After the flood goes down, the first thing you do is pump the water out of the buildings. All the wet personal stuff, clothing, photos, books, stuffed animals and toys, has to be thrown out. Then you haul out the furniture and appliances, rip up the carpet, and remove the shelves and cabinets. The next part smells. Everything has to be scrubbed with chlorine bleach to remove the contaminants that gather in flood waters.
Residents say the city still smells like bleach five months after the flood.
The debris left by the flood in Grand Forks totaled 112,000 tons. That was 224 million pounds of garbage. The Grand Forks Herald fire. One of the most destructive aspects of the flood was the fire, not water. Power lines that were knocked down by the water short-circuited and caused raging fires that were hard to control.