looking for Jan Novak, for 3 hours. And at 6:30 in the morning 
Jan Novak said she thought at that

[[Page S3720]]

point she may not get out of this. And her head was bowed and she was 
praying in her car in the middle of this raging blizzard, and this Don 
Halvorson drove up in his tractor. She saw the tractor and this fellow 
who did not know her but could not sleep at 3:30 in the morning because 
someone was out there, rescued her, saved her life. And she said if you 
ever think prayers don't matter, when I saw this fellow I didn't know 
driving this tractor, risking his life in this blizzard to save mine, I 
now understand about the power of prayer.
  You do not hear so much about heroes these days, I suppose, but 
people like Don Halvorson really deserve to be mentioned because they 
do things for each other that save lives and make life better. And the 
only way you can really survive in these tough times is to have people 
like Don Halvorson and Jan Novak and others who care about each other.
  Another hero is Jeff Differdin. He is a Valley City snow plow 
operator. During the blizzard just 3 weeks ago, Jeff drove his snow 
plow up and down interstate 94--the interstate had long been closed; 
nobody could see anything--searching for a car that had been stranded 
for more than 6 hours. They were worried about the safety of the people 
in that car.
  The visibility was so poor, he learned later that he once had driven 
within 8 feet of that car but couldn't see it in a whiteout blizzard. 
He kept looking, kept looking, risked his life and finally found that 
car and saved all of the occupants.
  I was in Mandan, ND, and met the fellows who went out and saved a 
little boy in the middle of a raging blizzard, with a snowbank 15 feet 
high over a road. A little boy was suffering a severe and acute medical 
problem and would have died from it had he not gotten to a hospital, 
except the problem was he was miles and miles and miles away from the 
hospital. And between him and the hospital, in a whiteout blizzard, was 
a 15-foot snowdrift. Two ambulance crews and two road crews of 
volunteers went looking for that boy. They plowed through from both 
sides of this 15-foot drift and got him out and got him to a hospital 
and saved his life. I talked about those folks a while ago on the floor 
of the Senate as well.
  I would also like to talk just for a moment about the 27 members of 
the Grand Forks Fire Department. I mean, they are real-life, big-size 
heroes of the last few weeks. That blaze that raged through downtown 
Grand Forks Saturday and Sunday, a lot of people don't know--they know 
they fought a blaze, this fire department, under heroic conditions. A 
lot of people do not know, in those buildings, in the downtown that was 
destroyed--and here is a picture of the firemen, you can see, fighting 
the fire in water up to their waists, sewage-infested water, ice cold 
water. An entire city block burned. I saw that block the other day from 
a boat, sitting right in front of it. It looks like the pictures of 
Dresden in World War II. These firemen saved the lives of 20 people, 
pulled them out of those buildings and fought that fire for 16 hours in 
contaminated, freezing water, so cold it was causing hypothermia.
  They did not have, as some fire departments do, waterproof hip-
waders. That is not what they were standing in that water in. They did 
not have, necessarily, all the right equipment. And they did not have 
water to fight the fire with. One of those young firemen said to me, 
``You know, normally water is our ally. When we see a fire, as 
firefighters, we know what we are going to do. Water is our ally. We 
were standing in waist deep water and had no water to use.'' So they 
improvised. A portable water gun was brought in and mounted on a nearby 
parking garage, and they fought it with that for a while and with their 
fire extinguishers. They had to hook up the water gun, groping around 
in the dark to find a fire hydrant. They plugged it in, and then the 
water main failed, so they fought the fire with fire extinguishers.
  Then they got big crash trucks in from the Grand Forks airport and 
from the Grand Forks Air Force Base on a flatbed trailer. It was raised 
up so they could bring it in through the water. One of the Grand Forks 
Fire Department's own pumper trucks was brought in, hauled by a 5-ton 
National Guard truck. At that point the firefighters finally began to 
make some headway, after an entire block of downtown Grand Forks was 
destroyed.
  These folks fought that fire as beams were falling and bricks were 
falling and crashing into the surging flood water that was raging 
around them. This flood water that they are in, I must tell you, the 
current is so incredibly strong that when they go down an intersection 
and face the current, they have to crab a boat deeply into the 
intersection, just to get across the intersection. That describes the 
current, and these folks were standing in that current fighting this 
fire. Even as they fought this fire by getting some helicopters to come 
in and dump some fire retardant chemicals on those burning buildings, 
those firefighters were still there, underneath those helicopters, 
fighting that fire.
  I cannot think of a more difficult set of circumstances in which 
someone would ever have to fight a fire, but they did, for 16 hours. 
They limited the loss. Yes, they lost a city block and they lost some 
other buildings and they have had to fight other fires since, home 
fires in a city of 50,000 where no one lives and where homes had to be 
evacuated.

  The Grand Forks Fire Chief, Richard Aulich, and 27 members of his 
department, are people, I think, who an entire nation would say 
represent the finest in public service and heroism.
  The more than 100 workers from the Corps of Engineers, public 
servants, Federal employees--more than 100 workers from the Corps of 
Engineers were waging flood fights in 80 locations up and down the Red 
River Valley.
  There were also 11 people in the basement of a building in Grand 
Forks who kept a telephone service working, a building that was flooded 
like the rest of town. These 11 people stayed in that building 5 days 
to keep telephone service working. It was critical for public safety. 
They are heroes, employees of U.S. West, who kept telephone service for 
the FAA, for FEMA, for all the emergency workers. They kept it up and 
operating during that entire flood.
  In Fargo, ND, in the middle of the night, Sylvia Hove's son-in-law 
discovered that the dike in her backyard was leaking and he put in a 
call to the police department. He flagged down, actually, Fargo Police 
Officer Lt. John Sanderson, and then Lt. Sanderson radioed for help. At 
4 in the morning, Sgt. Wayne Jorgenson and a number others showed up. 
They had just completed working an exhausting shift. But rather than 
going home, they rushed to Mrs. Hove's home and they sandbagged 
furiously at 4:30 in the morning on this ruptured dike and prevented 
the dike from breaking. Eventually that dike broke and Sylvia lost her 
home. I know Sylvia Hove. They fought a valiant fight. The point is, at 
4:30 in the morning when a leak developed, they put out a call and 
police officers just finishing their shift rushed to that scene to help 
sandbag.
  There are legions of heroes in North Dakota, fighting this battle 
even today, whose names we will not know and I cannot give here because 
they are ordinary people who, in extraordinary times, demonstrated 
uncommon courage.
  I want to mention the men and women at the Grand Forks Air Force 
Base. I have talked about how much a part they are of the community in 
Grand Forks. There is no better example of that than what they have 
done. I was at the Air Force base where they have three hangars where 
evacuees from the city are living on cots, 1,000 people in each hangar. 
But more than that, the people who live on the Air Force base have 
actually gone to the hangers and said, ``Come live in our homes,'' and 
taken people into their homes. The day before yesterday there was a 
farmer and his wife from Thompson, ND, 15 miles away, who were standing 
outside of the hangar. They said, we have come because we know there 
are evacuees. We have taken one family in and we have room in our home 
for a second family and we have come to get them and offer them our 
home. That's the kind of thing that was happening on the Grand Forks 
Air Force Base.
  There are boys and girls from our high schools, junior high schools, 
senior high schools and colleges, from all over the Red River Valley 
who have worked their hearts out sandbagging, helping save their towns. 
There is an 8-year-old girl and her 7-year-old brother who squatted on 
the ground for 2 hours

[[Page S3721]]

at ``Sandbag Central'' in Fargo, holding empty sandbags open as the men 
and women filled those sandbags.
  Two men from back East here, who were going to Montana to take new 
jobs, heard the radio reports and diverted in North Dakota and showed 
up in Fargo and said they were there to help fight the floods, and they 
spent their days sandbagging rather than driving to the next job. There 
were the women who baby-sat for free and caregivers and others, men and 
women, who helped other moms and dads with child care to fight the 
flood; employers who gave workers time off. The North Dakota colleges 
and universities--incidentally, who have dismissed for the year--made 
their facilities available for the flood fight.
  What is happening here is North Dakotans and others who have come to 
our State have reached out and responded in this crisis. They have 
helped sandbag. They have donated money and canned goods and clothes. 
All of these efforts in their own way are heroic.

  As I finish, again, 2 days ago, when I was in Grand Forks, ND, and I 
took a boat tour of the downtown, a fellow who--President Clinton came 
to North Dakota on Tuesday. I appreciated it. It was a wonderful thing 
for him to do and was a real morale booster for people who were 
terribly tired and fatigued but still facing this crisis. As I came out 
of this boat the day before yesterday, there was a fellow laying on the 
grass in Grand Forks. The Coast Guard had just pulled him out. He had 
been in his home all of these days. When the evacuation order came, he 
was stubborn. He said, ``I am not leaving my home.'' He was up there in 
the second floor and would not leave. So for days he was there with no 
electricity, no water, stuck in his home. He said, ``I saw this current 
going down the street. My home is flooded. I saw this current.'' He 
said, ``I saw dead cows come past my home. I saw telephone poles. I saw 
ice jams the size of semi trucks come past my home.''
  Then he said, ``You know, you really need to tell the President what 
is happening up here.''
  I said, ``Sir, the President was just here yesterday.''
  He said, ``You're kidding me.''
  Of course, he had been out of radio contact with anybody and had no 
idea what was happening in his city, because he had been living in the 
middle of that flood.
  The extraordinary spirit, I think, and the steady strength of North 
Dakotans as they endure and persevere to meet this crisis is something 
that all Americans will remember.
  I want to close just with two requests.
  Those who have written to my office and my colleagues' offices asking 
how they can help--there are many ways they can help. Yesterday, 
someone sent a letter to my office with a check for $1,000 made out to 
North Dakota. What he said was 60 years ago, as a young man, this 
fellow had been helped by a North Dakotan. He said, ``I have never 
forgotten it, so I just want to pay North Dakota. I want to help North 
Dakota. Please send this to the right place.''
  This morning as I just left my office, a couple of other envelopes 
showed up from people around the country saying, ``Can you get these to 
the right place to help North Dakotans?'' What a wonderful thing it is.
  I will just tell people, the Red Cross is doing wonderful work in our 
State, and the director of the Red Cross indicates they need help. The 
Salvation Army is, as always, doing wonderful work. And other 
charitable organizations that do this kind of relief work do a great 
deal of work in this kind of crisis. They just do a wonderful job. I 
encourage people to be supportive of them.
  I ask, as the north part of North Dakota now and the Canadian 
provinces who are, even this morning, evacuating, I believe 15,000 
people in Winnipeg, I ask the American people to offer their prayers of 
strength and hope to the people who are continuing to fight this flood. 
This region of the country will suffer the consequences of these 
disasters for some long while. We have met with the President. We 
visited again yesterday with President Clinton. We have been meeting 
with appropriators. Congress, on a bipartisan basis, is working on a 
disaster relief bill we will mark up on Tuesday in the Senate 
Appropriations Committee, of which I am a member. I think this Congress 
will do what it has done in all previous disasters, extend the helping 
hand of our country to say to a region, North Dakota, South Dakota, and 
Minnesota, ``You have been dealt a tough blow, but you are not alone. 
The rest of the country understands and is prepared to help, is 
prepared to help you recover and get back on your feet.'' That is part 
of the generous spirit of our country, to reach out and help others in 
times of need.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
  Mr. REED. Mr. President, I would like to express the common sentiment 
of the Senate, and that is the great respect and esteem we have for the 
people of the Northwest in their great trials in this historically 
unprecedented flooding, and particularly to indicate how hard and 
tirelessly their Senators are working to make sure the people of 
America respond to their needs--Senator Dorgan and Senator Conrad of 
North Dakota, Senator Daschle and Senator Johnson of South Dakota, 
Senator Wellstone and Senator Grams of Minnesota. So we are all 
admirers of the great courage of the people of the West.

                          ____________________