A Flood of Trash
By Leif Enger
May 9, 1997

Listen

Trash, debris, refuse, garbage - call it what you will, it is the most visible and immediate legacy of this spring's record flooding in the Red River Valley. In Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, entire buildings have been transformed into trash; in Fargo, used sandbags form a whole new geography at the local landfill. Further upstream the community of Breckenridge - hit hard by flooding - is still trucking trash off city streets, as it's been doing for most of a month. Leif Enger of Mainstreet Radio has this update.

FX: A WHOLE HERD OF GOOD-HUMORED VOLUNTEERS, LAUGHING AND DUMPING SAND

The last of the sandbags came up in south Breckenridge this week. A hundred bused-in volunteers formed one last human chain - this time, to lift sandbags from a neighborhood dike, pass them to the street, and empty them in the path of a waiting front-end loader. Doug Schmidt came all the way from Long Prairie to help lay these sandbags weeks ago; he came back to help clean up.

DUMP IT IN THE STREET, DUMP IT IN THE ALLEY; WHEREVER THEY WANT IT, WE DUMP IT. [IS THERE A LITTLE LESS PRESSURE THIS TIME AROUND?] HA HA HA, YES, FOR SURE. IT'S NOT LIFE OR DEATH THIS TIME. . .

I'M CLIFF BARTH, AND I'M ON THE CITY COUNCIL HERE IN BRECKENRIDGE, MINNESOTA, RIGHT NOW WE'RE IN THE PROCESS OF DE-SANDBAGGING, WE'VE FOUGHT FLOOD HERE FOR ABOUT A MONTH NOW. TOMORROW WE'RE GONNA START WITH DEBRIS REMOVAL AND WE HAVE A LOT OF IT; IT LOOKS LIKE A WAR ZONE HERE ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF BRECK. [TRACTOR GOES BY: VRROOM!]

The mounds of trash here breed similes: a neighborhood looks like a war zone. It looks like a shipwreck. Like a third-world country. Weeks after the waters went down, you could stand at the railroad tracks and look down the street and see not many mounds, but a single one - continuous, serpentine, a dragon of trash.

FURNITURE, SHEETROCK, PANELING, INSULATION, APPLIANCES, AND ON AND ON.

Jim Lutz is operations manager for Northern Waste Systems, across the river in Wahpeton.

I HAVEN'T SEEN THE TOTAL TONNAGE REPORTS YET, BECAUSE WE'VE NOT HAD THE TIME TO CATCH UP WITH THE PAPER, BUT I WILL TELL YOU THAT THE DAY WE STARTED ON THE SOUTH SIDE, WE PUT NINE HOURS IN, WITH FOUR DUMP TRUCKS BEING LOADED BY PAYLOADERS, WE HAULED OVER A HUNDRED TONS OF JUST DEMOLITION MATERIAL THAT DAY. AND THAT ONLY COVERED ABOUT FOUR CITY BLOCKS. AND THAT WASN'T COMPLETE - THOSE HOUSES WEREN'T EVEN CLOSE TO BEING FINISHED, THEY WERE STILL HAULING STUFF OUT AFTER WE LEFT.

FX: DUMP TRUCKS CRUISING IN AND OUT OF LANDFILL.

The Prairie View Landfill these days rumbles constantly with dump-trucks. Its name is optimistic: you can see a lot of clay here, and a lot of garbage, and a few seagulls - not much prairie. But these towns are lucky in a couple of ways: for one thing, this landfill's close by - right on the edge of Wahpeton. For another, it's fairly new - there's a lot of room left. Good thing, says Brad Reilly, with all this traffic.

YEAH - IT'S TENFOLD WHAT'S GONNA GO IN THERE NORMALLY.

Reilly works for Disposal Services, the company operating the Prairie View.

WE HAVE PROJECTED TIME PERIODS THAT THIS LANDFILL IS GOOD FOR, AND THIS IN THE SCOPE OF THINGS IS A VERY YOUNG LANDFILL. WE'RE NOT EVEN TO A TENTH OF CAPACITY YET - BUT IT'LL HAVE AN IMPACT, A DEFINITE, DEFINITE IMPACT.

In fact, the burden Prairie View landfill has multiplied exponentially. It's supposed to be a demolition landfill - reserved for sheetrock, paneling, and other construction materials less threatening to groundwater. But the record flooding prompted the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to relax certain guidelines. Now, household trash corrupted by sewage - and that's almost everything from every basement - is also being dumped at Prairie View. The MPCA says it weighed the possible risk to groundwater against the more immediate risk - of disease from contaminated garbage sitting even longer on city streets.

FX: HAMMERING, SCRAPING.

The first floor is being rebuilt at the Wilkin County Environmental office; flood waters chased some county employees to temporary quarters in a construction trailer, but environmental officer Bruce Poppel stayed dry. He's up on the second floor, tabulating the results a recent collection drive for hazardous household trash - the kind of stuff everybody has on their basement shelves.

WE'VE COLLECTED 495 GALLONS OF OIL-BASED PAINT, 660 GALLONS OF LATEX PAINT, 440 GALLONS OF FUEL PRODUCTS - GAS, DIESEL, PAINT THINNERS. . . .

And residents are still calling with fuel oil leaks, pesticide spills, you name it. The environment, Poppel says, took a beating from the flood.

FX: GRUNTING AND HOISTING

At a home in south Breckenridge, a volunteer named Dave hoists boxes of soaked sheetrock up from the basement and into a waiting wheelbarrow. The driveway is mounded high with wallboard, appliances - and history. The owner of the house, Connie Nennig, was born in Fargo the year of Pearl Harbor. She was one of a set of quadruplets. She'd saved a lot of newspaper articles.

FX: WHEELBARROW DUMPING

WE WONDER, OURSELVES, WHAT THEY'RE GONNA DO WITH IT ALL. BUT THEY'LL FIND A PLACE FOR IT.

FX: MORE DUMPING

Go to Flood of 1997.