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Boston.com -- September 25, 2009

Heavy rains, beginning on September 19th, dumped between 15 and 20 inches of rain over three days on parts of Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee. The deluge overwhelmed natural and man made systems, and the record-breaking downpour turned streams into rivers, swamping neighborhoods, washing out roads and, unfortunately, taking at least nine lives. Damage costs are estimated at $250 million, the cleanup just now beginning. Georgia's Republican Governor Sonny Perdue recently announced that President Obama has issued a Federal Disaster Declaration for individual assistance to aid residents of five affected counties.

Flooded to the rooftops.

NORFOLK

For nearly a week, dozens of residents in central Norfolk have been living in upheaval: Some without hot water, others with sagging walls and concrete floors, still others eating only canned food and sandwiches amid moldy carpets and furniture.

Many have lost their cars and much of their clothing. Heat pumps, appliances and electricity have shorted out. In dozens of homes, rotting drywall has been cut away, leaving only framing inside.

Yet until Tuesday, no one on the City Council knew about the plight of Spartan Village, which was flooded in last Wednesday's deluge.

More than a dozen residents of the small townhouse community across from Norfolk State University pleaded to the City Council for emergency assistance.

They said they had received little social service help, nearly all of it from Operation Blessing, which has been in the neighborhood helping tear out rotting drywall and clean.

"I can't live there anymore," renter Latoya Bowden said. "I have nowhere else to go. I don't know what to do next.

"I've lost everything I've worked so hard for all these years."

Based on residents' reports, no one in Spartan Village had flood insurance. The neighborhood isn't in a flood zone or near water, although it has flooded in the past. Wednesday's storm dumped as much as 7 inches on the area in just a few hours.

Bowden, who didn't make it home from work before the rains began, got to her house when the storm waters receded about 11 p.m. last Wednesday.

"By the time I got home the water had sat in my home for four hours," she said. "I just lost so much - and so fast."

Flooding reached the fourth step of the staircase inside her four-bedroom townhouse. All her living room furniture was ruined, and her mother, who lives in a downstairs bedroom, lost all of her possessions. The water toppled her refrigerator and claimed her computer.

The Red Cross, which reported helping two Spartan Village families after the flooding, provided Bowden a hotel room for two nights. But then she and her four children, fiancé and mother returned to the townhouse, confining themselves to the second floor, because they didn't have money to continue staying in the hotel.

On Tuesday, crews from Operation Blessing ripped out the carpeting downstairs and all the drywall up to the height of Bowden's shoulders.

"I don't even know what I'm supposed to do with this mess," Bowden said. "How do you clean up a house like this?"

Twenty minutes later, Vice Mayor Anthony Burfoot decided the answer was you didn't.

"We've got to move her out tonight," Burfoot said after touring the townhouse and arranging a rental through a friend. "She isn't staying in there."

At the council meeting, he and other members expressed surprise upon hearing about the neighborhood's problems.

Although city firefighters used boats to pluck Spartan Village residents from their homes Wednesday night, and city sanitation crews have done garbage pickups there every day since, the city didn't mobilize its incident command team because no one realized the extent of the problem, City Manager Regina V.K. Williams said.

"Had we known this was going on, we would have done that," she said. She added that typically the city leaves storm cleanup to its residents.

"Firefighters and police address immediate situations. Because these are private residences, we then leave it to the homeowners," she said.

On Tuesday, Mayor Paul Fraim directed that a survey of needs be done, and asked city management to come up with short-term and long-term plans for the community.

Short-term will involve helping people such as Jerome Alston, a retired city public works employee who has owned his townhouse - "what's left of it," he says - for 10 years. The bottom 18 inches of drywall throughout his home have been sliced away, his hot water heater thrown out.

"There's a lot of need out here," he said.

Resident Kimberly Redmond said beyond the immediate problems, the bigger picture has her worried the most.

"We've got to talk long term," she said. "We're going to get more rain."

Burfoot agreed. He said the neighborhood's drain lines are clear. But its low-lying ground and bowl shape could pose ongoing problems.

"We have to take a hard look at whether or not this is an appropriate location for housing," he said.

FARGO, North Dakota (CNN) -- March 27, 2009.

Fifteen helicopters from the U.S. Northern Command along with active-duty military personnel are being sent to Fargo, North Dakota, to assist the state as it prepares for record flooding, a U.S. military official told CNN.

Valley Water Rescue volunteers patrol the Fargo area in search of people who need help evacuating Friday.

The military personnel being sent to Fargo are from a "contingency response force" made up of active-duty troops, the official said.

Above-freezing temperatures, followed by heavy rains this week, caused the Red River to swell and surpass its 1897 record of 40.1 feet early Friday morning.

The swollen river threatened to rise further as the city's mayor vowed to "go down swinging.

"Right now, we think the river is beginning to crest," said Fargo Mayor Dennis Walaker. "As long as we stay under 42 feet, I think we got a chance; if we go over 42, there's going to be some more evacuations."

As of 8:15 p.m., the river churned at 40.78 feet, nearly 22 feet above flood stage and almost a foot above the previous record of 40.1 feet, set in 1897.

Sandbagging operations, which have churned furiously throughout the week, continued Friday, drawing praise from local and state officials, including North Dakota Gov. John Hoeven.

"North Dakotans have come together in a big, big way. Our volunteers are doing a magnificent job building this flood protection and we want to say thank you to them," he said. "There's a sense of perseverance and resolve and determination."

The National Weather Service predicted the river would reach 42 feet Saturday, and forecasts indicated it would remain there into next week. But the weather service warned the river might reach 43 feet -- the height to which most of the city's dikes have been raised -- if warmer temperatures expected in the middle of next week melt the record snowfall.

"What's going on here really is an inspiration for the country," said Sen. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota. "The eyes of America are on Fargo, North Dakota, and they're getting a very good impression of what the people of North Dakota are like."

Authorities would not try to raise the city's dikes above 43 feet, Walaker said. Sandbags are used to bolster dikes in residential areas around the city, while the city dikes are reinforced with clay.

"We have most of the south side of Fargo, and along the river, good to 43, so we're not going to proceed with trying to get it to 44," he said at a news conference Friday morning. "Now is that a gamble? We don't think so."

National Weather Service spokesman Patrick Slattery in Kansas City, Missouri, said the river's level means uncertainty for officials and volunteers who are scrambling to mitigate the flooding in the area.

Emergency responders can extrapolate the effects of the rising river, he said, but they cannot know for sure how accurate the predictions are because they have never seen the river so high.

"At some point, especially when you're dealing with record levels, you reach a point when there's nothing else you can do," Slattery said. "Start alerting people to be ready to get out of there."

Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who led the military response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2007, warned that sandbags can only buy time.

"You cannot depend on a sandbag dike to save your life; you put it up to try to save your property," he said. "Once you put it up, you need to leave, because that sandbag dike could break at any given time."

Sandbags also are less effective against cold water, Honore said. 

Water began seeping Friday under a dike that runs across a partially submerged athletic field, prompting officials to ask volunteer sandbaggers to come help.

About 150 people showed up as the water on the other side of the dike continued to rise.

"We're going to be OK. We're going to be fine," Melanie Engel Unger said as she passed 40-pound sandbags from her left to her right.

Daryl Braham said he was confident the volunteers would be able to maintain the dike's integrity. He was hopeful the cold weather -- temperatures were well below freezing Friday -- remained.

"It's kind of a blessing in disguise because it's slowing things down," he said.

Fargo officials early Friday evacuated a neighborhood of about 150 homes after they found cracks in a levee, according to a city news release. Capt. Tod Dahle said the residents were evacuated because the neighborhood lies between a primary and contingency levee.

About 100 people were evacuated Thursday from a nursing home, as were 40 others from a nearby neighborhood. No one was in immediate danger, officials said.

"We were disappointed yesterday and early this morning about the two areas that we had to evacuate," Walaker said. "Is that going to be it [for evacuations]? We don't know. We don't have any real crystal ball to look into."

MeritCare Hospital and MeritCare South University had evacuated 177 patients as of Friday, MeritCare Health System spokeswoman Carrie Haug said. Some were taken to hospitals elsewhere in North Dakota; others were taken across the river to Minnesota, she said.

Monday, the health system canceled elective procedures to reduce its patient numbers ahead of the evacuations, Haug said.

Across the Red River from Fargo, a U.S. senator said some homes had been lost in Moorhead, Minnesota.

Emphasizing that there are two states dealing with the river's rise, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minnesota, said, "This is a time at which the forces of nature, of the Red River, will meet the forces of the human spirit."

Clay County emergency center spokesman Dan Olson said some residents in Moorhead were being asked to evacuate.

He called it a "directed evacuation," rather than a mandatory one. It also applied to large parts of nearby Oakport Township, he said. The emergency center is setting up a call center where evacuees can register to be tracked.

A spokeswoman at the city's emergency call center said she would put the number of evacuees in the "high hundreds."

"We know our highways are pretty congested" with people leaving, Kasey Cummings said.

To the west, about 1,500 people who evacuated North Dakota's capital, Bismarck, on Wednesday were able to return home Thursday, after the Missouri River dropped more than 3 feet, the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services said.

(CNN) -- January 2009. 

River waters spread over highways and farms, towns and parks in Washington on Thursday, shutting down traffic on a 20-mile stretch of heavily traveled Interstate 5 between Seattle and Oregon and threatening the federal roadway north of Seattle.

Rescue boats are sent out Wednesday in Pierce County, south of Seattle, Washington.

"If you're trying to do commerce between Portland (Oregon) and Seattle, there is no way right now," said Bob Calkins, a spokesman for the Washington State Emergency Operations Center in Camp Murray, near Tacoma.

"That's the major way into Washington state from Oregon."

Flooding south of Seattle near Chehalis covered parts of I-5 with 30 inches of water, prompting its closure until at least Monday, state transportation officials said. And state and local roads were also victims of the water.

"The problem is, the one real good detour is just as flooded," Calkins said.

North of Seattle, a levee failure in Arlington brought the Stillaguamish River up to the edges of I-5, which remained open although some access ramps were closed, transportation officials said.

The rain also caused Amtrak to suspend service between Seattle and Portland until Saturday, "with no alternative transportation," the rail line said Thursday on its Web site.

Across the state, a number of rivers had crested, but flooded roads remained hazardous.

The risk of landslides was high, leading to the closure of all passes across the Cascades, officials said.

A meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Seattle said 15 inches of rain that began Monday had ended.

The rainfall swept across virtually all of the state, but its biggest effects occurred along the western half of Puget Sound, Calkins said.

The swollen Puyallup River threatened the city by the same name, but Loretta Cutter, sprang into action.

The administrator of a group home and a longtime resident there helped evacuate 47 residents from the Valley Community Inn, a home for the mentally challenged and developmentally disabled, to a shelter at a nearby church. And she made sure her husband and a grandson left their one-story rambler house and got safely situated.

Cutter is one of 40,000 western Washington state residents in at least 19 communities whom authorities asked to leave their homes Thursday amid heavy flooding along the region's rivers and streams.

Only 260 of them sought shelter Wednesday night at the 39 shelters for people, Calkins said.

In addition, seven livestock shelters and two pet shelters were set up, he said.

Meanwhile, the torrential downpours of the past few days transformed Thursday into drizzle, common in western Washington, which typically gets less rainfall in any given year than does Miami.

"It just drizzles every day, or so it seems, whereas in Miami, when it rains, it's a bellywasher," Calkins said.

This week's flooding was worsened by a warm spell that melted up to 7 feet of snow that had fallen around Puget Sound, he said.

"The larger issue is, as people go to their homes, they may be walking through floodwater that is contaminated by sewage," he said.