Living in a land of extremes

Blizzards, tornadoes, floods have taken their toll over the years in the Upper Midwest

By Ellen Crawford
The Forum - 05/02/1999

Darkness descended quickly upon the region as a deadly tornado formed west of Fargo June 20, 1957. The twister, which killed 13, has been remembered by many as the region's worst storm of the century.

The weather is an important part of everyone's life in this part of the country.
Many depend on it for their livelihood. Others plan their free time around it.

It's often the first thing people talk about, whether they've just met or have been friends for years.

They enjoy the nice weather, but it's the bad weather - killer tornadoes, crippling blizzards, record flooding - they remember.

For many Fargo-Moorhead area residents, the June 20, 1957, tornado was the storm of the century. It killed 13 people, injured more than 100, destroyed 329 homes and damaged hundreds more, and caused millions of dollars in damage.

The tornado was first reported on the ground near Mapleton, about 15 miles straight west of Fargo, and it was heading east. It split into two funnels west of West Fargo, then reunited a mile west of Fargo and struck the Golden Ridge area on Fargo's northwest edge at 7:35 p.m.

The twister cut a swath of death and destruction through north Fargo before retreating into the sky just east of the El Zagal Golf Course.

Thirteen-year-old Marc Wroe was on his bike a few blocks from home when the tornado hit. He took shelter in a U-shaped alcove of a two-story house and watched as pieces of Fargo - stop signs, garbage cans, car hoods, tree branches, boards, shingles - flew by overhead.

A Scene from downtown Fargo during the 1943 flood, which forced 250 Fargo-Moorhead arera residents from their homes and caused more than $250,000 in damage.

"It was like a jet stream," recalled Wroe, a wood turner now living in Tempe, Ariz. "The heavier things would go slower."

After leaving Fargo the tornado continued east into Minnesota and touched down in the Glyndon and Lake Park areas, damaging five farmsteads.

Eleven people, including six children from the Gerald Munson family, died that day. Ten lived in Fargo. The 11th lived just west of Fargo along Cass County Road 10.

Another died a month later. The final victim, Betty Lou Titgen, died the following January without waking from the coma she'd been in since she was injured.

While this tornado was tragic, one that struck Fergus Falls, Minn., almost exactly 38 years earlier was worse by far in loss of life and property damage.

According to most witnesses' accounts, two funnel clouds struck June 22, 1919, a sultry Sunday, and damaged or destroyed nearly two-thirds of the town. It claimed the lives of nearly 60 people, including a man who killed himself after the storm in an abandoned, roofless house. He'd lost his home and part of his hardware business and didn't have any insurance to cover his huge losses.

An accurate count of the victims wasn't possible because searchers weren't sure they recovered all the bodies. The tornadoes tossed some of them into nearby Lake Alice.

Other victims had been guests of the Grand Hotel, which a tornado flattened.

One tornado struck about 4:46 p.m., destroying everything in its northwesterly path. The other hit a few minutes later, heading south.

The tornadoes' power was awesome, ripping entire buildings off their foundations and turning them upside down, and reducing steel bridges to twisted piles of scrap iron.

In the aftermath of the deadly 1957 tornado, residents carried out the grim task of digging through the ruins of their homes.

Lance Johnson, a Fergus Falls native who in 1982 published a book about that day titled "The Great Fergus Falls, Minnesota, Cyclone of June 22, 1919," describes an incredible scene along the second tornado's path: "Next it picked up the house of tinner William Maire west of the high school and rolled it down the hill towards Vine St. where another house out of nowhere rolled into it."

By 5 p.m. the tornadoes were gone, but the torrential rain that accompanied them continued to fall. The victims lucky enough to find shelter slowly began to emerge from basements that were filling with rain and water from pipes that burst during the storm. They saw debris everywhere.

"The flotsam on Lake Alice was so compact that a person could walk across it without touching water," Johnson wrote.

A conservative estimate of the damage totaled $4.5 million. The storm leveled 44 city blocks, destroying 159 homes and damaging 194 others and blasting apart several businesses, churches and schools.

Other tornadoes also have taken a heavy toll in this region:

A twister killed two and injured 25 in south-central North Dakota's Kidder County Aug. 8, 1940. Property damage totaled $100,000.

On July 3, 1947, three tornadoes killed 11 and injured 31 in northeastern North Dakota. One struck north of Grand Forks near Warsaw. Another hit Portland. The third touched down near the Walsh County community of Auburn.

A tornado destroyed the town of Fort Rice, which is south of Bismarck, May 29, 1953. Two of the town's 50 residents were killed and 14 were injured.

Floods as devastating

Flooding hasn't claimed nearly as many lives, but it can be every bit as destructive, as Red River Valley residents discovered in the spring of 1997. Rivers reached record levels, forcing entire towns to evacuate.

To make matters worse, an April 4-5 storm mixing ice, wind and snow caused one of the worst power outages in the region's history. Winds blasting 60-70 mph snapped thousands of electrical poles like toothpicks and whipped power lines laden with up to 3 inches of ice.

A street sign at the corner of Fargo's Second Avenue North and Elm Street peeks out from the water during the 1965 flood.

The snow turned sandbagging into a slippery, muddy struggle and the power outage meant that electricity-run sump pumps were useless for keeping water out of homes. Many people kept fighting, using gas-powered generators to run sump pumps and wood-burning stoves to keep warm.

But as the outage lasted for days, and then weeks, some gave up the battle and had to be airlifted away from homes surrounded by floodwater.

Minot, N.D., residents found out just how menacing the normally docile Souris River could be in April 1969. Nearly 12,000 people fled from their homes as the river topped 20 feet, the highest it had been since 1904, and smashed through earthen dikes.

The river effectively cut the city in half, forcing people to travel about 20 miles around the city's edge to get from one side to the other until a towering earthen driveway was built through the floodwaters.

Other floods, including 11 in the Fargo-Moorhead area between 1943 and 1993, also did their share of damage.

In 1943, flooding on the Red forced 250 Fargo-Moorhead area residents from their homes and caused more than $250,000 in damage.

Five years later the Sheyenne River rose 30 inches in just three days. The river backed up into drainage ditches southwest of Fargo at Horace and left its banks there May 4, flooding hundreds of acres of farm land. Four days later it broke through the dikes at Kindred.

Blizzards pack wallop

Blizzards are just as savage - and even more frequent - than tornadoes here.

One of the worst blizzards struck March 15, 1941. It started in Pembina, N.D., and reached Fargo about two hours later, bringing just an inch of snow but 75 mph winds. It killed 39 people in North Dakota and 29 in Minnesota.

Another late-winter storm hit the Dakotas and Minnesota March 2, 1966. It carried up to 100 mph winds and dumped as much as 35 inches of snow in parts of the area. Thirteen inches fell in Fargo-Moorhead.

Cities became ghost towns as drifts up to 20 feet deep and swirling, blinding snow closed schools and businesses. The snow buried cars, trains, trees and even buildings in its path and stranded hundreds of travelers.

"It just raged," recalled John Bye, archivist at the Institute for Regional Studies at North Dakota State University. Bye, a high school senior in 1966, spent the blizzard on his family's Hatton, N.D., farm.

"You'd look out the windows, and you just didn't see anything," he said.

By the time the storm ended three days later, 20 people and more than 122,000 head of livestock were dead.

A blizzard nine years later is memorable, not for snow but for the tremendous amount of topsoil whipped around by high wind. That storm, known as the "Black Blizzard" of January 1975, claimed the lives of 16 Minnesotans, 12 North Dakotans, eight South Dakotans and 18,500 cattle.

Another deadly blizzard bombarded the region Feb. 4, 1984. It killed 20 people, including a 50-year-old Fargo man, his 13-year-old son and two of his son's friends. They died of carbon monoxide poisoning after the man's car became stuck on Fargo's 19th Avenue North and the storm buried the vehicle in 4 to 6 feet of snow.

Of course, not all blizzards kill, but they sure can pile up snow. The Fargo-Moorhead area won't soon forget the winter of 1996-97, when a record 117 inches fell. That topped the previous record by more than 2 feet.