Other roads and highways are either extremely hazardous or simply impassable because of encroaching floodwaters. Amtrak and the BNSF Railway may have to reroute their trains over more southern lines as rising waters threaten to wash out roadbeds and bridges. The small town of Minnewaukan, once located 13 kilometers west of the lake, is now partly underwater, and many of its plus residents have been forced to abandon their homes. Only a handful of people remain in Churchs Ferry and nearby Penn, communities established more than a century ago.
Army Corps of Engineers levee that protects the community from storm-generated waves that reportedly reach 2 meters or more in height. Without the levee, 3 to 4 meters of water would now cover parts of the city.
Devils Lake owes its existence to a continental glacier that covered much of North America during the Pleistocene Epoch. Carving a basin as it advanced over the landscape, the glacier deposited excavated materials along its leading edges, leaving terminal moraines marking the farthest extent of glacial ice sheets. Near the end of the Pleistocene, roughly 11, years ago, the glacier began its retreat. As the glacier withdrew, glacial meltwaters poured into the basin, creating a vast proglacial lake dammed by morainal deposits.
Native Americans called this lake Minnewaukan , meaning, among other possible interpretations, Bad Spirit Water. Recent flooding has perhaps given credence to a legend told by those Native Americans, claiming that the lake once overflowed and flooded the entire world.
Figure 2. The markers above indicate the surface elevation of Devils Lake between , at 1, feet, or meters, and at 1, feet, or meters. When the author took this photograph in , the lake, visible in the background, was at about 1, feet, or close to meters. Surface elevation of Devils Lake at the writing of this article was 5. Based on abandoned beaches, or strand lines, geologists estimate that the ancestral lake reached a maximum surface elevation of between and meters. At that elevation, the lake covered about 1, square kilometers, held about 5 million acre-feet of water and had a maximum depth of around 50 meters.
A natural outlet called Tolna Coulee, which allowed water to flow out of the basin and prevented the lake from rising and expanding further, controlled the maximum elevation. How often the lake has overflowed is uncertain, but geologists believe it has happened at least twice over the past 4, years, most recently around 2, years ago. Figure 3. Here is a more detailed look at the changing surface elevation of Devils Lake.
The lowest recorded elevation of 1, Its current level is the highest in recorded history. Adapted by Tom Dunne from a U. Geological Survey chart. Sediment analyses by geologist Edward Callender, published in his University of North Dakota doctoral thesis, indicated that the lake might have been completely dry 6, years ago.
After the lake last rose to its maximum elevation and began overflowing, water levels continued to fluctuate in response to alternating dry and wet periods. A persistently dry climate to years ago held levels at relatively low elevations for perhaps as long as years. Wetter conditions followed, raising the lake to levels that prevailed until the late s. Levels then began dropping precipitously, falling to the lowest-recorded elevation by before rising again.
Whether Lake Minnewaukan was completely dry at times or not, periodic drawdowns during dry conditions reduced its immense volume to numerous remnant lakes scattered across the south-central region of the basin. West Bay then was essentially dry and Main Bay covered about 53 square kilometers.
According to T. Pope of the U. Bureau of Fisheries, Main Bay and East Bay had become isolated during the s after lake levels dropped about 6 meters during the previous 25 to 30 years. Devils Lake receives nearly all of its water from surface runoff and direct precipitation. Most surface-water runoff originates from a chain of remnant lakes located a few kilometers north of Devils Lake, although many of these smaller lakes have now merged with Devils Lake as the water levels rise.
By September , for example, Devils Lake and all of the lakes to the east—including the two Stump lakes—had completely merged. Total annual inflows ranged from near zero during the drought-stricken s to nearly , acre-feet in Inflows, averaging 65, acre-feet annually between and , rose to , acre-feet annually between and , a fivefold increase. The years to contributed 24 percent of all inflow to Devils Lake between and Figure 4. An increase in water flowing into the basin of the ancient Lake Minnewaukan has caused Devils Lake and neighboring remnant lakes to merge into one body of water, which is becoming progressively larger.
The dashed white lines represent Devils Lake in , when the author, then a graduate student, first conducted research there. If Devils Lake rises approximately two additional meters and begins overflowing, as scientists predict it will, lake waters will enter the Sheyenne River. After turning south, the river is impounded by a Corps of Engineers dam Bald Hill Dam located 20 kilometers north of Valley City, a town of about 6, residents.
Figure 5. In , the town of Minnewaukan was located 13 kilometers west of Devils Lake. In this May photograph, the town is partly flooded by lake water. The giant lake bed left behind is virtually a closed basin: it has no natural outlet. However, the state of North Dakota pumps water from the Devils Lake Basin into the Sheyenne, which helps to moderate flooding, Frith said.
The pumps were shut down temporarily in July — when the Sheyenne couldn't accommodate pumped water because it was running full after the heavy rains — but pumping has resumed, Frith said. Heavy rains have affected fields and roads as flooding concerns return to the Devils Lake Basin. As Devils Lake's levels rise, water in surrounding areas miles away, such as the standing water on Doug Becker's field near Crary, N.
Rather, flooding here was slow and relentless — a steady inch-by-inch, foot-by-foot increase in water levels that claimed roads, fields and farmsteads that once had just enough elevation to escape flooding.
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By Sharlene Breakey on August 24, Sharlene Breakey. An eerie flood in North Dakota has wiped out roads, churches, cemeteries, and hundreds of farms. Paul Johnson, a Minnesota-based photographer who grew up in North Dakota, returned to his home state in the summer of to capture the inundated farming communities surrounding Devils Lake - including Churchs Ferry, where he snapped this abandoned barn and the scenes on the following pages.
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Brad Omick. Kima Bowman. I heard that the city of Devils Lake was built on another town is this true. View Replies 1. Mark Lanning. Carol R Anderson. But every year, by the time he had shuffled his finances enough to be ready for a mortgage, the widow would change her mind.
It got to be a sort of joke between Jim and Diane, and it never was resolved; eventually the widow just died. In , after 25 years of waiting, Jim bought the land from her kids. It's a fitting story for North Dakota. For more than a century, people have been coming here only to leave because of the bitter winters or the seemingly relentless winds, the loneliness they find in the vast stretches of land, or the annual challenge of coaxing a crop to life in a place that is so often too much of one thing—dry, hot, wet, cold.
But the people who have driven their feet into the ground and grown roots that would allow them to turn and face the wind head-on, those are the people who built Minnewaukan and communities like it, these knobs of civilization that poke up throughout the prairie and die only when they have exhausted every other option. The regional identity is built on values of solidity, endurance, and permanence.
Long-held, often multi-generational relationships with pieces of land are the most fundamental manifestation of that identity. For rural North Dakotans, place is not just a setting in which life transpires.
Place—land—is life. And so it makes sense that the non-farming widow would string the renter along for all those years—and that the renter would allow himself to be strung along. What doesn't make sense about the story, or perhaps perversely underscores that attachment North Dakotans have to their land, is that as the Yris were patiently waiting for their chance to buy the farm, the water around it was rising. Even in , the first year of flooding, the lake edged into their pastures; when they signed the papers in , the water had already been encroaching for eight years.
The farm was 2, acres when Jim started there, and after purchasing it he and Diane added acres by buying Jim's parents' place next door. In they were down to fewer than acres of dry ground. They still owned the other 2, acres, but those were underwater. Jim and Diane are in their fifties, he brawny and ruddy-faced, she slender with an air of mischief.
Given the choice, they both prefer to deliver a sentence with a chuckle rather than with a serious look, even when they're explaining how their farm has been almost entirely swallowed. Like so many here, they tell their story with an air of incredulity, perhaps still in shock despite 18 years of flooding.
The lowlands on the south side of the farm were part of what people had always called the "lake bottom," but before it had been dry land—hay fields, pasture, even some crop acreage. Same with the areas people referred to as "banks. The farm's main house was built in , and as far as anyone knew water had never come near it.
In , the farmhouse was moved up the hill to drier land. Sitting in the living room there last spring, Jim told me, "I never in my wildest dreams thought in 20 years I'd be chased away, only to watch it all disappear even more.
I never thought I'd see it actually become the bottom of a lake. And who knows when it will stop? The day before we spoke, there were winds Jim judged at 40 miles per hour. Coming across nearly eight miles of water, they sent waves to crash on what remains of the paddocks that front the farm's old, red barn.
As he recounted this, a rare storm passed over him and his face darkened. The waves out there are brown—that's land in them. The Yris are not alone. It's almost hard to find a farmer in the area who has not lost some land since the lake began rising. Government payments are available to make up for flooded land that has been planted two out of the last four years, but for those acres that have gone underwater for the long term, there is no compensation.
The burn is that landowners must continue paying taxes on their property or risk ceding ownership to the government. It's a gamble of sorts, since ownership really matters only if the land reverts to being land.
For years most farmers continued to pay, but recently that has begun to shift.
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