Dennis Walaker, the flood mayor of Fargo, was a larger-than-life folk hero with a booming laugh and an abiding devotion to the town he helped build from the sewer lines up.
Walaker died at home Dec. 2 after a months-long battle with cancer. He was 73.
"He was the voice and the face of Fargo," said Fargo Public Works Supervisor Lee Anderson.
Funny, kind, shy, cagey, competent and devastatingly candid, Walaker waged epic battles against the frigid floodwaters of the Red River of the North, mobilizing tens of thousands of volunteers again and again to sandbag along the banks of the flood-prone river and spare the low-lying city from rising water.
Every spring, when the southern thaws started pushing meltwater up the north-flowing Red toward Fargo, Walaker would shrug off the official weather predictions and drive the length of the river to gauge the risk for himself. If the risk seemed high, he'd swing into action.
"He took it very seriously and he was very accurate. When it was flood time, we would go south of town and drive Highway 46, and he would count how many approaches were underwater. And by that he knew how much water was probable," said Anderson, who accompanied Walaker on many of his flood-predicting forays. "It wasn't an exact science, but boy, it worked for him."
Fargo's director of engineering, Mark Bittner, worked with Walaker for the better part of 40 years, including the massive 1997 flood, when his department worked for 11 consecutive weeks without a day off. Through that crisis and others to follow, he said, Walaker radiated calm and reassurance to his city and its workers.
"He has such a calming influence, such a calming persona, that people know that even if they were screwing up in the worst way, they had confidence if Denny said it was going to be OK," Bittner said.
