Mississippi River Communities Cope with Flooding--Again | Columbus Ohio Dump Trucks

It’s flood season again on the Upper Mississippi. So far, this year flooding has been mild, but who knows. The water that is receding today, could be rising tomorrow.

In the last decade, studying Mississippi River flooding has become a full-time job for Teresa Stadelmann, vice president and water resources regional manager, Iowa and Minnesota, for H.R. Green, a Cedar Rapids-based engineering and design firm.

The columbus oh dump truck work to build levies and other structures to keep cities from flooding can be done by all kinds of Charlotte NC dump truck contractor and most of her clients choose local firms, Stadelmann says.  But figuring out what needs to be done and how to do it requires firms that specialize in flood studies.

Currently, Stadelmann is working on three studies, looking at the options for cities and towns struggling with the increase in storms, rising water levels, aging infrastructure and lack of money to fix it. Twenty years ago, this was barely a business. Today, “It’s keeping me busy,” Stadelmann says.

The City of Davenport is one of H.R. Green’s customers for this kind of work. Davenport was seriously flooded in 1993, when hundreds of levies failed, and then again in 2008. Since then, not every year has brought bad flooding, but hardly a year goes by without some dangerously high water.

The situation isn’t as bad as it looks, says Clay Merritt, assistant public works director for the City of Davenport. “Over the last couple of decades, the city has decided to live with the river. Davenport has about nine miles along the Mississippi River, the vast majority of which is now riverfront parks. You've probably seen the pictures from this last week that shows huge amounts of flooding, but most of that is parkland.”

 A project H.R. Green suggested to the city that made a big difference was recommending rebuilding old storm sewers, some of which were constructed before 1846, when Iowa became a state. 

“River Drive, which is a state highway, was always inundated because the river water came up under the storm sewer system,” Merritt says. “We were able to reconfigure the storm sewers in that area and that keeps that intersection open for travel for an extra four feet. Now, the river doesn't block the intersection with water until about Flood Stage 22 (feet). That means we are able to avoid floods impacting travel most of the of time,” Merritt says.

 Flooding where the Mississippi begins

Flooding caused by late and heavy snow and the resulting snow melt inundated portions of northern Minnesota this year. Omid Mohseni, vice president and senior water resources engineer for Barr Engineering, a Minneapolis-based consultancy, says weather patterns are changing and that makes predicting floods more difficult. “The most important thing is that the communities are more concerned, and they are asking for more help,” he says. “We are providing more support for different communities with respect to mitigating floods.”

The approaches to flood mitigation are changing, too, Mohseni adds. “A lot of green infrastructure is what clients are looking at. Their expectations are not the old ways of just storing and then slowly releasing water. They want us to come up with designs that are in harmony with the environment, too. And they aren’t purely looking at flooding events. They want designs that have other benefits for the communities.” 

Besides the public sector, Mohseni says his Charlotte NC dump trucks company has clients in the mining and utilities spaces, both of which are heavily impacted by extreme events and the runoff, and he says. 

It’s all about the money 

Financing flood mitigation projects is always an issue, says Jonathan Remo, associate professor of geography and environmental resources at Southern Illinois University. His specialties include river science, river management, flood hazard assessment and mitigation.  

“We have a flood mitigation system along the Mississippi River that was largely built out in the 1950s and 1960s with mostly federal funds. Today it's been turned over to the locals,” he says. 

That means most of the levee systems along the upper Mississippi River from St. Louis north are locally maintained. If the levee and other flood mitigation systems have been well maintained over the years, the Army Corp of Engineers puts them in the National Levee Safety Program where there is money available to repair and build at no cost to local communities. But many communities haven’t done the required maintenance for years. First because they didn’t think it was necessary for rare events. Then, after events weren’t so rare, because they couldn’t afford it, Remo says. 

Some Mississippi River communities are still relying on hollowed-out sequoia trees hauled from the West Coast in the 1950s to function as pressure relief wells, he says. Bringing systems like these up to date would cost billions of dollars, and the small towns and rural areas don’t have it and can’t tax themselves enough to get it.

Remo sees financing as what keeps this segment of the engineering and design business from being a lot bigger than it is.

“Plenty of qualified people  would like to do that work, but there’s no money to pay them,” Remo says.