North Dakota flooding draws Baptist disaster response
GRAND FORKS, N.D. (BP)--So far, there are no known dead.
But except for disaster relief crews on the job -- Southern Baptists among them -- "no known dead" is about the only good news in Grand Forks, N.D., a 10.5-square-mile city at least 70 percent under water April 21, with a portion of its downtown gutted by fire.
Most of its 50,000 residents left when a mandatory evacuation was ordered Friday, April 18.
Southern Baptist disaster relief units from Texas, Ohio and Oklahoma rolled into the area Sunday afternoon and were preparing to start providing meals Monday morning.
Grand Forks' downtown fire started Saturday, April 19, in an historic building -- perhaps because of a natural gas leak. It spread by Sunday to 11 buildings before helicopters contained it by dumping dozens of 2,000-gallon buckets of floodwater. More conventional firefighting efforts were hampered by floodwater running as much as five feet deep in downtown streets. The roiling muddy-colored water was further contaminated by raw sewage because the city's wastewater treatment plant was swamped.
These two disasters followed an April 5 ice storm. It turned into a blizzard with 60-mph winds that snapped upwards of 2,000 telephone poles like matchsticks. It was the ninth blizzard of the season and the worst snow storm in 50 years.
"We were already preparing for this flood when that storm hit," said Doug Lee, pastor for nine years at Cornerstone Baptist Church in the newly developed southwest corner of the Grand Forks. Townspeople knew high water was coming because the region's record 117 inches of snowmelt was finding its way to the Red River that marks the Minnesota/Dakota borders.
"Temperatures warmed up and snow started melting and you had that seeping in basements," Lee said. "It had to have someplace to go."
Pastors at all four Southern Baptist churches in the greater Grand Forks area related similar stories of their members being part of a community-wide effort to lend a hand where needed -- working sump pumps, sharing portable generators when there was no electricity, filling/passing/stacking sandbags to help shore up the city's long-established dike system.
The pastors went on to explain how their members have been impacted by the weather's triple whammy.
Henry Passmore has been pastor for the last dozen years at House of Prayer Baptist Church, a predominantly African American congregation that was meeting in the downtown Civic Center while its building was being renovated.
"You could say all we really have besides God is each other," Passmore said. Most House of Prayer church members have relocated to Emerado, about 15 miles west of Grand Forks. Grand Forks Air Force Base is located nearby, the pastor said.
Jim Cargile, pastor at Faith Community Church the last two years, echoed Passmore's thought.
"God is God," Cargile said. "He takes care of us in the good times and the bad times." At 7 p.m. Saturday there was eight inches of water in the street in front of the church and adjacent parsonage, but none so far in the basement. Most of his members had relocated to the Air Force base, the pastor said.
Mike Waters, on the job five weeks as pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Emerado, said 90 percent of his congregation are Air Force personnel. The military personnel have been on mandatory sandbagging shifts and so far have filled well over a million sandbags, Waters said. Emerado is west of the flooding.
Waters has been asked by the Air Force chaplain's office to provide pastoral counseling and to lead some of the worship services in the hangars for the evacuees. Calvary, which offers two contemporary Sunday services, will house the Texas Disaster Relief unit.
Cornerstone's church building, which was completed last summer, is on high ground so it might not be damaged, Lee said. He doesn't know for sure and might not know for up to six weeks. That's how long Mayor Pat Owens said the mandatory evacuation might be in place because of biological contamination.
Cornerstone church member Bob Jantzen's home was one of the first to be flooded. It was about 20 feet from where a sandbagged dike was breeched by overland flooding in the wee hours of Saturday. One day later all that could be seen of the house was the tip of the roof, Lee said.
"We have potential flooding every year but the dikes have handled it until this year," Lee said. "They built everything up to handle a hundred-year flood, but this is a 500-year flood."
The 400-mile-long Red River Valley once was covered by the prehistoric Lake Agassiz, Lee said. That's what makes the bottom land so flat and the black loam soil so rich. That's what set up the area for a flood so severe it would come along only once in 500 years.
Eastern North Dakota Southern Baptist Association director of missions Preston North had a further explanation for the natural disaster.
"All the water here -- on this side of the Continental Divide -- flows north to the Hudson Bay, rather than south to the Missouri or Mississippi River," North said. "You've got water flowing north, into ice. It's jamming up, spreading out."
That phenomena, known as overland flooding because it is not bound by a river channel, is what flowed over the top of Grand Forks' clay and sandbagged dikes that were readied for a 49-foot crest. The crest now is expected to reach 54 feet -- 26 feet above flood stage city officials say -- where it could stay for a week.
At the Grand Forks Air Force Base, as many as 10,000 evacuees will be staying in one of three hangars, but the numbers are much smaller than at first anticipated. Since they've been told they won't be permitted back into their homes for two weeks, many evacuated townspeople are going to the homes of relatives and friends outside the affected area, officials speculate.
The Texas unit at the air base expects to provide about 3,000 continental breakfasts and perhaps 3,500 beef stew lunches on its first day of operation, leader Mel Goodwin said.
The Ohio unit has set up on the parking lot at Temple Baptist Church in Fargo, which also has been impacted by the flooding. Fargo is about 75 miles south of Grand Forks.
The Oklahoma unit is setting up at an elementary school in Red Lake Falls, Minn. There is no Southern Baptist work in Red Lake Falls and only a seasonal Hispanic mission in East Grand Forks.
Jerry Bob Taylor of Brownwood, Texas, is the designated coordinator of the three disaster relief units.
"In our briefing today, we do not feel like the meal count is going to be quite as heavy as we thought," Taylor said. "The Red Cross is anticipating within two, three, four days that if nothing else feeds the river we're going to find masses of people trying to get back home. Basically what we're doing now is gearing up and getting all our support materials in place so we're ready for the onslaught when it comes.
"The thing I'm beginning to pick up on is that unlike some other floods I've worked where the water is more or less contained right on the river, this land is so flat it's just spreading out," Taylor continued. "I came in today from the air and I thought I was looking at one of the Great Lakes. It's a big sea."
Southern Baptists and relief agencies in the area are very grateful the disaster relief units have come in, Director of Missions North said.
"Everybody up here is really appreciative of the Southern Baptist disaster relief crews that have come in," North said. "They're appreciative of it, excited about it and anxious for them to start feeding."
Dakota Southern Baptist Fellowship Director Dewey Hickey also expressed his appreciation. He plans to be in the flooded areas early in the week.
