A Red River Floodway for Fargo - Moorhead?

10-year, $1.3 billion solution for Fargo floods?

Excerpt:

The 36-mile channel involves considerably more than just digging a big ditch, with some tricky engineering challenges that help explain why construction is expected to take nearly a decade.

As the channel splits from the river's main path and angles west of the city, it would cross three larger and two smaller tributaries.

It would pass underneath the Sheyenne and Maple rivers through some "extremely large culverts" while open channels — basically aqueducts — would carry the normal flows of those rivers above, said Aaron Snyder, a project manager with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in St. Paul, Minn. Another smaller river, the Wild Rice, would also require its own structure over the channel.

Upstream, a span resembling a highway bridge would have gates that would be lowered during high water to make the diversion.

Construction alone would take 8½ years, and that's just from when the corps gets funding and starts digging. More time will be needed to acquire some 6,500 acres of land, line up funding and take care of other pre-construction needs, Snyder said.

Comments:

• Winnipeg's Red River Floodway
  
• 1997 Red River Flood