In the Ridgewood-Woodland Drive area, students worked for days preparing the area for the flooding Red. Neighbors in the area pitched in together to provide an interconnecting dike system to protect the whole area, and much of the work was accomplished by student laborers.
Diking work was still continuing in the Elm Street area in Fargo as huge pumps worked hard to keep seepage to a minimum behind private dikes on the expanding Red River.
There were approximately 70 students working at the time, a good number of them SU students, as a new layer of plastic coating was being spread over the inside of the dikes.
"Without the students helping us out, we just couldn't make it," said Dr. Wayne LeBien, local resident. During the work on Friday, there were about 500 students working in the area at one time.
Dr. LeBien's dike was primarily constructed by members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, but volunteers from all over the University were evident at all points along the river.
"These kids can work six hours without tiring, something us older people just can't do anymore," said LeBien.
The amount of sand moved is almost unbelievable to most people. In just building a partial dike behind one house, over 37 tons of sand were used. Each sandbag weighs about 60 lbs., and over 150 tons of sand were moved in the neighborhood in two days.
City crews consisting of volunteer college students worked late into the night on Friday, and most of the day on Saturday to raise an earthen dike on Elm Street between 18th and 19th Avenue North, near the Veterans Hospital.
The sandbagging there started early Friday evening, and the workers' morale seemed high. There was plenty of joking going on, but the volunteer students contributed most of their time and energy to raising the dike.
"Using students to work on the dikes has seemed to work out real fine so far," said a local resident standing nearby.
Throughout the operation, shoveling sand into bags by hand was minimal as city trucks with automatic sand dispensers were used extensively.
The crew began with about 50 members, but soon expanded from two to three trucks and over 100 people working. "Our only problem at the moment is a shortage of shovels," said Gerry Anderson, representative of the city engineer's office, at one point during the night.
"We do have enough people working now for the setup we have," said Anderson, "but if we could get more people we would just start another crew working further down the dike."
The students also shifted jobs so people would not be exhausted from doing one kind of work all night long. They went from filling sandbags at the trucks, to throwing the bags along the lines and setting them in place, to pushing shovels.
"We have people working here from Stockbridge and all of the other men's residence halls at SU," said Walt Odegaard, head resident of Stockbridge and coordinator of the dike-building on Elm Street.
We've got good workers here," he continued, "and using student volunteers is working out quite well.