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Fargo, North Dakota is experiencing historic flooding and U.S. Geological Survey scientists
continue to monitor the streamflow as the flood waters rise.
(Chris Laveau) We've been out measuring how much discharge is passing the town of Fargo.
We've been doing this daily. Yesterday, we measured 25,900 cfs. A CFS is
the cubic foot per second about the size of a basketball and we
had 25,900 basketballs passing Fargo every second. Today, we measured 28,700 basketballs
passing Fargo per second and the stage is still rising.
After the conclusion of measurement yesterday actually I immediately went on a conference
call with the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Weather
Service and my supervisor with the USGS and they made some
decisions regarding the elevation of the levy. Since yesterday, they've actually raised the
levy in the area of our gauging structure by about 3 ft.
A lot of this was done based on the discharge numbers we measured yesterday.
(Joel Galloway) Well, we had a little bit of difficulty this morning. Our previous boat
ramp, which was a bike path, before it was sand bagged, so we couldn't
get our boat in there so we had to take our boat to the other side of the
river where there are submerged roads and there was about 100 ft ice we had to break
through with our boat. We had to go in by hand and break out a channel
and then take the boat through the ice to get out to the water.
So we were a little concerned about if that was going to work or not. We have a jet boat
and getting ice into the intake was an issue, but it worked out
fine and we had a lot of safety measures in place like a rope
attached to it until we knew our engine was working and it was clear. We had the coast
guard calling every 15 minutes. So we took up as many precautions
as we could and it all worked out. (Chris Laveau) The measurement we provided
today to the National Weather Service will be used to recalculate
the peak forecast and it may impact whether the town of Fargo needs to be evacuated or
not. It makes me realize how important the numbers
we provide are. CoreCast is a product of the U.S. Geological
Survey, Department of the Interior.