By State › North Dakota

North Dakota: Overview

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Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in North Dakota exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under North Dakota go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

The 1997 Red River flood: Grand Forks’s own story

Minnesota’s page on this site covers the 1997 Red River flood’s broader regional numbers, a $3.5 billion disaster largely without direct fatalities thanks to a massive evacuation. Grand Forks, North Dakota, sits at the center of that same flood with a story distinctly its own: the Red River crested at 54 feet, well past the National Weather Service’s 49-foot worst-case estimate, forcing Mayor Pat Owens to order more than 50,000 people out of the city. In the middle of that evacuation, a major fire broke out downtown and burned through 11 buildings and 60 apartment units before firefighters could reach it through the floodwater. Recovery required removing entire neighborhoods permanently to build a new $409 million federal levee system. See the Risks page for the full data.

The Blizzard of 1966: widely considered North Dakota’s worst storm

Over March 2-4, 1966, a blizzard parked over North Dakota for three days, driving winds up to 70 mph into mountainous snow drifts across the state. It’s often identified as the worst recorded storm in North Dakota history specifically because of how long it lingered, killing at least 18 people in the state and surrounding region along with thousands of livestock. See the Risks page for the full data.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in North Dakota: a flood evacuation can create its own secondary emergencies, as Grand Forks’s downtown fire during the 1997 flood shows, so this manual’s guidance about not assuming firefighting response will be available or fast during a major flood applies directly here, and extreme, multi-day blizzard risk is a genuine, historically severe hazard in its own right, not just a routine winter inconvenience.

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