Bob Collins
Watch video: If clinging to hope and a refusal to quit is all it took to beat back a flood, the Red River would be down for the count.
MPR News Reflections and observations on the news
By Bob Collins
Bob Collins retired from Minnesota Public Radio in 2019 after 12 years of writing NewsCut and pointing out to complainants that posts weren’t news stories. A son of Massachusetts, he was a news editor 1992-1998, created the MPR News regional website in 1999, invented the popular Select A Candidate, started several blogs, and every day lamented that his Minnesota Fantasy Legislature project never caught on.
I’m in the Morses’ house, we’re getting water behind the dike now. Next door at John’s house, there’s a small group trying to make sandbags, lots of water coming through there. No volunteers, sandbags or sand being allowed in the neighborhood. I’ll go over there to help out as soon as I finish this post. Read more →
Video of the morning after the evacuation in the Riverview Circle neighborhood of Moorhead.
This neighborhood, and this city, did in five days, what it took three weeks to do in 1997, and they’ve done it better, and they’ve made the dikes higher.
An aerial view of Riverview Circle shows how the Red River is conspiring against the neighborhood.
Saving Riverview Circle: The fight ends
This is Riverview Circle’s response to Moorhead’s Code Red that indicates evacuations are likely. Another pickup with another load of sandbags has just pulled into John Brummer’s garage and another crowd of volunteers has arrived to stack it on the sandbag dike that rings this neighborhood along three miles of shoreline. I asked him if Read more →
As a Code Red was issued this afternoon, signifying an evacuation is possible from Riverview Circle, and the surrounding neighborhoods, the Morses and John Brummer were not giving up.
The Red River can be very sneaky. It took a backdoor approach to get near Donna and Todd Morse’s house today.
Live-blogging: Thursday’s flood meeting
With the order to raise the sandbag levee by another foot, I couldn’t imagine having the gumption to get back out and sling sandbags.