Residents prepare as Mississippi swells
Flood threat to continue through spring in areas
OMAHA, Neb. — The risk of more flooding will hound Iowa’s third-largest city for at least a month as the possibility of a wet spring could see an already swollen Mississippi River pushed higher out of its banks, Davenport officials said Wednesday, a day after floodwaters broke through a temporary barrier downtown.
Meanwhile, cities downstream remain largely dry, but are preparing for a flood threat that could stretch into the summer.
Floodwaters that swamped a couple of blocks of downtown Davenport on Tuesday are not expected to get worse over the coming days, public works director Nicole Gleason said Wednesday.
Even with the river set to crest later Wednesday at an estimated 22.4 feet, just short of a record crest set at Davenport in 1993, it would do little to add to the floodwaters already covering the couple of blocks on the river’s edge, Gleason said.
“The longer we can go without rain, the quicker the waters will recede,” she said.
But she and other officials expect the river that was bloated by heavy rains and snowmelt earlier this year to remain as such as the region heads into what is typically a wet stretch of spring.
Unlike cities such as Muscatine downstream, Davenport doesn’t have a permanent floodwall, opting instead for an open, picturesque riverfront.
Davenport Mayor Frank Klipsch said at a news conference Wednesday that the city has 9 miles of riverfront, making the prospect of a floodwall to protect all of it outlandishly expensive.
“We live with this river,” he said. “We want to protect it and our citizens.”
Further downstream, Mississippi River levels are expected to reach rare heights in Missouri. The projected flood would be the fourthworst ever in St. Louis, Louisiana and Clarksville, and third-worst ever in Hannibal, and officials are scrambling to get ahead of the worst of it.