The Hellish Waters of Devils Lake Basin

DEVILS LAKE, N.D. —  The lake is brackish from the old algae and new runoff, and even in the shallows you can’t see bottom. So to locate the lost parts of this town, you study the old maps, memorize the landmarks on the high ground and steer your boat accordingly.

There is the water tower and there is Highway 19; the Eagle Bend subdivision must be directly below, 11 feet down.

If the new bridge is overhead, the old bridge is a few yards north, just below the waterline. Kill the motor. Raise the prop.

And if that’s the roof of Duane and Orpha Howard’s barn, these must be their hayfields. The perch love it here.

In 1993, Devils Lake began to rise. It has not stopped since.

Hundreth-of-a-foot by hundreth-of-a-foot, as the scientists measure it, the water level has climbed an unimaginable 24 feet. And inch by inch, the lake has spread out across this shallow scuff in the prairie, taking a county road one week, a state bridge the next, a line of telephone poles, a house.

In seven years, the water has claimed more than 450 homes, 80,000 acres of farmland, a million trees. It has quadrupled in size, now covering more than 200 square miles.

So incremental, so monotonous has been the rise of the water that few people outside the area know about the strange flood. Folks here know all about it--the meteorology behind the phenomenon, the hydrology, where the water came from and where it will go next.

They just aren’t sure what to do about it.

Workers build up the roads, and the lake washes over them. They build up the dikes and then build them up again.

People move their homes. Then they give in, take the federal flood insurance money and torch them to keep the structures from floating off into the lake.

More than $300 million later, and still the water comes.

The Clinton administration wants the Army Corps of Engineers to build a pumping system as quickly as it can and funnel water into the nearby Sheyenne River system. But even with White House backing, which came just this week, that will take two to four years at least--and the lake is rising more than 3 feet a year.

The state wants to hack a ditch through the hills and drain at least a little water right now. But that would inundate a national wildlife refuge.

Others want to let nature take its course. Just get out of the way, they say.

Everyone agrees on what the lake will do next. It will settle a bit in the fall, freeze in the winter and, when the snows up north melt in the spring, it will rise again.

“It just keeps coming,” says Duane Howard, 66, a sinewy, soft-spoken former rodeo cowboy whose 1,400-acre ranch went under in 1997.

Howard and his wife are sitting at the kitchen table in their new house in Sheyenne. This is the first time they’ve ever lived in an actual town. Duane is paging through the photo album that documents the slow drowning of their ranch.

“It keeps on rising.”

Elevation Is Everything

“Today the lake is at 1,447,” Mark Tabert explains. He’s talking elevation above sea level. “My basement is at 1,448 1/2. We’ll try and spend the rest of the year here, then we’ll leave.”

Sixty miles south of the Canadian border, more than 1,000 miles from an ocean and a long day’s drive from any serious mountains, the study of elevation would seem the most academic of pursuits here.

Rather, elevation is everything. It dictates your property value. It dictates your daily dose of anxiety. It decides whether you stay or go.

After years of studying satellite images and surveying every knoll around the basin, and changing its mind a few times, the Army Corps announced the most important elevation of all: the level at which the lake can rise no more, when it will begin to spill over into the Sheyenne River system, then the Red River and flow north into Canada, into Hudson Bay.

The magic number is 1,460 feet above sea level. And the number is uttered with a reverence born of fear. Long before the lake reaches 1,460, it will swallow most of the town of Devils Lake (much of which is now dry only because of the dikes), several neighboring communities, hundreds of homes and another quarter of a million acres.

Even a couple of years ago, people never dreamed they would be talking 1,447. And no one even knew the importance of 1,460.

“We sold our old place over there in 1992,” Tabert says, looking past his disappearing yard, past his long-gone boat dock, to the south side of the lake. “The kids wanted to see the old homestead. I took them in a canoe. I guess it’ll be the same with this place.”

‘Prairie Pothole,’ the Locals Call It

Shaved out of the flat land by the receding glaciers of the last Ice Age, the Devils Lake Basin always has been a bit of an anomaly. A “prairie pothole,” locals call it, the lake has no natural drainage. Like the Great Salt Lake, it grows and shrinks depending on precipitation and evaporation and the saturation of the soil.

The old-timers long have known that some years you had a ways to go if you felt like fishing, and some years the lake and the fish came to you. No one got too worked up about it.

This is different, though. In 1993, the lake was eight miles from the town of Minnewaukan. Now the lakefront is on Main Street.

The previous record high level for Devils Lake was 1,438 feet--9 feet below the current level--recorded in 1867. The lowest was 1,400 feet in 1940, when the lake darn near vanished.

In February 1993, the waterline stood at 1,422.6 feet above sea level, about average over the 132-year recorded history of the lake. Then it began to rain and snow.

Each year since 1993, the Army Corps has studied the weather patterns and long-term cycles of precipitation and made its most careful, most cautious prediction: the 1% prediction.

There is less than a 1% chance, the Corps would announce, that the lake will reach such-and-such a level the following year. Each year, the lake has beaten the government-sanctioned odds of 99-to-1.

Meteorologists now say the area is in a prolonged wet cycle, brought about by a slight shift in the jet stream. Computer models suggest the cycle will last at least five or seven more years and then fade slowly.

Some of the local Sioux have a simpler explanation: The lake is angry. It wants to grow and spill and cleanse itself.

Glorious Days for Fishing Guides

When they built the highway out to Graham’s Island a few years back, they built it 10 feet above the water. The highway is now 12 feet under. And the fishing guides, using their depth gauges, point the bow straight down the center line of the submerged roadway and throttle up--eight straight miles of glorious trolling.

“We call it the Golden Highway,” 24-year-old guide Jason Mitchell shouts above the thrum of the outboard. “The Golden Highway, paved with walleyes and northerns.”

Many small shops and other businesses in the community report sales off by 25% in the last year or two. The real estate market is a mess; buying any property below 1,460 feet is a gamble. Companies that once talked of expanding into the area now are looking elsewhere.

But the fishing guides, and a handful of others, have become apologetic beneficiaries of the spreading lake.

The new water and thousands of acres of fresh fish-food are turning Devils Lake into a world-class sport fishery. Mitchell was booked solid all summer, and on the very worst afternoon of the year, his customers still pulled in a decent-sized northern pike and a big white bass.

At the same time, every drop of water that finds its way to the lake expands the shoreline ever so slightly--and the lake’s lure as a tourist destination.

In 1995, the water finally forced Kyle Blanchfield to move his Woodland Resort--the restaurant, boat docks, campsites, everything--up the bank. He rebuilt, 12 1/2 feet higher. Now, with the pumps going full time, full bore to keep the bait shop dry, he’s getting ready to move again.

“I’ve had it with the mud and the pumping and the moving,” Blanchfield says. Then, with a dumbfounded shake of his head, “But our business has skyrocketed. We’re up 50% in the last two years. Ironic, huh?”

Still, nearly everyone--even the farmers getting semi-rich selling rock for the levees and the road workers bringing in the overtime--understands that sooner rather than later, a call must be made: Find a way to drain some water or abandon the towns.

Time to Act, Studies Aside

“It’s time for something to be done,” city engineer Glenn Olson says, his measured voice rising. “We have stacks and stacks of studies. We have so many studies they would fill my entire bookcase. We need to start moving some water out.”

In his office at City Hall, Olson keeps a poster-size satellite photograph of the basin. The lake, as it stands now, is rendered in a dark blue. The lake as it would look just before it began to spill is a bright fuchsia. Beneath the fuchsia lie the towns of Minnewaukan, Church’s Ferry, Webster, Cando and everything in between.

The problem, as Olson knows all too well, is that there is no good place to move the water to. The rains of the last seven years have not confined themselves to the Devils Lake Basin. People around have all the water they need, and then some.

And even if they didn’t, even if every town from here to Winnipeg was withering from drought, you could hardly pay them to take Devils Lake water.

Because the lake has no outlet, its salinity rises with evaporation. No one downstream wants the relatively salty water. They would have to upgrade their water treatment facilities. And they don’t want the lake’s microorganisms and indigenous species of fish either, which could alter ecosystems for hundreds of miles.

The idea of dumping the salty water is so unpopular with “downstreamers” that the city has named local businessman Joe Belford of Joe’s Corner Mart to a new official post: downstream acceptance manager.

But Belford is having a tough time of it.

The Canadians are so upset, claiming any transfer of water would violate the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty, that they quietly have been raising the issue with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s office and other high-ranking administration officials.

“This is a serious diplomatic issue,” says Robert Oleson of the Canadian Transboundary Waters Office. “It is a disaster for the town, but the solution is not for them to dump the problem on their neighbors.”

At the direction of the White House, the Army Corps is studying plans to pump the water out of the west end of the lake, which has lower salinity levels. But the idea of having slightly fresher water dumped on them, at 400 cubic feet per second, has done little to mollify downstreamers.

And while many folks near the shore here are pleased to have the attention of lawmakers, they just don’t think it much matters, not now.

If the Corps chooses the very simplest plan and builds the system as swiftly as possible, it will still be two years before the first gallon is pumped out of Devils Lake. The water level will likely have risen another 6 feet by then.

“Six more feet,” Olson says. “Do you know what would be left? Not much.”

So the state is forging ahead with its own desperate plan: Dig a ditch and dump some water, dump as much as possible. Apologize for flooding the 90-year-old Stump Lake National Wildlife Refuge, gird for lawsuits. But start moving some water, now.

The outflow would not keep up with the inflow of recent years, proponents acknowledge, not even close. But it’s time to do something, they say, past time.

Looking Back on What Used to Be

It has just rained--a short, hard rain. The lake has risen again, some infinitesimal amount.

Back inside the Howards’ new house in Sheyenne, everyone is dry and tired and ready to talk about something besides the lake. They know, no matter what happens now, they will probably never go home.

Orpha is drinking coffee and Duane is fiddling with the spurs he won as bull-riding champ at the 1959 Pendleton Round-Up out in Oregon.

He begins to list the things the water took.

“We lost a house, a big barn, two small barns, 1,400 acres. . . . Oh, we lost it all--that’s how you’d put it, I guess.”

Slater was recently on assignment in North Dakota.