Norman County Battles 2019 Flood Fight As Red River Rises

The Red River in Halstad is expected to crest at 38 feet by Tuesday

NORMAN COUNTY, Minn. — Pools of water on the side of the road are just a little bit of the flooding you’ll see in Perley.

“We’ve got the ditches that are looking like this but like I said, we’re maintaining and if anyone needs sandbags, we’ve been helping them out with providing sand. The farmers, everybody,” said Ann Kruse, Mayor of Perley.

The ditches are the only thing underwater for right now.

In addition to opening them for water relief, flood gates have been closed and two pumps are moving to get water outside of town.

But that wasn’t the case in 2009.

“It was kind of chaos because the National Guard had to come here and they had to build levees around the town to protect it from the water coming in,” said Dennis Hanson, who’s lived in Perley since 2001.

Since then, Perley has dikes so people don’t have to build so many levees, and an extra one was also added to the east side of town. That means for now, it’ll be about keeping an eye out.

“Just watch the water levels. Watch the incoming water from overland flooding,” said Lee Langei, Perley City Council member.

While watching their own water levels after most of the the snow melt, community members have even gone down the road to Halstad to help sandbag.

The city is right along the Red River where it combines with the Wild Rice River.

The Red is expected to crest at 38 feet soon.

“They’re going to block the dike for as long as it takes before the crest starts receding but that could take anywhere from five to seven days before it starts going down in Halstad,” said Garry Johanson, Norman County emergency manager.

Halstad officials say they’ve only gotten two calls about power outages in the past two days, but were able to get things back up and running in a few minutes. The city will continue to have sandbags for anyone that needs them.

“We asked for about 50 volunteers yesterday to put together about 2,000 sandbags. We ended up with about 90 people who made about 3,000 sandbags,” said Lucas Spaeth, City of Halstad superintendent.

Anyone who needs sandbags should contact Halstad Municipal Utilities.

As for people in Perley, you can pick them up right at the Cenex gas station.

Perley will have a flood meeting at the fire station on Main Street Tuesday night at 7:30.