5 ms·

This has been happening for at least 4 years already. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/the-rapid-rise-of-federal-surveillance-drones-over-a

• heelix 6y ago
  Even longer - I remember seeing one circle over the 2009 Fargo flood while we were sand bagging.
  • littleweep 6y ago
    Question -- what is 'sand bagging'?
    • CapitalistCartr 6y ago
      Assembling and placing sandbags to hold back floodwaters.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • heelix 6y ago
      https://i.imgur.com/BlUJxIj.jpg https://i.imgur.com/BlUJxIj.jpg Was my parent's home. We were south of Fargo, outside of the city dike. Fargo is very, very flat farmland. Our house was 40' above the river. The top of the city dike was around 43'. We melted down the ice, put down a sheet of plastic, and then built a wall of sandbags. Bonus, it was very cold, so you essentially had to bag and place the sandbag before the sand froze. We put around 10k sacks around the house -- and saved it. Nothing like paddling a canoe to my brothers to resupply fuel for the generators powering the sump-pumps that handled the water that seeps in. We got very, very lucky. The weather froze the ice a few inches thick and it stopped rising. Had water reached that last bag, Fargo would have been a giant swimming pool.
      • neckardt 6y ago
        How do you acquire 10k sacks of sand on such short notice? Also, how much does that cost?
        • heelix 6y ago
          The sacks were pretty easy to order. You would have a dump truck come out and leave a pile of sand on the driveway. From there, you basically shovel/fill sacks like mad and either place them on your wall or put them someplace heated. Next day you would order another truck of sand. A stupid amount of manpower was involved. Entire high school football team came over to help fill on one of the days. The entire city basically shut down and did little but. We did the same for at least five or six houses that we did for ours. Exhausting. https://i.imgur.com/Ijzt56t.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Ijzt56t.jpg https://i.imgur.com/FR0qla3.jpg https://i.imgur.com/FR0qla3.jpg https://i.imgur.com/KDvP5Du.jpg https://i.imgur.com/KDvP5Du.jpg I'll have to dig up some of the 'end of days' photos where it almost breached the wall. You had to buy flood insurance early on... which was pricey, but covered a lot of the supplies. It was several thousand dollars for the 2009 construction. We had 3 '500 year' floods. 1997, 2009, and 2011. The Red river flows north, which is an oddity. Lots of snow, with folks redirecting water caused some new records. Grand Forks was flooded out in one of those years - Fargo almost fell. By the time the third major flood happened - we were ready. https://i.imgur.com/jhAIMMn.jpg https://i.imgur.com/jhAIMMn.jpg We set up a series of hesco bags and filled them directly. Worked great, and they came and picked up the bags to be reused in the Bismark flooding. Sand doubled in price each time... and the city really wanted this property on the cheap... so that last run took hours but cost about 20k. (yikes) After that, the city built a permanent dike that protected the property.
          • asldfhasdf2 6y ago
            > By the time the third major flood happened - we were ready. i was expecting to see a raised home on the pic, not a better way to fill sandbags. oh well.
            • 6y ago
• ryder9 6y ago
  well then it's alright, if it's been happening for years