Flooding in Valley City Spring 2009

As you may already know, there has been major flooding in the town of Valley City, ND. The flooding started many weeks ago at the end of Spring Break. When I came back from spring break with my friend, we went to his house to work on some assignments. As we were working on our assignments he noticed water was starting to leak in from the basement window. The next few hours were spent trying to stop the water from entering the basement. After awhile we were able to stop the water from leaking into the basement.

Not long after this, is when the events leading up to the cancellation of classes on campus and evacuation of Valley City began to be set in motion. After the flooding began, the city started to call for help sandbagging. Many people went out to help sandbag at the Wintershow building. I was able to help, but not as much as I should have. I was only able to get out for a total of 14 hours. Other people were out there a lot more, and the help was greatly appreciated by the citizens of Valley City. Not only did college students sandbag, but high school students and the citizens of Valley City were out sandbagging almost every day. Dikes were also being built along the river. Classes on campus were often cancelled in order to allow students to go out sandbagging. The bridge on Viking Drive was closed down by a dike, and eventually mostly all of the bridges would be closed off too. As many of us left for Easter Break, a contingency dike was being built on 4th Ave.

Communication was kept up through email and the use of notifind. When contacted by notifind about not returning to campus, I had mixed feelings. For one, it was kind of nice to have some extra time off from school. Then I started to think about how things were for the citizens of Valley City. Things became even more confusing once they said all classes were canceled on campus. I started to wonder what would happen with classes and how people with work study like myself would get hours in with campus closed. Then after hearing that people were being evacuated from Valley City, I started to wonder what was going to happen with Valley City.

Now things are starting to get back to normal in Valley City. Classes are being conducted online, which is a little confusing, but starting to get used to it. Many of the questions about what is going on have been answered by the staff of VCSU. In this time of crisis, we have been well informed of what is going on and what we should do. This is the type of thing that should be done in crisis situations. The public should be kept informed so that they know what they can do.