The City That Built an 8-Million-Sandbag Wall to Survive

In the spring of 1997, a wall of water that was later called the "Flood of the Century" bore down on the Canadian province of Manitoba. The only thing standing between the rising Red River and the city of Winnipeg was an army of ordinary people with shovels, sand, and empty bags.

A River Turns Into an Inland Sea

Heavy snowmelt and spring rain pushed the Red River far past its banks in April 1997. At its peak, floodwater covered roughly 1,840 square kilometers of southern Manitoba, an area close to the size of Prince Edward Island.

Nearly 28,000 people were evacuated from the region, and damage across the province eventually topped $500 million.

An Army of Volunteers

With the river climbing by the hour, Manitoba put out an urgent call for help. Tens of thousands of volunteers answered, and schools across the province sent busloads of students straight from their classrooms to the sandbag lines.

Day and night, crews formed human assembly lines, scooping sand, tying bags, and stacking them into makeshift walls around homes, farms, and pumping stations. By the time the water finally receded, more than 8 million sandbags had been filled across the city, enough that laid end to end they would stretch roughly from Winnipeg to Vancouver.

The Wall Built in Four Days

Partway through the crisis, provincial engineers realized Winnipeg faced a second threat: if the Red River backed up into a smaller river to the west, it could flood the city from a direction its existing defenses never covered. The answer was the Brunkild "Z-dike," a zigzagging, 26-mile wall of earth, crushed rock, and giant sandbags built across open farmland between the towns of Domain and Brunkild.

Crews worked around the clock, some nights lit by flares dropped from aircraft, moving roughly 750,000 cubic meters of earth in a matter of days. It cost about $10 million to build.

The Wall Held

The Brunkild dike went up just in time. Combined with the sandbag lines built by volunteers across the city, it kept the Red River out of Winnipeg and protected hundreds of thousands of people.

Once the danger had passed, the province dismantled the temporary dike, and the millions of donated sandbags were slowly hauled away.

The Same Flood Hit Both Sides of the Border

The Red River flows north out of the United States, and the same 1997 flood devastated Grand Forks, North Dakota, just upstream. More than 50,000 residents, nearly the entire population of the city, were forced from their homes, and a fire tore through downtown Grand Forks even as the streets sat underwater.

Across the whole Red River Valley, the flood caused an estimated $3.5 billion in damage.

Nearly three decades later, the 1997 flood is still the benchmark Manitoba and North Dakota measure every spring thaw against, and the image of tens of thousands of strangers filling sandbags side by side remains one of the province's defining memories.