Lt. Gen. Russel HonoreCourtesy US ArmyCNN has an interview Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who is urging people to follow evacuation orders near the rising Red River. Cold temperatures are going to make this flood more dangerous, because if people get stuck in the frigid waters they won't be able to last long waiting for rescue before hypothermia sets in.
As Thor pointed out in another post, the frigid waters are also have a negative effect on the improvised sandbag dams that are holding back the rising waters.
Honore talked about the danger implicit in the sandbagging effort. The volunteers shoring up the sandbag walls are doing great work to help the community, but the leaders of this effort have to calculate and predict when or if the waters will break through. If those volunteers aren't evacuated before the waters rush in it might be too late for a safe escape.
He puts it pretty clearly at the end of the interview:
CNN: What's your final message for residents in the region?
Honore: Get out of there...
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Man, I sure hope this flooding isn't as bad as Katrina, because were going to have yet another national response to this.
General Honore should not be giving advice to Fargo from afar. We have experts on the ground here assessing the situation. Patients in one hospital and people in several nursing homes were evacuated. Some particularly vulnerable neighborhoods have been evacuated. However, to have a mass evacuation would be unnecessarily chaotic. We have the tools here to assess our personal vulnerability to flooding. I am sitting in my home which has a dike between it and the river which is about 200 yards away. If the dike broke at the projected peak (which it did not reach), I would have had water in my driveway. It is not time to "cut and run". It is time to be cautious, be vigilant and follow the instructions of our very competent city leaders.
that is so scary!
I was up there sand bagging and the truth is I think he's right. All last week my friends and I were volunteering but as it got colder and colder it was hard to stay out for very long at all. The vollunteer staff wasn't very well coordinated and a group of fourty college kids got stranded in a church parking lot for an hour waiting for a bus sopping wet. Its dangerous and if its not safe for volunteers then they have to expect less volunteers and therefore less support of the dikes. The safest thing would be to evacuate all affected areas!
I sure hopeit dose not flood because then times would get worse then they already are is that even possible?
"Floods are acts of God, but flood losses are largely acts of man." Gilbert White, 1942
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