One moment, her two little boys - ages 3 and 4 - would be OK. And the next moment, they both would panic - and scream, as they would try to find her.

And this went on for months.

For months, stretching into a year, the sound of apolice siren, an ambulance siren, any siren, was all it took to change her two little boys from being OK to being terrified.

"The boys would freak out," Laurie Deitz, 31, said.

And Deitz would have to tell them that this wasn't that.

That this siren was just a police officer going to help someone.

It wasn't one of those sirens the boys remember from when the police were driving up and down streets in mid-April 1997 during the evacuation of homes, including the Deitzes, during the Grand Forks flood.

Nor were they the tornado sirens going off all day, or the bullhorns officials used to blast out warnings to evacuate.

"I had to reassure them it wasn't happening again,"she said.

It took about a year after the flood before she noticed the screaming episodes had stopped, and they were getting back to their normal selves.

In April 1997, Deitz and the two boys waited for her fiance to get home from work. By the time they evacuated, there wasn't much time.

"We had time to get our clothes and get in the car,"she said. "We saw water flowing down the street."

They would end up in the same place as her parents, Dave Kaufman, 44, and Marcy Kaufman, 46, and Laurie's brother, Doug, 13, and about 2,500 others, living in an Air Force airport hangar furnished with cots.

When she left a couple of days later because there were free Minnesota hotel rooms available for flood victims, it was a hard scene, because her dad had been the main male figure in her life and they didn't know what was down the road for all of them.

She said she was amazed to see tears in her dad's eyes. "It was the first time I'd ever seen him cry,"she said.

Her dad, mom and Doug didn't have the hotel option because they had their two family dogs with them.

Eventually, the Deitz family would wind up living in Minnesota because of a new job opportunity.

And life would change for her dad, too.

He's not a chef, anymore.

Ten years ago, the Tribune focused on two families to give readers a taste of what they were going through - and checked in several times to see how they were coping.

The Tribune decided to check in again. This story looks at the Kaufman family, and the accompanying story looks at the Chris Wagner family.

Working at Whitey's

When the flood hit, Dave Kaufman was employed as a sous chef at Grand Forks' famous then-72-year-old Whitey's Cafe and Lounge.

Kaufman, who grew up in Pennsylvania, always planned to be a chef. "I just liked doing that."

As a teen, he was known for his pineapple upside-down cake, which he would make in quantity and sell - a fun way for a teen to make money.

After high school, he went into the Air Force, landing in Grand Forks. After he got out, he stayed. He met Marcy, got married and bought - with money from G.I. Bill - the about 100-year-old house at 401 Eighth St. N. that they were living in when the flood hit.

Marcy Kaufman, raised in Grand Forks, didn't know what she wanted to do with her life after high school, and was working as a waitress at the Golden Hour Restaurant, known for its halibut, when she met Dave, then the manager of the local American Legion club. They both eventually found jobs at Whitey's, he as a sous chef, she as a waitress. She also took another job, working at Slapshot Pizza, 1909 Gateway Drive.

Over the years, they worked different shifts, she days, he nights, so they wouldn't need a baby sitter for their two kids. He got Tuesdays and Fridays off. "We rarely went out," Dave Kaufman said. Days off were spent taking care of the kids. Sometimes they'd have the neighbors over for a picnic.

"We were pretty much breaking even,"he said. There wasn't time or money for vacations. The only holiday he got off was Christmas, unpaid, and there was no sick leave pay or retirement.

When the flood hit, the couple had a grown daughter, Laurie, out on her own, and son Doug, 13. And they had no savings account, about $600 in checking and were juggling bills.

For quite a while, Marcy Kaufman couldn't imagine her hometown would come to this.

She said she even told her husband, maybe a day before they had to evacuate, that the water would never get to the house.

"If it gets to the house, the whole city is going to go under,"she remembered saying. And she never thought that would happen.

But constant broadcast warnings brought out a suitcase.

Dave Kaufman said they had one suitcase packed with two days worth of clothing when, at about 2 or 3 a.m. April 17, they were watching the news - which kept showing how the dike had broken on Lincoln Drive, water flowing over it. He said that was about 20 to 25 blocks away from the Kaufmans' house, which is about six blocks from the Red River.

And that's when Kaufman heard either police or North Dakota National Guard members driving down the street with a loudspeaker, telling people to evacuate.

They grabbed pillows, blankets and their two dogs and headed for a relative's northside house that they thought the water wouldn't reach. It did. On Sunday, they had to call for help; the water was too high there to drive out by themselves.

Going to the hangar

Doug, now 23, remembers the National Guard arriving in a truck with a boat on the back. The Kaufmans were taken for a ride around the block so Guard members could see if others were stranded. Doug Kaufman remembers seeing cars floating on University Avenue where the water was 5 feet high.

The family spent four nights at the hangar, at the same base where years before Dave Kaufman had served as a security policeman.

"It smelled like sweat," said Kaufman, about sharing sleeping and living quarters with a couple thousand people.

He also remembered some "shady characters"in the crowd, but that there were always Air Force personnel walking around, providing a reassuring presence.

They slept in their clothes and the lights never went off entirely, and there was noise at night, a lot of snoring. So there wasn't a lot of good quality sleep happening. "I might catch an hour or two," Dave Kaufman said.

There were no showers, but there were porta potties, and lines to them.

But there was plenty of food - three full meals with snacks in between.

"If you were hungry, it was your own fault," Marcy Kaufman said.

And there were card games going for adults and games for the kids.

Dave Kaufman remembered his wife was sullen. "She'd sit and kind of mope," he said.

"I wasn't real calm until I got back in the house," Marcy Kaufman said.

Doug Kaufman said the memory he still carries with him is the visit of then-President Clinton to the air base.

"He was smiling. He was trying to make it a calm time while he was there," Kaufman said.

His other memory was the smell - eggs, garbage, moldy water - when they returned to Grand Forks.

"No matter where you went in the city, you smelled it,"he said. And muck covered the streets and sidewalks, as well as tree branches, lost property.

But that was better than what Dave Kaufman remembered smelling in their basement when they were able to return home:human sewage.

Oily sewage water was 7 feet deep in the basement.

Back home

It took a couple of weeks to clean the house, which was colder inside - about 40 degrees - than outside. Marcy wore a winter coat inside.

Three times a day, a Salvation Army truck came around with bottled water and meals, in a city where open grocery stores were many miles away.

"At Christmastime, I (used to)throw coins in the kettle,"Dave Kaufman said. "Now, they get a much better donation. I can never pay them back enough."

Doug and his dad spent days in the old basement, five steep steps from the main floor. There were pine needles stuck on ceiling beams and a stranger's shoe on top of the furnace. They removed the ruined family pictures, wedding memorabilia and other storage items.

When the basement was done, but not sanitized, a couple of volunteers from a church group from either North Carolina or South Carolina just happened to come up to the house and asked if there was anything they needed. The Kaufmans told them about the basement, and the volunteers went downstairs and sprayed and disinfected it.

"People were so, so helpful,"Marcy Kaufman said.

They were able to move back in 50 days after evacuating. They kept their financial head above water with the help of FEMAmoney, AMVETS and American Legion grants and the $2,000 gift that donor Joan Kroc - widow of Ray Kroc, McDonald's Corp. founder - gave to thousands of flood families.

After the flood, the city hired him as a damage inspector, and then he stayed on as an assistant appraiser, got training and then later became a full-time appraiser.

"If anything good came out of the flood - it got me into a new career," he said.

The family has a financial cushion now, and their house, bought in 1977, was paid off five years ago. And he has weekends off, 40 hours of work during the week, and the wherewithal to take a recent Florida vacation.

The basement remains empty 10 years later, nothing stored there and no reason to go down unless the furnace filter needs changing.

Doug Kaufman is grown, installs hardwood floors for a living and is expecting a baby in May with his girlfriend.

Dave and Marcy Kaufman can't think of anything in their daily lives to remind them of the flood. But then Marcy remembered a little something - there is a water mark on one corner of the house, discolored, light green.

They don't talk about the flood, even with the 10th anniversary coming up.

"I think the dikes will do their job," Dave Kaufman said about the future. The wall put up along the river to help keep future flood waters away is really just a wall to keep Minnesotans out, Dave Kaufman joked.

The city's downtown isn't the same. "The flood helped Grand Forks a little bit. … The run-down buildings, most are gone,"Doug Kaufman said.

Marcy Kaufman still works for the pizza place, as its assistant manager. Dave Kaufman said he doesn't think the flood experience changed him or Marcy.

"She's a tough old German,"her husband said, and laughed.

One of thousands of tough Grand Forks people.

(Reach reporter Virginia Grantier at 250-8254 or at virginia.grantier@;bismarcktribune.com.)