IN
HER OWN WORDS:
ASHLEY SELBY
Red River Rising: The Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American
City
(Borealis Books 2004)
1. As a Minnesotan, the story of the Grand Forks flood was always burned on my brain. I think for all of us Upper Midwesterners, the images from the catastrophic floods of '97 are hard to shake-the carcasses of cattle suspended in frozen rivers and creeks, entire neighborhoods swept through by rivers, a downtown on fire while drowned by water. This is a region criss-crossed by ill-tempered rivers and lakes that flood and yet we've lived with them for so long that we really have come to believe that we have them figured out, or we rely on other people to figure them out for us.
2. We are, by nature, optimistic creatures. Most of us believe, upon waking up in the morning, that we're going to survive the day, that we'll have a home to come back to, and that we will be comfortable, warm, and well-fed.
3. I think the disconnect lies between man and Nature and man and man. Despite the rhetoric to the contrary, we do not, in general, respect the power of nature, especially when it comes to rivers. You've got the Corps of Engineers literally re-routing rivers or trying to contain them in metal walls, as in New Orleans. These structures are truly awe-inducing; but ultimately, and this is a point the Corps would never accede, the river is going to win.
4. The calamity also taught me much about the nature of disaster. People don't process natural disasters in the same way they process man-made disasters. A twister comes through town and destroys huge chunks of it, people can process it in a cleaner way, because they can blame Mother Nature or God. But if a man burns down your town, you stay angry, you blame, you hate, and you seethe. People in Oklahoma City had been through terrible tornados, but the bombing of the Murrah building was a completely different kind of disaster. Even though Grand Forks had been through other floods and had dealt with them as natural disasters, this one was different because the people in the city believed the National Weather Service had caused the disaster.
5. People can prepare for disasters by learning how to use uncertain information-and how to accept uncertainty in general.