FARGO -- Elroy Bakke grew up on farmland where the city of Oxbow, N.D., now sits. The 70-year-old and his wife, Ina, still live just across old Highway 81 from Oxbow in the Bakke subdivision that bears his family's name.
They've put their house of 36 years on the market as part of their estate planning. But Bakke said the Army Corps of Engineers' revised diversion plan released publicly on Thursday isn't going to help them sell it any faster.
"Hell, we might be on the buyout list," he said, only half-joking.
Eight miles south of Fargo, aftershocks from the bombshell dropped by the corps were still reverberating through Oxbow, Hickson and the Bakke subdivision Friday.
Instead of raising river levels downstream, the revised plan calls for upstream storage cells backing up water south of Fargo -- a plan Oxbow Mayor Jim Nyhof said could wipe out the town of about 250 people.
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Beth Leake, whose home on Riverbend Road overlooks the Red River, said she's "not too excited" about the plan.
She and her husband, Dan, built a sandbag dike to protect their home in 2009, and water crept onto the bottom few inches of it.
"And I don't like the idea of it going any higher than that, because that was pretty darn close as it was," she said.
The couple landscaped last summer to try to alleviate flooding worries.
"But we don't know how much that'll help if the water's going to be higher," she said.
Even for residents such as Bakke, who could see the floodwaters from his yard but wasn't touched by them during record flooding in 2009, the prospect of additional water is chilling.
"For us out here, it's kind of scary," he said. "A couple more feet wouldn't do us any good."
Corps officials Thursday said they're still studying the impacts of the revised plan on river levels.
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Nyhof said Oxbow has spent a lot of money to protect itself to a higher river level since the 2009 flood. Now, based on the revised diversion plan, "it's irrelevant," he said.
"Everybody should be concerned," he said.
"There isn't a house here that would be saved. Anybody that's trying to sell a house, it's sad. It becomes something that we can't even defend."
County Engineer Keith Berndt said a team of consultants led by local firms Moore Engineering of West Fargo and Houston Engineering of Fargo is studying the feasibility of building a ring dike to protect Oxbow and Hickson to the level necessary under the corps' revised plan.
The Bakke subdivision is farther from the river and could be ring-diked more easily, Berndt said. Ring dikes also would be needed to protect individual farms, and roads would need to be raised, he said.
Berndt said the consulting team formed after initial discussions with the corps a couple of weeks ago about the possibility of staging water upstream.
He acknowledged the corps' revised plan creates "a real dilemma" for upstream residents trying to sell their homes.
"I think they have reason to be concerned. We would just ask for their patience," he said, adding the plan could turn out to benefit homeowners if they receive ring-dike protection.
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Cass County has bought out 11 flood-prone homes in Oxbow since the 2009 flood, and buyouts are pending on two others.
Leake said she voted against the county's half-cent sales tax to fund a diversion Nov. 2 "because of the fact we didn't know what it was going to do for us."
Now, she and her husband face potentially having to leave the peaceful setting and dream home they built in 1996, she said.
"When we built this house, I always told my husband I'm going to die in this house," she said.
The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead and the Herald are Forum Communications Co. newspapers.
