City officials spent much of Wednesday working on a revised plan after the National Weather Service issued a foreboding forecast for the Red River: a 41-foot crest predicted to hit Saturday.

The last flood even near that level was in 1997, when the river crested at 39.6 feet. The record for the Red River in Fargo, the state’s most populous city, was set in 1897 at 40.1 feet, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Red River was one of many rivers that were at flood level early Thursday in North Dakota.

The threat from the Missouri River caused more than 1,000 people to be evacuated from an area near Bismarck on Tuesday. On Wednesday, authorities blasted ice jams from the river in effort to keep it from rising even higher.

But the Red River posed the gravest threat as it rose toward historic levels, officials said.

“Nobody that’s alive today has ever seen it at 41 feet,” said Fargo Mayor Dennis Walaker. “They need to take this extremely seriously.”

Walaker said it’s only “smart” for city officials and residents to think about worst-case scenarios, which could include a citywide evacuation.

“If they have people that are infirm or have difficulty getting around, they [residents] should consider taking them out of the city” before any evacuation is ordered, he said.

“If you have kids that are small and so forth, evacuation would scare the tar out of them.”

City officials had been hoping that the river would top out at 39 feet, which would mean that their plan of getting all dikes to a 42-foot level would be fine.

Source: CNN.com

Seven children and seven adults died in a plane crash Sunday in Butte, Montana, according to the FAA.

The single-engine Pilatus PC 12 was headed to Bozeman, Montana, but was rerouted to Butte instead, said Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Mike Fergus.

The plane crashed 500 feet short of the runway at Bert Mooney Airport.

The National Transportation Safety Board is sending an investigation team to the scene, Kristi Dunks, an aerosafety investigator with the agency, told reporters in Butte late Sunday.

Dunks said the plane crashed at the Holy Cross Cemetery, just south of Runway 3 at the airport.

No one was injured on the ground, Sheriff John Walsh said.

Martha Guidoni told CNN that she and her husband witnessed the plane crash. She photographed one of the first images from the scene, which showed the cemetery in the foreground of a huge blaze.

Source:  CNN.com