earlier the river would hit , I would have moved my stuff out of my house. At 49, it was safe." Downtown Grand Forks fire The flood made national news. The most familiar footage is possibly of the fire that started on April 19 in downtown Grand Forks, surrounded by floodwaters, where eleven buildings and sixty apartments were destroyed. The Grand Forks Herald building was totally destroyed in the fire, along with 120 years of archives. Firefighters were not able to begin extinguishing the fire immediately as they had to evacuate nearly forty people in one of the nearby apartment complexes who had defied the evacuation order. Additionally, their tankers were unable to reach the buildings due to the height of the floodwater and the water pressure from the hoses and fire hydrants was too weak to extinguish the flames. The National Guard placed the fire trucks on several tractor-trailers to prevent them from flooding, which allowed the firefighters to assist in extinguishing the fire. Also, two aircraft rescue and firefighting trucks from the Grand Forks International Airport were brought in to fight the fire because their engines were higher up off the ground, and thus did not get clogged by the flood waters. The firefighters received assistance several hours after the fire started by a fire-bombing plane that dropped retardant and helicopters who made sixty drops totaling 120,000 gallons of water. Three of the firefighters were treated for hypothermia after treading through the cold temperatures of the flood water. The fire was later determined to have been caused by an electrical problem that had resulted from the large amounts of floodwater. Donations and damages The national attention of both flood and fire reached Joan Kroc, the McDonald's heiress, who anonymously (her anonymity was later revealed to the public by the Grand Forks Herald) donated $15,000,000 to be divided into $2,000 portions for each damaged household (though the amount some homeowners received was less due to the huge number of devastated homes; in all 7,500 households received funds). Additionally, another single anonymous donor gave $5 million which was distributed in $1,000 allotments. In November 1997, North Dakota Governor Ed Schafer reported that victims had been assisted by 50,000 relief agency volunteers who had served more than 2 million meals. Additionally, the communities received clothing and supplies that were donated from every U.S. state. During a concert in Fargo, the rock