Heavy rains soaked parts of the upper Midwest on Thursday, forcing governors in Minnesota and Wisconsin to issue emergency declarations for large segments of their states amid the daylong downpour, which made many roads impassable.
A Red Cross shelter was established in southwest Minnesota. The chapter's executive director, Joyce Jacobs, said utilities were shutting off the gas and electricity in some homes with water in the basement.
Jacobs said water damaged homes and saturated farm fields and ditches. Half the roads in the small town of Truman, Minn., were completely covered by water.
"One of the first things we saw was a car, and the water was up to the doors," she said. "It came up so quick people didn't have time to move their cars."
In Owatonna, Minn., flooding along Maple Creek forced the evacuation of fewer than 10 homes, Steele County emergency management director Mike Johnson said.
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Pastor John Lestock of Trinity Lutheran Church said water has been pouring into his own basement, seeping through the floor and coming in through windows. More than 3 inches of water covered the floor of his church, he said.
"It's just too much water coming down too quick, and there's no where for it to go," Lestock said. "We are on a hill, but there are standing puddles in our yard, which we've never had before."
The flooding southeast of the Twin Cities had gotten so bad on Thursday that the Minnesota Department of Transportation was laboring to find passable detours around submerged parts of Highway 52, a key link to Rochester, department spokeswoman Jessica Wiens said.
In Arcadia, a town of about 2,400 people 100 miles southeast of Minneapolis, 20,000 sandbags were dispatched to rivers and creeks that had overflowed.
The National Guard, police and firefighters rousted many residents there, urging them to leave their homes for higher ground. Nearby tributaries were rising rapidly, and they needed to get out, the officers told them.
Soaked valley
A day of steady rain Thursday filled already soggy farm fields with water in the rows of not-so-dry edible beans, sugar beets and potatoes in the Red River Valley, putting a big pause in harvest.
Fargo-Moorhead received 0.45 inches of precipitation by 7 p.m. Thursday and is now 6.79 inches above normal for the year.
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Further north, 1.32 inches of rain had fallen by 7 p.m. Thursday at the University of North Dakota reporting site, said Chris Hammer, a meteorological student working for the National Weather Service office in Grand Forks. The rain was expected to continue overnight until about dawn today, slowly diminishing in amounts.
Total precipitation at the UND site since Jan. 1 is about 23.2 inches by 7 p.m. Thursday, according to weather service data. That's 6.85 inches above the 30-year norm for the period. Since Sept. 1, 4.3 inches of rain have fallen, 2.4 inches above the norm.
