FORMAN, N.D. - Critters are causing a headache for flood fighters in this city.
Mayor Mark Bopp says muskrats are burrowing through dikes protecting Forman from overland flooding that is "close to 3 feet above anything we've seen before."
As a spring storm approached Thursday with the potential to drop rain and 4 to 8 inches of snow on the area, Bopp struggled to find optimism.
"It's gonna be ugly," he said.
No major rivers flow into Sargent County, but the wetland-speckled county is plagued with overland flooding caused by snowmelt and rain that fell last fall and this spring, county Emergency Manager Sandra Hanson said.
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Forman, the county seat, built a series of clay and sandbag levees to keep the water at bay. However, muskrats are eating away the plastic on sandbag dikes and digging through an earthen dike along the golf course, threatening to flood basements, roads and a lift station in the southern part of this town of 506 people about 90 miles southwest of Fargo.
"The golf course crew has been daily going along with sandbags and garbage bags, trying to get down into those runs and plug them, because it's pushing water right through the dike," Bopp said. "It's going to take the dike out. If it takes that out, then we have our big ugly."
Elsewhere in town, the water level is within an inch of the main floor at Full Circle Ag grain elevator, which stands surrounded by water. Two residents have moved out of their homes as crews use sump pumps to keep water off their main floors and try to minimize damage to their basements, Bopp said.
Clay and sandbags protect an addition completed last fall to the Sargent Central School. Railroad service has been cut off, as a section of track west of town hangs in the air after water washed out the track bed, Bopp said.
The water level against the city's dikes had dropped by about half an inch early Thursday, Bopp said, but he feared the impending storm could push levels back up.
"I'd almost rather see snow at this point because it takes longer to melt," he said, adding the city has about 2,500 sandbags in reserve if needed.
Seven miles to the west, Cogswell is in a similar boat, with overland flooding threatening a lift station and the city's lagoon system, Hanson said. Homes are sandbagged, and residents have been on water use restrictions for at least a month, she said.
In rural Sargent County, about five homes are accessible only by foot, and 15 to 20 homes have "very limited" access because of road washouts or other flooding issues, she said.
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"Some of these roads are undermining from the bottom up, and we don't know they're washed out until a vehicle travels over them" and the road collapses, she said. That happened Thursday, but no one was injured, she said.
The number of road washouts is higher than in 2009 and more similar to last year, Hanson said.
"Too many to even count at this time," she said.
Readers can reach Forum reporter Mike Nowatzki at (701) 241-5528
