Slow and snow

It seems like the flood has taken backseat to Japan and Libya probably because it is a "slow flood flood a coming" as former Fargo dweller Robert Zimmerman might exclaim. I guess that is all right since Japan is in much worse condition than us at the moment.

So since the last update, sand bag filling operations stopped in Fargo due to new estimates for needed bags. So somewhere between 2.5 and 3 million sand bags were made. Moorhead stopped last week and Cass County did as well. In 2009 the flood was already here by this time. I think the 2010 flood crest already arrived by this time. But the crest in 2011 is taking its time. Winter continues to exert itself upon the region with weekly snow. I think the precipitation this year is higher than 2009. But it is slowly melting. More snow came this morning.

A large community prayer meeting also was held a few weeks ago. For prayer meetings, it was pretty good. It was held in a huge church in SW Fargo.

Fargo had planned to lay sand bags today but due to weather it has been postponed. It was scheduled last week but the snow storm changed that. Moorhead will begin putting up the sand bag dikes on Friday.

A new blog is covering things about the flood- http://www.fargoflooding.com/. It has the usually commentator and links to pertinent stories and a few live web cameras.
http://valleyfloodwatch.com/ has all the important river gauge numbers at top. Looks like Fargo hit flood stage today or yesterday with a reading of 18.7 where 18 is considered flood stage. It also streams live flood meetings.
New forecasts give a 50% chance of hitting the 40.5 crest and a 10% chance of hitting the monsterous 44 foot crest.

The diversion keeps getting more expensive and no doubt dragging this thing out like the Garrison diversion proceedings of decades prior. I am unsure if there will be a win-win solution. The costs keep increasing and outlyling communities are banding together to keep the diversion from affecting their communities. It is kind of like a super-meta narrative: diversion fighting, but when will the diversion come or will it ever?