By the time the city of Grand Forks, North Dakota, shut down electrical power in the wake of the massive flooding of the Red River, it looked like it was too late for the Grand Forks Herald. A newspaper older than the state it inhabited, the Herald had succumbed to fires and the river's rising waters, which wiped away a sizable chunk of the town's history: clip files from as early as 1920, microfilm of issues dating back to 1879, and tens of thousands of photographs. The paper's presses in the basement were among the first casualties.
 But the Herald continued to publish without missing a day, and learned anew its value to the scattered people of Grand Forks, 90 percent of whom found themselves suddenly homeless. The city of 50,000, the hub of commerce in the remote northern prairie that extends 300 miles along the Canadian border between North Dakota and Minnesota, lay in ruin. And without electricity for television newscasts, the town looked to the Herald as its lifeline.

 The headline of the Friday, April 18 edition, the paper's last full press run of 38,000, blared flood hits home. The next morning's run - broken dikes, shattered hopes - stopped at 9,500 when the waters began flowing in. At 1 a.m., staff members heard that the office would be surrounded by three to four feet of water by sunrise.

 The next day, editor Mike Jacobs issued an all-points bulletin on local radio: "If you work for the Grand Forks Herald, report to the University of North Dakota student union." There, after the paper bought the last eight laptops from the university bookstore, publisher Mike Maidenberg issued a decree of sorts: "We are going to publish this newspaper come hell or high water." They got both.

 Later, Herald employees at the UND campus looked downtown and saw a big billow of smoke. That night, it was confirmed that the Herald office was among the eleven buildings that burned. The swelling river, meanwhile, forced them to evacuate their temporary quarters.

 Undaunted, the paper quickly set up shop at a public school in the nearby town of Manvel (pop. 400). The newsroom took over the computer lab, the photo department set up next to the drums in the music room, and classified ads were sold from the counselor's office. Knight-Ridder c.e.o. Tony Ridder arrived with a strong message of hope, that he'd back them to the hilt.

 The company, which had spent $3 million refurbishing the historic downtown Sears building for the Herald less than four years ago, brought in US West to set up twenty-eight additional phone lines for the reporters at the Manvel school, from which the paper could be shipped electronically for printing at the Ridder-owned St. Paul Pioneer Press, more than 300 miles away. Knight-Ridder also provided nineteen recreational vehicles for homeless staff members, a $100,000 employee flood-relief fund (it's now more than $200,000), and several pinch-hitting staff members, including reporters and photographers from other company newspapers.

 Equal to Knight-Ridder's devotion to the paper was that of the Grand Forks community. "The response was astonishing," said Maidenberg. People were "hungry for a newspaper. They wanted to read names, see photographs, see facts. The idea that they could be without a newspaper really woke them up."

 Left with little infrastructure intact, flood victims were starved for the kind of basic information provided by the Herald Helpline, a free message board, through which residents relayed to one another their whereabouts and conditions - "Message from Mary &AMP John Fontaine: We're okay and in Anoka, MN."

 Don Gonyea, who covered the flood for National Public Radio, noted that the Helpline, which looked like classified advertising for the diaspora, gave the paper an innate advantage over radio. "I didn't know any of these people in these messages," he said, "but I found myself getting choked up just reading them because you could sense the relief that people would get when they would find someone's name in there." Several of the city's radio stations, meanwhile, pooled their programming, focusing on round-the-clock flood coverage as well as call-in talk radio.

 The Herald, boosting its circulation by 10,000 for free distribution at shelters, also provided coverage that ranged from the useful - a list of every relief agency in town - to the sublime: a remarkable front-page photo of a full rainbow arching over bombed-out downtown Grand Forks.

 The paper continues to publish from the Manvel Public School as it looks for a new temporary home. A production plant eventually will be built in the city's industrial park, outside the flood plain, and the Herald plans to occupy its historic building again when it is rebuilt in early 1998.

 Meanwhile, there are signs that the situation in Grand Forks may be normalizing. When an anonymous donor known only as "Angel" volunteered $2,000 to heads of flood-ravaged households recently, the Herald revealed the benefactor to be Joan Kroc, the widow of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc. The identification, which Maidenberg insists "is something newspapers do," angered some city officials and residents.

 "I think things are getting back to normal," says managing editor Jim Durken. "They're mad at us again."

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