MINNEWAUKAN, N.D. -- A group of elementary students at Minnewaukan Public School playing an outdoor recess game paid little attention the other day as a muskrat swam past the playground.
But they couldn't help but notice the commotion a few hundred feet away, as a couple of pairs of Canada geese started screaming their a-hink-a-honk, a-hink-a-honking calls as they battled for territory on a marshy piece of ground that used to be the school's baseball diamond.
"We're getting along all right," Superintendent Myron Jury said, as he walked on the spongy, broken blacktop of the school's flooded parking lot. "But it's going to make a mess soon."
He was talking the rising Devils Lake and of an emergency project to build a temporary berm to keep the lake from encroaching on the school, the city water tower and several blocks of private property.
If all the paperwork is completed, construction could start by Friday.
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High school graduation is May 22, with the last day of classes on May 20.
The hope is that the berm -- an official U.S. Army Corps of Engineers term for what many call a temporary clay dike -- will buy the school and the community 15 to 16 months to relocate to higher ground a couple of miles away, on the west side of a relocated U.S. 281.
The lake today was at an elevation of 1,453.76 feet above sea level. "It is above the gym floor now, but we haven't seen any water in the building yet," Jury said.
The gymnasium floor is at 1,453 feet.
People in this Benson County seat of 290 have been battling the lake for the past 15 years, relocating its lagoons and rebuilding its sewer system, among other emergency repairs.
City crews have been pumping water out of town, trying to protect that infrastructure, for the past week.
The 3,000-foot-long berm will be built to an elevation of 1,458 feet at an estimated cost of $1.2 million.
Much of the ice left Devils Lake over the past week, and 40- and 50-mph weekend winds pushed one large sheet a mile or more away from the school property. But by today, it had drifted back to the edge of the school property.
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"Usually, it's the end of May when we have to start dealing with higher water," Jury said. "We're pretty well prepared to deal with it, but we didn't think it would happen so fast."
