MinnPost: Restraining the Red River: Local officials take flood fight to Washington
Posted in News Clips on June 29th, 2010WASHINGTON — About $193 million worth of taxpayer dollars is spent every year in the Fargo-Moorhead area on fighting, responding to and cleaning up after floods on the Red River — and those are for fights they’ve won.
A loss, defined as the icy waters of March and April breaching the makeshift sandbag levees and flooding the cities, would cost about $8 billion to clean up.
But the risk could be mitigated — and almost eliminated, city officials say — if federal officials would green-light a proposed 36-mile-long diversion channel that would funnel away 35,000 cubic feet of water per second. The cost: $1.4 billion over 10 years, the federal portion of which comes to about $90 million a year.




