Jamestown Places 50,000 Sandbags in Flood Fight

the James River is at a flood stage of 12 feet

JAMESTOWN, N.D. — The city of Jamestown places 50,000 sandbags to protect houses from flooding.

This comes after the city was slammed with too much rain in September and almost two feet of snow last week.

With Halloween just around the corner, there’s a much different monster lurking in Jamestown.

But it’s one city engineers didn’t see coming.

“This is really odd to have it at this time of year,” said Travis Dillman, a Jamestown city engineer.

Dillman says Jamestown is seeing flooding in October because last month, the city’s upper watershed was dumped with almost seven inches of rain.

Then just last week, it got an additional two feet of snow.

And there’s still more precipitation to come.

“As of yesterday, we saw about 3,900 cubic feet per second of water coming into the two reservoirs and we’re only releasing 1,800 right now. So the corps has asked us to go up to 2,400 CFS and we’re going to start that incrementally after this rain event that’s supposed to come today and tomorrow,” Dillman said.

The James River is at twelve feet, or flood stage.

In 2009, it crested at more than 14 feet high.

The highest the river has crested was back in April 1969 at almost 17 feet.

“There are certain things the city did do as far as trying to help take some instances such as storm sewer mitigation, things like that. But there are certain areas along the banks where there’s a lot of infrastructure in place so we have to do sandbagging efforts,” Dillman said.

Jamestown’s Sandbag Central operation began Friday and the city placed them over the weekend.

Twenty-five thousand sandbags were used from the City of Fargo.

Dillman says Jamestown is grateful to all of those who have made an unexpected, October flood fight a little easier.

“We even had groups come in from Fargo and Bismarck to come help out in the effort so it was really a good effort in the last two days to make it all happen before this rain event. With everybody that helped out, we were able to accomplish what we needed to do,” he said.

Dillman says rain during this time of year tends to be more controlled, which is why he believes the city should be able to handle the extra water.

Jamestown has closed its Sandbag Central operation.

You can contact the city if you need any sandbags for your property.