FARGO, N.D. - By Saturday, Jay Olson figured he had sneaked in about 10 or 12 hours of sleep in the previous three days. And the raging Red River was expected to keep him up plenty more.
The Red's waters were giving the wall of an estimated 15,000 sandbags—7 feet high in some spots—making up Olson's backyard all it could handle, sending intimidating streams of water through voids in the wall's foundation. Olson's counteroffensive: Five pumps, and they were keeping up.
"As long as we don't run into some unforeseen problem with the dike, we'll keep the water out," said Olson, 49, who works in computer software sales. "We'll win this, and I believe that."
If that happens, he suggests it might be because he got by with a little help from his friends—and lots of strangers. When truckloads of sandbags were dropped off on this driveway says earlier, Olson estimates 300 to 400 people came to help, many "who just flew in to help."
"I can't help but get emotional about it," said Olson, his voice cracking. "You don't see that everywhere. It's embodied in this place, and we see it all the time in different scenarios played out the same way. We have to take care of each other."
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Bruce Bakke's backyard runs seamlessly into the fairway to a Fargo Country Club par five. These days, that hole—and the rest of the course—is nothing but a giant water hole, swamped by the Red River that's being anything but neighborly.
A manmade dike was holding back much of the river that already had risen to record heights before hydrologists said Saturday it had crested. But seepage from beneath the wall was feeding onto Bakke's turf, at one point leaving the back end of it under 4 feet of water before a sump pump cleared much of it out. On Saturday, it was only a couple feet deep.
Bubbling at some points along its base showed weaknesses the river was exploiting. Emergency crews were noticing, deploying a virtual ballet of heavy equipment to move in dump trucks full of sand to shore up the barrier.
As for reports Saturday that the river actually had crested, Bakke shrugged: "We don't listen to that too much. We plan for the worst and hope for the best. If it's going down, that's great. But we're not gonna take that as gospel."
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Jim Sundahl has reason to feel fond of his modest, two-story home, having lived there since he was born there 91 years ago. But his wife has pressed for them to move, and he knows she may have some new ammunition.
On Saturday, Sundahl shoveled his sidewalk as the nearby Red River was consuming his backyard and the park behind it, leaving his two-car garage with about 3 feet of standing water. A 4-foot-tall wall of sandbags were keeping the house dry, courtesy of sump pumps throwing water back over into the flooded garage area. His driveway on Saturday was a boat landing.
Hydrologists had announced hours earlier that the river was in retreat, but Sundahl already had noticed by an ice mark that the waterway had dropped an inch.
"It's come down that much. I wouldn't quibble with anybody about that," he said. "I'm happy about it, I'll tell you that. But it won't do us any good for four or five days" until the water truly recedes.
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Near a snaking wall of sandbags meant to safeguard his neighborhood from the swelling Red River, Mark Rerick let his 2-year-old leashed dog Max bury his nose playfully in the snow.
But it was worry that seemed to be dogging the 49-year-old man.
As crews scrambled to build an earthen levee around the nearby sewage plant, the dogwalker with a home just 100 yards from the river said concern about whether the now-frozen sandbags would hold has left him "basically sick to my stomach all week."
He's taken precautions: The family's basement, including his 14-year-old son's room, has been moved to higher ground, leaving that boy to sleep in what Rerick described as a coffin-sized area on the floor upstairs. The vehicles are packed with essentials—clothes, a safety box with important documents and identification—in case a fast evacuation is ordered.
"We can get out of there in a minute if they tell us to go, and that's about all we'll have," he said.
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Bruce Boelter and Tony Guck figured they've expended ample sweat helping erect a sandbag wall blocking the Red River from their Fargo neighborhood. And they're being proactive making sure it's up to par.
On Saturday, Boelter, 56, had walked the entire length of a roughly mile-long stretch of sandbag dike to eyeball the manmade wall separating their subdivision—an eclectic mix of townhouses, duplexes and split-level homes—from the Red River. Guck, 42, joined up with him halfway along, each figuring they had a special stake in the integrity of the dike they helped build.
Monitoring the dikes, they said, was a shared duty, with someone assigned to walk the 3-foot-tall wall of sand every hour around the clock until the crisis passes. If there's seepage or other signs of trouble, there's a local stash of sandbags on standby and plans for one neighbor to swiftly call another in an old-school phone tree reminiscent of how an Old West fire bell sounded the call for help.
Guck said he expected to walk the line every six hours, with others taking part in the rotation.
"There's always a person every hour going," he said. "If we don't protect this, it's gonna get us."
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