Volunteer sandbaggers in Fargo and Moorhead dig in bright and early this morning, tossing shovelfuls of sand that amount to the first salvos in yet another effort to hold back a river primed to cause problems.
In Moorhead, plans call for preparing 300,000 sandbags. In Fargo, the aim is to fill 1 million bags.
That's enough to bolster the banks of both cities for a flood of 38 feet, a height nearly 3 feet below 2009's record crest of 40.84 feet on the Red River - a memory fresh enough to make sandbagging again seem like a cruel case of déjà vu.
It will depends on melting patterns and rainfall in the next month, but forecasters say there's a 1-in-4 chance that this year's spring crest could be just as high as last year's. It's set to be the unwanted encore, a reprisal coming before the recovery ends.
So the straining, monotonous work must begin, bags readied as bricks in the lines of defense that go where clay dikes can't. It's a tough pill to swallow, but it's equally tough to imagine people here failing to meet the challenge.
