Blame the Ice Age glacial lake that left the river in a flat, wide valley.
Stick a river that flows north into one of the flattest stretches of land on the face of the Earth and what do you get?
Trouble.
That is why folks in the Red River Valley seem to spend spring after spring stacking sandbags, watching the skies and worrying about frost depth, rate of melt and ice jams.
In a region that slopes inches per mile, all it takes is a rapid thaw or an ice dam to send the meandering Red River over its banks and put miles of the valley under water.
"It's like taking a glass of water and pouring it on the top of a table," said Kevin Dean, public information officer for the city of Grand Forks, N.D.
"The water just goes everywhere. Everything's flat. That's really hard for a lot of people to understand. But it's just so flat that when it floods, it has everywhere to go and there's nothing to stop it."
It's been that way for nearly 10,000 years......
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