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Southport makes final stand against flood without city’s protection

By   /   June 30, 2011  /   8 Comments

The sun was setting behind a row of riverfront homes in Southport one evening last month as Kevin Turnbow made the rounds in his neighborhood, checking the pumps he rigged to keep groundwater from filling the basements of some of the swankiest homes in Bismarck.

He pulled over to a curb and leaned out the window of his mud-covered truck to ask a group of his neighbors whether their homes were still dry. They were – so far at least.

(Photo by Matt Bunk) Southport developer Kevin Turnbow walks away from the mouth of the Southport bay June 8. Just days before, the city restricted him from plugging the bay and finishing a dike around Southport.

“Kevin, I just want you to know how much we appreciate everything you are doing,” a woman said as she leaned forward to press her cheek against Turnbow’s forearm. “We’re all behind you. God bless you.”

Turnbow and his Southport neighbors not only wage war against the rising Missouri River, but also against a city they’ve paid millions of dollars each year to support. Residents have decided to pay 2 percent of the their home value – $20,000 on a million-dollar-home – to work around the city’s multiple roadblocks and build a dike that will protect their homes from the flood.

“The city, the feds – nobody has lifted a finger to help us,” Turnbow said. “We’ve had to do everything ourselves, and sometimes they don’t even let us do that.”

Turnbow, a developer who owns Nodak Construction, was the mastermind behind the 226-home Southport community nestled between a golf course and the heavily forested edge of the Missouri River in the southwestern corner of Bismarck. Nearly 20 years ago, he dug up the river and pushed the soil higher in spots to expose enough land above the 500-year floodplain to build the subdivision that almost everyone had told him was impossible.

In the late 1980s, most developers considered the land useless. But not Turnbow. “Back then, they told me to donate it to the city and turn it into a park,” he said.

After fighting a series of legal battles with the Army Corps of Engineers and the city to get permits for the development, Turnbow built what became one of the most fashionable, pristine communities in North Dakota. He made a substantial amount of money by selling the homes to captains of industry, politicians and retired millionaires.

Now, though, Turnbow is trying to save his waterfront creation from a flood that could compromise the ground beneath the residential community and rip away the riverbanks in the backyards of his neighbors. He has hired scuba divers to plug culverts, trucked in countless tons of dirt to build a barrier against the river and jackhammered 20-inch holes in the foundations of dozens of homes to pump out water.

The once-tranquil neighborhood has been entirely transformed by mounds of dirt and pools of murky water in the streets. Yellow and white sandbags were stacked everywhere, with hoses draped across yards in every direction to pump water away from homes and back into the river.

“I mean no disrespect to our military veterans, but this looks like a war zone,” said Les Kern, a Southport resident. “It’s as close to a war zone as I’ll ever get.”

Kern and other Southport homeowners have been relying on Turnbow to coordinate flood-fighting efforts since late-May when the Corps of Engineers announced record amounts of water would be released from Garrison Dam about 75 miles north of Bismarck. Community members tried several times to convince local, state and federal officials to defend Southport, but each time they were rejected.

“The way Bismarck handled this was disappointing,” said Mary Chmielewski, a Southport resident. “We’re part of the city and we pay taxes like everyone else, but they just left us out here.”

Many Southport residents are among the 850 temporary refugees of the flood. Some displaced homeowners visit the neighborhood daily to check their property and make sure their groundwater pumps are still working.

Bismarck and Mandan built large levee systems to protect public infrastructure and homes closer to the city centers, but neighborhoods along the river such as Marina Bay, Lakewood Harbor and Southport were left outside the protected areas. Several riverfront neighborhoods in Morton and Burleigh counties also were left in harm’s way.

But in Bismarck’s case, the city’s effort to save a vast majority of the homes and businesses in the flood zone actually worked against the residents of Southport.

When Turnbow asked Bismarck officials to build a dike around Southport, instead of behind it, the answer was no. When he asked for assistance to build a dike himself, the city, state and feds said no. When he was nearly finished building the dike at his own expense, the city shut him down by banning heavy equipment on Riverwood Drive, the only road leading into Southport.

Instead, Bismarck teamed up with the Corps of Engineers to build a levee along the eastern edge of Southport, pinning the neighborhood between a barrier on one side and the swelling river on the other. The levee system was intended to protect “public infrastructure” on the city’s south side, but it also created a blockade restricting access to Southport.

After the primary levee system was complete, the city began pumping water from a nearby golf course and distributing it onto a field about 20 yards east of Southport. With the river rising to the west and the city pumping water onto land to the east, groundwater quickly became the foremost threat to Southport homeowners.

“It’s like they are purposely trying to flood us out, and I don’t have any idea why they would do that,” Kern said. “If the city’s not going to do anything to protect us, then it should at least let us protect our own homes.”

The Bismarck City Commission voted unanimously in early June to stop Turnbow from completing his dike because engineers said the trucks hauling dirt and heavy equipment to the site may compromise the integrity of the levee that was built along Riverwood Drive.

Bismarck Mayor John Warford said restricting heavy loads on the road was a “methodical” decision based on data provided by the Corps of Engineers and private engineering firm Kadrmas, Lee and Jackson.

“The Corps said the road has deteriorated to the point that they can’t guarantee the dike will hold up if we allow heavy traffic,” Warford said. “We determined that Riverwood Drive couldn’t handle it. It’s not feasible from an engineering perspective,”

Warford said the city considered several different plans to save Southport, but none were workable. He said the state rejected the city’s request to send a National Guard helicopter to drop large sandbags into the mouth of the bay.

“We made three runs at plugging the gap,” he said. “None were feasible from an engineering standpoint.”

By the time the city shut Turnbow down, he had committed $750,000 to the project and was nearly finished building a dike around Southport. The only things left were to plug the bay and start pumping water back into the river.

The dike remained unfinished for two weeks as Turnbow scrambled for a way to smuggle heavy equipment into Southport. He considered bringing heavy equipment downriver on barges, and Mandan officials told him they would help. But Turnbow decided it would be more efficient to disassemble two cranes and other heavy equipment so he could bring them in pieces through the Riverwood checkpoints.

“If I take everything apart first, they can’t stop me,” Turnbow said.

On June 18, three weeks into the flood fight, Southport residents voted to approve separate proposals to plug the bay and to hire an out-of-state engineering firm to install a series of groundwater wells across the neighborhood. Each homeowner will pay 2 percent of the assessed value of their property to cover shared costs that may exceed $3 million.

The final cost to Southport may run higher than that, considering the costs of restoring the area after the flood and the precautions each homeowner has already taken.

Southport homeowners such as U.S. Sen. John Hoeven have spent thousands of dollars to install groundwater pumps in their basements and yards to keep water from rising into their homes. Hoeven’s yard on Harbor Driver has dozens of hoses sprouting from the ground at intervals of about four feet.

“The groundwater pumps are working. Our house is still dry,” he said after a community flood meeting last month.

Joe Ibach, president of Southport’s homeowners association, had three sump pumps running full time in the lower level of his house. But he was skeptical that the pumps will continue to keep things dry for the duration of the flood, which could last another two months or more.

“It’s only temporary,” he said. “When the water pressure increases and keeps pushing against the house, it will get worse. It’s a constant issue and a constant worry.”

In some respects, though, the damage has already been done. Homeowners have fled Southport to find shelter on higher ground. Some have temporarily moved into recreational vehicles, while others have purchased homes on the north side of Bismarck to get out of the flood zone.

Ibach, an appraiser by trade, said the flood has caused psychological damage that will depress home values in Southport for many years to come.

Ironically, the city may also take a significant financial hit if home values decline and property tax revenue plummets; homeowners in Southport pay an estimated $2 million in property taxes each year.

“Next year you won’t be able to give a house away. Two years from now, same thing,” Ibach said. “Will (home buyers) forget in five years, I don’t know because we don’t know what the extent of this will be. But I can tell you that even if the river drops to its normal level right now, the flood will have significant impact on values in the future.”

-Matt Bunk is publisher of the Great Plains Examiner. He can be reached at

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8 Comments

  1. Dani says:

    Who let this guy build homes in an area that is a known flood zone? Didn’t the fact that the Army Corp and the City really didn’t want a development here a clue that they might not be real happy about the potential expense of flood protection? I would not commend this guy for fighting to save these homes. I would condemn him for insisting on building in this location in the first place.

  2. Teacher in Dakota Dunes, SD says:

    Dani, it says in the article you didn’t read that he built up above the 500-year floodplain. This flood event is so severe that water is going well beyond any “known flood zone.”

    If you criticize Mr. Turnbow, you also have to criticize those farmers who have flooded fields of crops that were planted above the 500-year floodplain. You also might want to Google something called the “Just World Hypothesis.”

    • Dani says:

      I do think that having crops next to the river is pretty different from having a house next to the river. Crops are temporary/annual while houses usually are not.

      Yes, I did read this article. However, the problem with “500-year” flood estimates are that it is just so gosh-darn hard to predict those cycles. We’ve been experiencing record floods in parts of North Dakota just about every year since at least 1997. People are losing and/or relocating their homes in various parts of this state due to flooding and here is yet one more example of it. I think it takes a lot of balls to build a million dollar home along side a river whether or not it is in the so-called 500 year floodplain.

      Just because I find it ironic that anyone expects me to feel sorry for someone who built an expensive house next to a river when it turns out that holy cow-it got flooded out, doesn’t mean that I think there is justice here. I don’t hate rich people, and I’m not happy they are getting flooded. I want to know how the people in charge of permitting developments, planning/zoning, etc…would allow people (citizens who trust their local government to make good decisions) to build here. I have spent more than 7 years working with developers and planning and zoning boards and I know the processes and politics involved and I am curious how it happened that anyone was allowed to build here. I’ve seen developments turned down for a whole lot less than this, and it doesn’t make me a poor-white trash ignorant rube for asking how this guy was allowed to build here despite the fact that nobody in local/federal government seemed to really be enthused about the idea.

  3. Teacher in Dakota Dunes, SD says:

    So if you had the opportunity to build a nice house with a gorgeous view of the river and FEMA maps showed your annual chance of flooding was less than two-tenths of one percent, you would say “no thanks.”

    You get tornadoes up in your neck of the woods? There are people in different parts of the country who wonder why anyone would want to build where tornadoes are a possibility. How about flash floods from torrential downpours?

    Tornadoes, floods, hail, wildfire — everyone assumes some risk with where they live. Life is short, you might as well enjoy the view!

  4. CKent says:

    What the article fails to mention is the group of homeowners in South Port that will be suing Mr. Turnbow for charging them for the emergeny measures that they did not want taken. Not everyone in South Port is singing his praises.

    What the article fails to mention is that no where is it written that the city is responsibile to protect private homes. Their job is protect public infrastructure. I for one and glad they took time & resources to protect the water treatment plant, aren’t you?

    What the article fails to mention is that Turnbow did nothing to protect South Port until 2 weeks into the disaster, after the city’s levees had been built.

    Sadly, this is a one sided article. I would have hoped for better from a “new” Bismarck paper. Next time, please get the other side of the story as well.

  5. camando lando says:

    I beleive I have read the same article, correct me if im wrong but its the one on the top of this page, SOUTHPORT MAKES FINAL STAND… The story that reads, southport residents through the whole thing, top to bottom. I may have even read southport residents voted… Voted? You folks voted! This is all very interesting to me. I dont think many of us non southport residents would have had any idea how much really went on down there. You see to those of us who dont live in southport, you folks are like your own community. Everybody knows everybody and everythings prestige. Just the way you like it. Isn’t that why you live there? (Thats why i would want to live there.) Is there some southport residents that didn’t want to make any emergeny efforts? I can’t see why anyone would have a problem with one mans efforts to save southport. Unless you had a personal vendetta with the man. Or if your one of those people who are just never going to be happy. The bottom line is that southport residents voted to make emergency efforts. It is my advise then, to hold yourselves and your neighbor accountable. So unless your neighbors with the turnbows then let it go and get on board with the rest of your prestige community.

  6. camando lando says:

    Dani, its not a “so-called” 500 year flood plan. Unless you really don’t have any confidence in the corp.

  7. Matt Bunk says:

    UPDATE: I had a conversation with a city employee the other day who said he delivered loads of dirt to Southport to assist with the neighborhood’s dike-building effort. He explained that the city also allowed Turnbow and other Southport residents to pick up dirt from the landfill to build the dike. He was disputing the statements by Southport residents that the city was not helpful during the flood.

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