Oak Grove School Damaged by Flooding
FEMA provides assistance to public infrastructure and public-nonprofits
April 1, 2009

Morgan Forness, Principal, Oak Grove School:

We are a school, a private Lutheran school in Fargo. We're about 103 years old. And we are on a peninsula along the Red River in Fargo.  We have been in the City of Fargo over 100 years, and we're a school of about 300 students and we've been hit by the flood of 2009.

The water was about two feet high in here, when all was said and done. We will see some water marks on some of the desks and such. But it was about two feet high as it flowed through here.

The building that we are in is not useable at the present time. Virtually every classroom has water damage. The entire basement has been obliterated and we have no electricity, gas, heat... those kinds of services are gone.

Roger Jones, FEMA Emergency Management Program Specialist: 

Oak Grove Lutheran School, is an educational entity. They are a private non-profit entity, so they do qualify as an eligible applicant for FEMA public assistance program. During their response to the event, they did a lot of emergency work in terms of shoring up their dikes and their levees -- that kind of thing. As we all know they did a have a breach in one of those levees so their campus flooded. They had a great deal of water in several of their buildings. So we will provide them assistance to repair and reconstruct those facilities.

Morgan Forness, Principal Oak Grove School:

We were down but we are back and we're doing everything we can to recover and we will rebuild and we'll be stronger than ever.


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