Obama hates White people.

Pure baloney.

Yes and you voted for him.

WHO hates black people? I think waterbrain is suggesting that , because NO was mpostly black the people sit on their asses while the folks in Fargo were these Fair skinned Germanic types .


I just got it, waterbrain is a Skinhead.

Why do you keep up with that siggy effemm when I have already shown that reason as a concept has been emptied of meaning by both philosophers and scientists over the last 300 years? Are you completely stupid?

I guess that my sig line does suggest that you are quite the witless airhead whose unquestioned acceptance of everything religious disqualifies anything that follows. Of course its only my opinion, maybe I should ask all your fans what they think. The way you paint yourself as loaded (pause).... with expertise, Im sure I can find one .

Man, you sound like cj. Only you haven't typed "porch monkeys" out loud.

Plastic and potatoes help protect earthen dikes
by Tom Robertson, Minnesota Public Radio
March 30, 2009

A spring storm has already started to deliver snow to the Fargo-Moorhead area, with up to a foot of snow expected. The winds will also pick up, and that will complicate efforts to hold back flooding on the Red River. Officials say the 30 mph winds could whip up waves and threaten the integrity of the dikes built to protect both cities. Today, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers began covering vulnerable sections of the dikes with huge sheets of plastic to protect them from erosion.


Fargo, N.D. " National Guard troops pull huge sheets of plastic over an earthen dike that protects this east Fargo neighborhood.

Army Corps of Engineers spokesman Frank Worley says they're building a makeshift protective layer to keep the waves from eroding the soil. The worry is that water could crash into the dike and cause breaches.

"This was engineered on the fly, literally, over the last 24 hours. We knew we needed a solution for the possible wave action," said Worley.

Engineers knew they had to lay down the plastic cover over about 300 feet of this dike, but they weren't sure how they'd secure the covering to the sandbags that hold it down. Worley says they came up with a strange, creative solution.

"Someone suggested tennis balls, but they didn't have any available, and another person said 'Hey, why not potatoes?'" said Worley. "We'll take the potato, wrap a little bit of the poly around it so it will create sort of a bulge or joint, like your elbow or a fist, and then wrap the rope around that bulge and use that to hold the sandbags in place."

For now, the Army Corps is using this technique only on the Fargo side of the river, because the direction of the prevailing winds during the storm will affect the North Dakota side more.

The Red River has already flooded a community golf course that's behind this dike. Grace Backman, who lives in the neighborhood behind the dike, says she's worried about what high winds could do.

"You don't have to be around water too long before you realize its power, and the wind will just magnify its power and its strength," said Backman. "The dikes are manmade, and we know that when we as man mess with Mother Nature, we don't often win. Maybe this time we will."

The Fargo-Moorhead communities had a blizzard last week as they began their battle against the flooding Red River.

Jill Graveline lives just across the street from the dike. She's not worried about the dike failing, but she says the heavy snow and wind will make life miserable for those fighting the flood.

"I'm most concerned about the men that are going to be out patrolling the dikes and working on the dikes," said Graveline. "Blizzards are not fun to be out in even if you're out for a minute. But to be out for 24 hours or 48 hours, it's going to be tough for them, I'm sure."

The huge snowfall to the south of Fargo-Moorhead will eventually make its way into the Red River. But at least for the short term, Mike Hudson of the National Weather Service says that won't pose a problem for people battling the flood.
Larger view
Moving more sandbags into place

"The river forecast center in Chanhassen will be looking at that ... and try to start modeling that for when we do get snow melt later in the month," said Hudson. "But for now that snow will lock in, and will not have a dramatic or even really an impact whatsoever, on the immediate river levels. They'll continue to fall."

Across the river in Moorhead, city officials say many of their sandbag dikes already have plastic wrapped around them. But the ones that don't could be vulnerable if winds create a lot of wave action.

Moorhead Mayor Mark Voxland says water levels of the Red River have been falling for several days, but strong winds could make the water rise.

"Wind blowing over a large body of water. ... It will pile up. The water will rise in front of the wind," said Voxland. "As placid as water seems, it is a very insidious enemy. It's an evil substance when it's at this height, and it's doing its best to beat us as much as we're doing our best to beat it in this crazy fight."

For now, people in Fargo-Moorhead are preparing -- for potential leaks in the levees and certain blizzard conditions. The worst of the storm is expected to wrap up late Tuesday.

Published March 30 2009

Ice jams: There's 'no silver bullet'

There is “no ‘right’ way” to deal with river ice, “no silver bullet” to prevent jams before a flood, one of the nation’s leading authorities on ice jams said Monday. Kate White, a hydraulic engineer with the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H., arrived in Fargo on Monday, part of a team assembled by the Army Corps of Engineers to track the formation and movement of ice in the Red River flood.

By: Chuck Haga, Grand Forks Herald

There is “no ‘right’ way” to deal with river ice, “no silver bullet” to prevent jams before a flood, one of the nation’s leading authorities on ice jams said Monday.

Kate White, a hydraulic engineer with the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H., arrived in Fargo on Monday, part of a team assembled by the Army Corps of Engineers to track the formation and movement of ice in the Red River flood.

Dealing with ice jams, such as the 4-mile-long slab threatening bridges at Oslo, Minn., depends on such variables as ice thickness, water flow, what’s happening upstream and downstream, and potential risks.

“The key is whether the ice jam is amenable to being broken up ahead of time,” White said. “Or are you just moving the jam downstream, or breaking the ice up too early only to have it freeze again?”

Explosives “are not always the first choice,” she said, with safety and environmental concerns and risks to levees.

“But explosives can be effective if used in a right way,” and she cited last week’s assault on Missouri River ice jams near Bismarck. A solid ice cover allowed charges to be set into the ice, and that broke open a channel “so the flow could carry the ice away.”

The first demolition used 160 pounds of C-4 plastic explosive supplied by the North Dakota National Guard. The C-4 was packed into 80 holes drilled into ice 3 feet thick. Later, helicopters dropped road salt onto other parts of the river ice to weaken it.

Many places have tried drilling holes in the ice to hurry breakup, White said, “but there’s no firm way to quantify benefits.”

A more expensive response: the strategic placement of ice control structures, such as dams and booms, which could control where jams form.

Nebraska set up a statewide ice reporting system after damaging 1993 ice jams on the Platte and Missouri rivers. “It’s an excellent system,” she said.

White was in Grand Forks and Crookston 20 years ago to study ice jams during the 1989 floods. Early this year, she watched the prairie winter from afar, noting icy similarities to 1997.

“You’re dealing with pretty thick ice, like in 1997, yet you’ve also had a record snowpack,” she said. “I remember looking at numbers back in February and saying, ‘Well, we’re setting ourselves up.’ ”

Jamming in Oslo

In Oslo on Sunday, flood fighters tried lowering a 4,200-pound weight from a Minnesota National Guard Chinook helicopter onto ice to the north, to little effect.

Excavators were to be used this week to grab at the southside ice from atop the railroad bridge. Workers with Gowan Construction of Oslo and personnel from the railroad and the Corps of Engineers were helping, City Council Member Scott Kosmatka said.

The aerial effort to the north on Sunday “broke the ice a little but not enough to make a difference,” he said. “And the helicopters had to use so much fuel.”

Ice jams are nothing new on the Red River. At public meetings after the 1997 flood, the International Joint Commission (IJC) and its task force on the Red River Basin heard many suggestions on how to deal with them.

In a 2000 report prepared for the commission (http://www.ijc.org/rel/pdf/icereport.pdf), researchers found that certain river features, such as sharp bends, “are highly conducive to jamming.”

That’s the Red River of the North, with its hairpin curves and slight gradient. Also, tributaries with “relatively significant channel gradients and confined channels are prone to ice jams,” including the Red Lake River at Crookston " where an ice jam early last week caused a sharp and sudden rise in river level and prompted some temporary evacuations.

River ice can erode stream banks as well as make flood forecasting difficult, the report states. “Small bridges can be swept away,” and approaches may erode.

Kevin Dean, Grand Forks information officer, said that City Engineer Al Grasser and other officials are familiar with the IJC report and recommendations.

“The problem is that with ice jams, although there are many different ways to deal with them " sand to hurry melting, dynamite, backhoes " there really aren’t any absolutely foolproof methods,” Dean said. “It’s mostly Mother Nature you have to rely on to break them up.”

Dean said the margin between the expected crest and the city’s defenses could withstand some fluctuations caused by a local ice jam.

Canadian ice

Manitoba employs some high-tech equipment to deal with jams threatening Winnipeg and its environs.

After warnings earlier this month of potential major flooding on the Red River, Manitoba paid $1.2 million for an Amphibex ice-breaking machine, a sort of floating backhoe that claws through river ice with an articulated arm.

Think of it as a Zamboni with attitude.

The new machine complements one already operated by two municipalities and the city of Selkirk. They were pressed into service north of Winnipeg last week on an ice jam that had backed up the Red River and caused flash flooding, forcing more than 30 families from homes in the municipality of St. Andrews.

Mayor Steve Strang of nearby St. Clements said that the ice jams, ice-clogged culverts and the rising river threaten the “worst two weeks” in the community’s history.

According to a company Web site, the Amphibex was designed in Quebec and can be used to clean contaminated waterways, install pipelines and underwater cables and do dredging work, as well as control river vegetation.

It is “highly effective” for breaking up and preventing ice jams and making it “unnecessary to use dynamite, which can harm the environment,” according to the company site (www.normrock.ca/1/The_Amphibex/Functions).

The IJC, the Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies have identified several other means of mitigating ice jams. Structural measures " such as the smoothing out of some river curves, part of the Grand Forks-East Grand Forks project after 1997 " are more expensive but generally more effective than trying to break up or weaken winter ice by drilling or using icebreakers, chemicals or explosives.

In some locations, flood planners have tried to hurry ice breakup by dusting the ice surface with certain materials to enhance solar radiation. But this must be done about a month prior to the anticipated breakup, and the application could be rendered useless by new snowfall. The IJC report says a dusting on the Red River years ago failed because the sand was too light in color.

Still, the report’s authors recommend an ice management approach in the Red River basin that relies primarily on channel modifications, dusting with “chemically benign substances,” and ice cutting and drilling "not so much on things that go “boom!” or monster ice-eating machines.

They also note that “very little work has been done on the more complex question of how climate change may influence the frequency and severity of ice jams.

Bush cut off the funding for the fortification of the levees in New Orleans to channel the money into the Iraq War -- he can't weasel out of that one and neither can anyone else in the administration or anyone supporting Bush. Bush left office with the worse job approval since Richard Nixon.

The Liberal leaders of the great state of Louisiana misappropriated tax payer money they had already received.

Your proof? You can't misappropriate Corp of Engineers' workers who are sent there with materials to construct levees. What did they do? Build a new city hall? There isn't really any proof than there was any misappropriation of funds, only that the state and the city of New Orleans were unable to match government funds for the use of maintenance on the levees.

Fargo normally experiences a hundred year flood but there have been two in the past 12 years, with little improvement in the levees. Let's see if the levees are improved now.



Editorial
Fargo’s Flood


Published: March 30, 2009

From a geologist’s perspective, Fargo, N.D., is in the wrong place at the wrong time: in the midst of a flood plain waiting to be reflooded. What is making the Red River overflow is the combination of heavy snow melt and ice jams " the convergence of spring and winter all at once on a river with a shallow channel across a terribly flat landscape.

Over the weekend, it looked as though Fargo might be spared even worse flooding than it has already experienced. Water levels began to drop slightly from the record level of 40.82 feet reached on Saturday. The flood stage is 18 feet. But on Monday, winter and spring converged yet again as a blizzard moved into the area.

The forecast is for more than a foot of snow, which will not in itself add much to the water level. The real fear " for Fargo and Moorhead, Minn., just across the river " is the wind, which is predicted to gust up to 40 miles per hour. That would create wave conditions that could threaten the miles of temporary dikes and levees protecting these cities from what is now essentially a wide-spreading prairie lake dotted with sunken islands of civilization.

Fighting an epic flood " the second hundred-year flood in the Fargo area in the past 12 years " is hard enough. But with wind chills expected to bring night-time temperatures close to zero degrees Fahrenheit, the battle will be bitter, especially if waters are able to breach the defenses that contain them. We join the residents in hoping that the wind lies low and the waters begin a steady subsidence, back to flood stage and below.

When you argue with waterboy, you must remember that he is not familiar with the concept of "facts", He makes **** up as he goes along and expects some of it to stick.

FARGO is a lovely city , albeit on the site of an ancient glacial lakebed. Nobody ever "planned " the city to be away from danger. Thats why I like my colleagues, who make these brilliant statements that noone should ever have built there. The area, at the center of the Red River Valley was where all the riverboats stopped and later, Centralia (its old name) became a transportation hub when the first of several trestles crossed the Red River under the care leadership of John FARGO, the RR capo di capo.
Fire, floods, tornadoes etc were all part of the cities growing pains. The town has been quite gentrified and they dont only serve crappy motel foods like we saw in the Movie when MArge met her friend who tried to put the moves on during the salad course. You can get anything you want at some good Fargo restaurants.

Farmgirl, have you met with your PO today?

Don't be late.

You are exactly right -- same with building in brush fire areas in Southern California and, duh, lose your home to brush fires.

When watergirl is needed, she doesn't show up.

PrezBO is not really concerned with the good people of Fargo, he doesn't "feel their pain"... hell, he just left the country.

It's a damn good thing these particular individuals are self reliant, free thinking, Americans... they really don't need big government.

It would be great if the rest of the nation would be as self reliant and free thinking.

Obama has assigfned the responsibility to his deputees ,most of whom have skills. Quite a difference from the douche bag who occupied the white house previously.

good idea, start a revolution, march on washington and burn the ****** to the ground

go on, you free thinking we don't need the government folks are always spouting this ****, get of the pot

Tax cheating skills!

I that hope you don't own a lighter or matches...

i just want to set the world on fire