Red Ramp

From a makeshift command post in the Manitoba legislature building last week, a composed, greying soldier in the red-tabbed battledress of a brigadier defended besieged Winnipeg against the city's worst flood in a century. His orders flowed by field telephone and radio to 50,000 men sweating on 15 miles of soggy, sandbagged dikes along the surging Red River of the North. Occasionally he hopped into a helicopter for a hurried look at a new danger point. By week's end, as hope mounted that the main crisis had been met with only two lives lost, many a Winnipegger sent up a waterlogged cheer for Brigadier Ronald Morton, 49, veteran of D-day in Normandy.

Dogged Battle. As boss of "Operation Red Ramp" (for Red rampage), with nearly 5,000 army, navy and air force men under his command, Morton's job was to prevent complete inundation of Canada's fourth largest city (pop. 320,000). At least 10,000 houses and eight of greater Winnipeg's 75 square miles were already flooded; traffic on two of the city's key bridges was cut off, dividing the area into semi-isolated segments. The water level stood twelve feet above the point of first flooding. The city's vital power stations were entrenched behind dikes more than six feet high.

Morton and his men were fighting a dogged, seldom dramatic battle of containment, with wet snow and rain adding to their difficulties. At suburban East Kildonan a 25-foot dike section burst, swamping 150 homes in a boiling wall of water ten feet high. But in most places the dikes--made of sodden burlap sandbags--were holding.

Outward Bound. During the week, Morton directed the greatest mass evacuation in Canadian history. In eight days alone, an estimated 80,000 people left the Winnipeg area in special trains, aircraft, buses and a fleet of cars and trucks. Some went to boarded-up resorts to the north, others to points as far away as Calgary and Montreal. The Red Cross provided emergency funds for the needy. Thousands of other evacuees crowded into downtown Winnipeg, safe on relatively high ground. The city auditorium was turned into a dormitory. If the situation worsened drastically, Morton had a master plan for compulsory evacuation, under martial law, of as much as 75% of the city's 320,000 population. Food was stockpiled; emergency passes and ration cards were printed.

By this week the river level appeared to be stabilizing although the danger was still grave. As relief operations gathered momentum, Winnipeggers had an urgent question: how could future floods be prevented? Flood experts had a grim reply: they probably cannot. The cost of permanent diking would be prohibitive, and in any case it might be an engineering impossibility in the flat Red River valley. Once in 25, 50 or 100 years, the valley would probably have to take it.

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