Suzan Woodley, a para-professional in the technology department at the high school, remembers coming home from work in 2009 to the smell of a burned out sump pump. When she went outside of the house to make sure it was working, she looked up to see shingles blowing off of her house. When she walked in her house and went downstairs, her feet hit water.
“I went, ‘Ugh! I can’t do this anymore!’” Woodley said. “That day, I had people fixing a sump pump in ice cold water, nailing down shingles that were blowing away, and moving furniture.”
During that spring, multiple teachers from the district came out to help the Woodley family sandbag. One of those teachers was Spanish teacher, Lori Anderson. Anderson recalls the night she got the call that Woodley needed help.
“We quickly finished up our bites [of dinner] and maybe 10 to 15 minutes later, we were on our way,” Anderson said. “Our first thought was, we’ve got to get there.”
That spring, the Woodley family was living on two levels of their house. The family could not even park in their driveway because it was completely under water. Instead, they had to park on the highway and walk to their house.
After dealing with the Sheyenne River’s raging water in the 2006, 2009, 2010 and 2011 floods, Woodley and her husband have found new ways to prepare their house for the water. Woodley lives in a four story house just outside of Harwood. The Sheyenne River’s banks are in their back yard but when the flood waters start to rise, their house is put in danger. During the 2011 flood, the two bottom levels of their house were flooded.
Since that spring, the Woodley family began to prepare their home earlier in the year. They have already dug out the snow to make paths for their sump pumps and, earlier this year, they got an external sump pump. This pump will not only drain out water, but also sand and dirt. They also dug four feet down around their house to put polygala membrane on their house, which is a sticky rubber material that helps repel water. Lastly, they got pea rock to put on the bottom of their new drain tiles to help protect their home.
The Woodleys are not the only family affected by floods. Sophomore Suzy Dullum’s family may not have to worry about sand bagging their house every spring because of a dike that has been set up by their home, but the rising water still causes problems for her family. They have had hard times getting to places such as school and work. During the 2009 year, the Dullum family went to live with their other family members for a week.
“We wanted to make sure we could get to school and that my mom could get to work,” Dullum said.
Their family lives in town so they did not have to worry about flood waters blocking off roads, like they did while they were at their house. That was one precaution the family took to try and keep their lives semi-normal.
But even having to deal with all the difficulties of flooding for all these years, Woodley still says she would never leave her house.
Anderson, who lives in town, says she cannot imagine what it would be like to deal with the flood.
“I think you have to live through it to know.” Anderson said. “But at that point, [Woodley’s] house is not a house anymore, it is a home.”