Water rising in spots as northern Minnesota continues to battle historic flooding

Seven of the historic, rustic buildings on Rainy Lake's Mallard Island — home to the Ernest Oberholtzer retreat — are filled with several inches of water.

"Every day, water keeps going up," said Rebecca Otto, executive director of the Oberholtzer Foundation, which oversees the property. "This is completely unprecedented."

The retreat is one of many properties facing historic flooding in northern Minnesota's Rainy River Basin, saturated by spring rainfalls and snowmelt so significant it triggered a National Guard response to the soaked region. And while some waterways have likely crested, Rainy Lake, just outside of International Falls, Minn., is expected to rise nearly another foot in the next few days, surpassing a 1950 record.

"We can't provide a ton of optimism, unfortunately," said Ketzel Levens, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Duluth. "Lake levels will likely continue to rise and stay high, causing that extensive damage to shoreline property we've been seeing already."

Resort, cabin and business owners throughout the region have been filling sandbags for weeks, attempting to stave off encroaching water — many while they continue to operate. Mostly dry weather is predicted in the next week, meteorologists said in a Thursday briefing, but gusty winds could push more water onto shore.

The basin's headwaters, which include Basswood, Vermilion and Kawishiwi rivers, are expected to rise again for a brief period, but flows are generally starting to decrease, the Weather Service said. Namakan and Kabetogama lakes are 6 inches shy of 1916 record levels, but are expected to slowly fall over the next week.

Longtime Kabetogama Lake resident and fishing guide Tim Watson said people are reinforcing the thousands of sandbags filled by the National Guard and other volunteers. He's got 9,000 of them protecting his home, which so far hasn't taken on water.

"We get the wall up and think we're good, and the water comes up and we go back to sandbagging," he said. "It's been a constant."

Basin water flows east to west, from the headwaters near Ely, Minn, to the Namakan and Kabetogama lakes area before moving on to Rainy Lake. All of that water is then squeezed through a narrow channel before flowing into the Rainy River, which travels into Lake of the Woods.

"Overall, there is still a lot of water to get through the system," Levens said, predicting 6 to 8 weeks for Rainy Lake to return to normal levels once it hits its peak in mid-to-late June.

That's bad news for property owners, and the Oberholtzer retreat on Mallard Island. Its caretakers were forced to move a valuable collection of Indigenous and other literature from the library before water began to seep in, but a piano in another building sits in several inches of water. Even the kitchen, in a structure raised more than a foot following the 2014 floods, now holds water.

The Oberholtzer property, which Otto calls a "living museum," is on the National Register of Historic Places and operates as a public retreat. Oberholtzer, an influential environmentalist who lived on Mallard Island until 1957, famously lobbied against a proposed series of dams in the northern watershed in the 1920s, which helped establish the nearby Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and Voyageurs National Park.

"The mood is pretty somber" on Rainy Lake, Otto said, with docks covered by several feet of water and people working around the clock to save their properties.

"We're hoping the feds will declare a disaster for the area," she said, as the government did in 2014. "It's hard to imagine how much we will have to do to restore these really special buildings."