Here's the story from the Minot Daily News.
Here's the ND DOT highway condition map.
Here's the National Weather Service's flood prediction for Minot.
Here's the county's flood info page.
You can get more info from the links in the sidebar of the Minot Daily News page. On the ND DOT page there are closures and delays all over the area as roads are going underwater and/or collapsing. There will be major railroad closures too- Minot is a railroad junction and the BNSF "High Line" and CP transcontinental main lines cross there. Expect to see freight backups as trains are detoured over the already congested MRL/BNSF "Low Line" and CP's Noyes line or simply parked. Looking at the NWS APHS page, the water level is now going over the levees, flooding homes and businesses as well as thousands of acres of farmland, and will rise rapidly at least another eight feet in the next few days.
This is major... I've been following floods since the Midwest floods of 1993 through the Minnesota and Red River Valley floods of 1997, the Iowa floods of 2008, and the last three years repeated Red River Valley floods. Done ham radio communications, thrown sandbages, and documented the damage. I've become jaded... I don't even bother with little floods anymore because they happen every year it seems. It's getting to the point I only do floods when the NWS catagorizes them as major or they set new records. A hundred year flood means nothing, we get them every couple years now.
Which brings us to the topic of megafloods. A few years back I'd look at the inundation maps and do a "what if" observation of what would happen if the levees we're topped in riverside cities like LaCrosse, Wisconsin. Darn near that whole town's built in flood plain, protected by levees to the usual 100 year or so flood levels. Given enough warning they can add a couple feet to the levees, but beyond that the town's getting flooded. Just like Grand Forks, New Orleans, and Cedar Rapids, all of which were supposedly protected to at least 100 year flood levels. Megafloods have obsoleted the whole Corps of Engineers calculus, and with many cities great and small built along rivers much of our country is threatened by these increasingly common megafloods.
It takes megastorms to make megafloods, along with the general increase in precipitation we're seeing in the upper middle of the country. I remember in Skywarn tornado spotter training a couple decades ago when we we're shown pictures of F4 and F5 tornados, because we'd probably never see one with our own eyes. How many F5s have we had this year? I've lost count! Same with hurricanes. What we are seeing, that can pretty much only be attributed to human induced climate change, are extreme weather events and trends well beyond the old norms.
I'm angry and emotional about this, as Minot becomes the latest city to be ravaged by floods. To add insult to injury, Minot is far removed from the national news media centers so you'll see scant mention of this catastrophe in the MSM. So please blog up this issue and bring it to the fore. And I may unload on any climate change denier that brings up the subject today...