The BBC reports on more flooding in the Northern Prairies: North Dakota city Minot evacuates amid flooding fears

Authorities in Minot in the state of North Dakota have told roughly 12,000 residents to leave their homes immediately, as the Souris River threatens to flood.

Sirens sounded throughout the city around 1300 local time (1800 GMT), alerting residents of an impending deadline to evacuate.

“All residents must evacuate, Zones one through nine,” an announcement said.

Heavy rainfall has bloated the river, which flows down from Canada.

The Souris River is expected to hit nearly 1,563ft (476m) above sea level this weekend, topping the previous flood record set in 1881.

Canada has been dealing with the flooding along the Souris for weeks, so this has been a slow moving disaster.

Nothing against the people who were born and raised there, but there is an Air Force Base and ICBM missile silos outside of Minot. If you were in the Strategic Air Command, Minot AFB was the equivalent of Hell. That’s where you were sent if you really screwed up. Minot was considered a credible threat to people stationed at Shemya in the Aleutians.

I feel bad for the North Dakotans, but if the Base were seriously damaged and the DoD decided to close it, there would be a lot of happy campers in the Air Force.

Update: Dr Masters has more on the flooding and a map showing the connection to the Assiniboine which joins the Red River at Winnipeg. The Prairie Provinces have been dealing with the system since early Spring, and eastern North Dakota had to deal with the Red River going over the flood stage.

All of the reservoirs in the area are full, and there is nowhere left to hold the water.

Just read 5 Reasons Internet Access in America is a Disaster. I realize that it is on a humor site, but the Daily Show is on Comedy Central. It pretty much explains what I’m going through.

When I first got DSL, Sprint was using Earthlink, and with the DSL service you also had dial-up back-up if the DSL went down. When Sprint sold out to Embarq, Embarq used its own system, and that didn’t include dial-up. It also meant that all of your Earthlink e-mail addresses and on-line storage went away. Now CenturyLink has taken over Embarq, and the e-mail/web site shift is coming. CenturyLink has also implemented modem leasing, rather than the original policy of just giving you the modem they wanted you to use. They want to charge me $3/month in addition to the $100/month I already pay for a modem that probably costs them $25 or less, plus $14 to ship it to me.

To be fair, the $100/month includes a landline telephone with every feature the telephone company offers. The only thing connected to it is a 20-year-old Plantronic headset phone that doesn’t have the capability to use any of those features. If I had to keep the landline, I could get by with the most basic plan for telephone service they offer, as politicians and wrong numbers are the only calls I receive on the thing, but if I did that, they couldn’t give me the special rate I receive for DSL as part of a “bundle”. Oddly enough, the price is going to be $100/month no matter what I do. In another amazing coincidence, if I went with the cable company, their plan works out to $100/month. Isn’t competition under “capitalism” wonderful.

There are a lot of problems with satellites, but I have an extra $50/month to deal with them.

The spread was limited to just over 2000 acres, and containment is up to 58%. Better weather really helps the effort to control wildfires.

Also note that the number of structures that are threatened has also been reduced over the last couple of days, indicating that the lines around the populated areas are holding.

Information from the current Wallow Fire InciWeb Page

• Date Started: 5/29/2011
• Location: Apache, Navajo, Graham, and Greenlee Counties, San Carlos and White Mountain Apache Reservations, Arizona; Catron County, New Mexico
• Cause: Human – under investigation
• Size: 529,825 acres [828 miles² 2144 km²] based on infrared data
• Percent Contained: 58%
• Injuries to Date: 12
• Residences: 1,511 threatened; 32 destroyed; 5 damaged
• Commercial Property: 162 threatened; 4 destroyed
• Outbuildings: 400 threatened; 36 destroyed; 1 damaged
• Other: 1 truck destroyed
• Number of Personnel: Approximately 3,389 including 10 hotshot crews and 45 hand crews
• Equipment: 21 dozers, 189 engines, 72 watertenders
• Aircraft: 16 helicopters, 5 air tankers
• Incident Commander: Jim Loach, Area Command Team 3

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