Heavy Rains Bring Raging Floods - and a Debate

June 21, 2011

Davenport this spring, in an image that’s not at all unusual for this flood-prone town.

This spring, so-called “100-year floods” swamped many communities along the Mississippi River, America’s largest commercial waterway.

The flooding was so severe that the U.S. Corps of Engineers, which supervises national flood-control efforts, took the nearly unprecedented step of opening giant floodgates to keep high water from reaching Baton Rouge, the capital city of Louisiana, and the major port of New Orleans.

The result was the deliberate flooding of millions of hectares of rural areas and small settlements in Louisiana’s already swampy “bayou country.”

Whether to hold back the river or let it flood is a longstanding issue on the Mississippi - one that crystallizes each spring in the city of Davenport, Iowa.

Pleasant Davenport without flood waters.

Over the past decade, floodwaters reached near-record levels there three times. Each time this happened, photos showed the city’s baseball stadium nearly submerged, giving the impression that much of Davenport was under water.

Parts of it are submerged during floods, but it’s by design. The city has chosen not to build floodwalls, instead, turning the lowest-lying parts in town into floodable parkland. It provides sandbags to the few residential and business areas that take on some water during severe flooding.