Monday Update

Today I am back at work, but Josh's work is still closed. Yesterday we needed to get out of the house for a bit and took a trip to Target. On our way, we decided to check out how the neighborhood.

Here are some homes just a couple blocks down the street from us in a newer development. The river has risen up to street level.

This is just down our street... we didn't get real close but you can see a large temporary barrier they put up around the riverfront homes, so if the river were to raise up to their level and get past the sandbag dikes, it would not spill out into the rest of the neighborhood. We also live just a block down from the County, and they had made about a 3 ft tall earthen dike around their whole building. We went in to Fargo to check out the scene, and here is a view on the only open part of 2nd St. Just past this Nat'l Guard truck and barrier is a gigantic earthen dike built by the city to protect all of downtown Fargo.We went over the Main Ave bridge, the only one open save I94, and there was a huge crowd of people gathered around to see the view.

As you can probably tell, these are all pictures taken from the car. Here is a photo of a train going over the bridge next to the Main Ave bridge. The water almost touches the tracks. When it is dry, there is a road that goes below these bridges, so you can get some idea of how high this water really is.

The water is slowly going down. It is finally below 1997's record level. Unfortunately, a blizzard has begun and we are looking at another possible 10 inches of new snow tonight and tomorrow. This makes for very bad conditions in trying to monitor the dikes and get around town. Snowplowing is at a bare minimum, so streets are terrible. There is a good chance I'll be working from home tomorrow.