Craig Charbonneau spent Friday night in his residence at 1104 Oak St., unaware of the evacuation order.

"I fell asleep; that's what happens when you're awake sandbagging for two days," Charbonneau said. "When you crash, you crash."

Charbonneau's crash ended at 10 a.m. Saturday. He quickly noticed his isolation and the water lapping around his neighborhood. The streets in his area were too flooded to escape by car. So he took his canoe.

He was surrounded by dry land and streets when he went to sleep, but by Saturday afternoon he had to paddle 11 blocks to the west, to South 19th Street, before portaging.

The water continued its westward route on Saturday, resulting in roughly 50 percent of the city being under a mandatory evacuation order. The Red River's rise was slight in the past 24 hours, so it wasn't the culprit. And Washington Street served as an unintentional dike that kept most of the heavy water to the eastern side of the main artery in Grand Forks.

Instead, most of the new water-filled territory was a result of storm sewers continuing to back up.

"The water continues to go from one service area to the next service area," said Tom Hanson, an engineer with Webster, Foster and Weston Consulting Engineers of Grand Forks. "We've been trying to catch it but have been unsuccessful."

Before Charbonneau docked his canoe in a friend's garage on 19th Street, he took a tour of the evacuated Lincoln Park and Central Park areas.

"I hate to even say this, but houses are literally floating on the Lincoln Drive area," Charbonneau said. "Some are literally tilted -- off their foundations."

And, Charbonneau said, you can see just the tip of the sandbags atop the Lincoln area dikes. He said he needed to be careful of a strong current in the neighborhood, a fact that National Guard members mentioned when they booted him out of the area.

On the way out, Charbonneau checked on the homes of several friends.

"It's strange," he said. "There's all this water, but then there are islands of perfectly dry homes. My house didn't even have water in its basement."

Others who were on the new water edges included neighbors Dennis Anderson and Bob Thompson from the 1400 block of South 17th Street. They watched water run down their street with a mix of worry and confidence in their voices.

"We heard that we're on one of the highest points of the city, over 54 feet," Anderson said. "I'm not so sure I believe that right now."

Thompson said almost all of the women and children in the neighborhood had left, even though the area was not under a mandatory evacuation order. They were considering doing the same.

"You've heard about the rats jumping off a sinking ship?" Anderson said. "My wife is a teacher at Kelly School and she took the white rats from there with her."

The entire area from Washington Street to Columbia Road had pockets of high water on the streets and boulevards -- but not lapping at houses -- by late afternoon.

The first six blocks of University Avenue west of Washington had three feet of water. DeMers Avenue was filled with water, invaded from the east and west, and passable only by trucks and recreational vehicles.

Washington was a lake south to 15th Avenue, but dry south of there.

The water also was claiming new territory on the west edge of town. Joe Lewandowski stood in his yard at 3518 Sixth Ave. N. with a "Fort Hope" wooden sign stuck in a snowbank. Two blocks to the north, the English Coulee was creeping toward them. In the opposite direction, 100 feet away of the corner of Stanford Road, water began gurgling from a storm sewer.

"I'm not leaving," Lewandowski said. Told that anyone resisting a mandatory evacuation order could be arrested or forcibly removed, Lewandowski replied, "I'm not leaving."

A few blocks away at McVey Hall, junior aviation major Jeff Edgerton was packing his Toyota Land Cruiser with his belongings. He said he was one of the last to leave McVey after UND President Kendall Baker's morning announcement of classes being canceled for the semester.

"Everyone just wanted to get out of here," Edgerton said. "With no classes, no water and everyone needing double the time to get home because of detours, everyone felt there was no reason to stay."

Edgerton had a longer trip than almost everyone. His home is in Redding, Calif. "I've never seen anything like this before. This is unbelievable. I just want to go home."

There was little sandbagging for the students to do. Only small pockets throughout the city, almost all of them private areas, had operations. An exception was around United Hospital.

A five-foot wall of clay was being built in front of the hospital, with the dike angling across the parking lots of the Grand Forks Clinic and Orthopaedic Clinic.

The plan was to build a rink dike around the entire complex, protecting it from the storm sewers falling like dominoes to the west and the coulee behind it. Heavy equipment worked as helicopters landed and took off to evacuate some patients.

"With the nursing home, clinic and orthopaedic clinic all connected, you're talking about a mile's worth of ring dike," engineer Hanson said. "They're all connected, so if you lose one, you lose them all."

The dike still seemed exceptionally high considering the elevation and any water being still distant. But a United Hospital employee who didn't want to be identified cast light on that.

"As a member of the EOC explained it, they'd lost a lot of battles and they sure weren't going to lose this one," he said.