DEVILS LAKE - Hundreds of families displaced. Landowners losing everything they own, becoming ill due to stress.

It sounds like New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but it's much farther north - in North Dakota, where a popular lake has been rising and spreading, swamping fields of crops and drowning homes. It doesn't get much attention, locals say, because the devastation is happening so slowly.

"It's like a cancer," says Joe Belford, a Devils Lake business owner and county commissioner.

Devils Lake, west of Grand Forks in the north central part of the state, has risen about 26 feet since 1993. If it keeps rising and its wet cycle continues, it could rise another 11 feet by 2012, taking more homes and livelihoods with it.

Ironically, much of the rest of the state is now suffering a record drought. But residents of Devils Lake are used to being in a unique situation. Those who live there say they have lived for years with a profound uncertainty about their surroundings.

Al Staloch is a resident of Minnewaukan, a small town that used to be eight miles from the lake. It is now directly on the lake, which has eaten up the school's football field and driven away the local church. Roofs of houses peek out of the water nearby as fishermen drive boats where fields once provided lucrative crops.

Staloch sells flood insurance, which is the good news. The bad news, he says, is that another 2 feet of water could flood the town's sewer system and drive him out of town.

"If that happens, I'm going to Bismarck," he said. "If the water comes up 2 or 3 feet, there is a good chance the town won't be here."

Staloch would be one of the many local residents who have decided to make their home elsewhere. About 1,000 people have left this area of less than 10,000, Belford says. Seventy-five thousand acres of deeded land is under water, and most owners are still paying taxes on it. Dikes and levees worth about $50 million are holding the city from floodwaters, and they are still being raised. If they weren't there, Belford says, his own convenience store downtown would be under 9 feet of water.

Belford, who spends much of his time lobbying for money and overseeing ways to control the flooding, says the water has changed the character of the town and reduced social life on the lake.

When the water first started rising, he said, "People were mad at it. They were hurt."

Some became depressed.

In 1998, Jen Foss lost her husband, Raymond, to a heart attack after they lost most of their wheat, barley and flax fields.

"He was healthy as a horse," she says. "I can't even remember him having the flu. We had to move off, and that's what really did the number on him. He didn't care about nothing anymore and pretty soon he had a heart attack."

Steve Swiontek, superintendent of the Devils Lake Public Schools, said youngsters have had a lot of questions: Is their house going to be moved or flooded? Are they going to have to move out of the school district?

"I think it's on the back of their minds - what's happening and what's going to happen," he said.

Behavioral problems have lessened as the flooding has become more of a way of life, Swiontek said, but the schools are still losing students. Before 2000, the district had about 2,200 of them. Fewer than 1,800 children will start there this year, Swiontek said, attributing some of that loss to less economic development in the area since the flooding.

Doug Boknecht, a clinical social worker, has run crisis counseling programs in the area. He said North Dakotans are resilient people, but the flooding can be like "Chinese water torture."

"It creeps and it creeps," he said.

Boknecht sees hope with a new state outlet designed to drain excess Devils Lake water into the Sheyenne River. The project has stalled because of low water levels and sulfate in the river, and is opposed by Canada, which worries it will send harmful material north. The Sheyenne River is a tributary of the Red River, which flows north into Manitoba's Lake Winnipeg.

One of the theories of stress, Boknecht says, is a need for control over one's destiny.

"The outlet is very helpful, when it's running, because it gives people a sense that we aren't just depending on nature and her whims," he said.

Dwight Williamson, an administrator for the Manitoba Department of Water Stewardship, says Canadians across the border "understand completely" what it is like to be flooded but their interest is protecting their environment.

Belford said Devils Lake's slow rise has given people time to prepare, but many of them have been hit hard.

Foss sounds wistful when she talks about a grove of trees lost to the waters.

"We had such a pretty place and all of the trees are all dried up and dead," she said.

"With Katrina or Rita the storm came and left," said Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., who has worked with other state officials to get money for higher levies and replacements for threatened infrastructure. "In this case, the flood comes and stays. So you are just never free of it. It's never over, so you don't get closure."