Extreme rainfall and historic floods are transforming life in the vast Mississippi River basin. The challenge: How do we respond?

In the early morning hours of July 26, many St. Louis-area residents awoke to floodwater filling their homes, or to the din of blaring car alarms from vehicles overtaken by murky brown water.

Too much rain was falling far too fast.

The weather system dumped more than 9 inches on St. Louis – about a quarter of the city’s annual average – largely within a few hours. That same week, torrential rainstorms pummeled eastern Kentucky, where up to 16 inches fell and water rushed into people’s homes so swiftly that many didn’t get out in time.

Forty people were killed in eastern Kentucky; two died in St. Louis.

Longtime residents in both regions, no strangers to severe storms and flooding, said they’d seen nothing like it before.

The rainfall totals obliterated previous records in each area by a margin that was difficult for some experts to fathom. It was yet another example that rain isn’t falling the way it used to, with both the magnitude and intensity of extreme rain events increasing throughout recent decades across a large part of the country.

The climate is growing hotter and wetter, and more prone to dumping massive rains on communities whose creeks, streams and drainage systems are not equipped to handle them. That trend, which has escalated flood risks, raises urgent questions about the country's readiness to cope with spiraling and once-unheard-of rainfall extremes.

“We are not doing enough. This last flood sure proves it,” said Bob Criss, a Washington University emeritus professor who studies regional flooding. “This problem is not going to get better. We’ve got to make it better.”

In the wake of July’s floods, the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk – a journalism partnership that includes more than 14 newsrooms, including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – asked climate data nonprofit Climate Central to analyze 50 years of rainfall patterns.

Findings showed that the eastern half of the United States is getting far wetter on average, with some areas – including parts of the Mississippi River basin – now receiving up to 8 more inches of rain each year than 50 years ago, based on data from the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Climate change models show further increases are likely in coming years,” said Climate Central data scientist Jen Brady, who helped with the analysis.

And when it rains, it pours. Data on rainfall intensity shows that not only is more rain falling, but it’s also falling harder in many places.

The basin covers more than 1,245,000 square miles, includes all or part of 31 states and two Canadian provinces, and roughly resembles a funnel with its spout at the Gulf of Mexico. It covers roughly the western two-thirds of Wisconsin, and in the southeast extends to the Milwaukee suburbs. Its tributaries in the state include the Rock River, Wisconsin River, Chippewa River and St. Croix River, among others. 

Nationally, the rainfall trend is largely tied to heat.

As greenhouse gases from fossil fuels heat the Earth, that warming extends to the oceans and the Gulf of Mexico — a primary source of the atmospheric moisture for the eastern United States. Warming oceans produce more water vapor, and a warming atmosphere can hold more moisture, which can then deliver more precipitation in short windows of time.

"We're getting warmer and we're getting wetter," said Pat Guinan, Missouri’s state climatologist and a professor at the University of Missouri. "We are in an unprecedented wet period."

That's certainly true in Wisconsin. Temperatures in the 2000s have been warmer than in any other historical period, and five years this century — 2010, 2014, 2016, 2017 and 2018 — have been among the wettest in state history.

Recent decades have given rise to a stark divide seen across the continental U.S., with the western half of the country becoming increasingly arid and prone to drought, while the eastern half is faced with exceptional moisture, often delivered in bursts.

The Midwest is one region absorbing the brunt of all that water. Since 1958, the region has seen a 42% increase in the amount of precipitation that falls during the most extreme events, said Ken Kunkel, a professor at North Carolina State University who studies extreme rainfall and is a lead scientist behind the National Climate Assessment.

“The future will be characterized by more extreme events, simply because our source of water vapor will be hotter,” said Kunkel. “The system will have more fuel to work with.”

That helps drive risks of high water even in some places set apart from increasingly flood-prone major rivers, with widespread flash flooding as a separate – and in some ways greater – danger.

“At this point, no community in the country is safeguarded from flooding,” said Laura Lightbody, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ flood-prepared communities project. “We're seeing it flood in more places than ever expected before.”

What if it happens again and again?

Flash flood risk is shaped by more than weather alone. Pavement-heavy urban areas and places with constricted rivers or hilly topography compound the threat and are especially vulnerable.

In part of Appalachia, for example, the North Fork Kentucky River shattered its previous height record by more than 6 feet in July’s flooding, rushing in fast enough to destroy the U.S. Geological Survey sensor designed to monitor the water.

That explosiveness means flash floods can present a far more sudden threat to people and property than the gradual rise of rivers carrying water collected from afar.

"You can get caught by rapidly rising water and it's hard to anticipate," Kunkel said.

Flash floods have become even more dangerous in densely developed and heavily populated urban settings, said other experts, like Washington University's Criss, who has shifted his research focus more toward flash floods in recent years.

Such flood risks can vary widely from place to place but can be especially pronounced in small, "flashy" watersheds that are unusually sensitive to bursts of incoming water.

In freshly flooded places around the U.S., various forms of recovery are underway – a process that could take a long time.

In Kentucky, residents were told to expect years of rebuilding. But some, like Mary Cromer of the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, point to the continued threat posed by climate change – giving the difficult rebuild the grim possibility of becoming a Sisyphean task, poised to repeat itself unless certain changes and precautions go into place.

“We know flooding like this will happen again,” she said.

So how can a city retool its infrastructure to withstand stronger flooding? How do people get out of harm’s way?

Most existing structures were built to withstand conditions and expectations based on what used to happen – not the climate trends happening today, nor future projections. 

"Historical data is no longer a good predictor of the future,” Kunkel said.

Facing a no-win situation

Laurie Thomas already knows this all too well.

The Pecatonica River runs two blocks from her mother's stoop in Freeport, Illinois. After a recent two-day deluge, floodwaters reached the basement's ceiling. It was Freeport’s fifth major flood in just the past four years. Thomas and her mother have experienced flooding at least 15 times in the past 20 years. 

As increased rainfall and repetitive flooding strain aging infrastructure in many towns, residents along the Mississippi River ask the same question: Do we pack up and move out? For Thomas and her mother, Freeport, a historic Black community on the east side of town, has always been home. Moving is not an option. 

“People have always lived over here and there's always been the Pecatonica, but lately the floods, they’ve been worse,” Thomas said. “But they’ve been worse everywhere else, too."

Staying put in the face of flooding can be dangerous and is growing increasingly costly. Property taxes are the largest source of tax revenue for local governments in most states, and as flood risks increase, property values decline. That means less tax support for the local governments.

At the same time, federal funding remains relatively flat, according to data from the Congressional Budget Office. The federal government covers about 40% of general water and transportation infrastructure, but states are left to maintain it. 

Without the tax base to maintain infrastructure, sometimes leaving is the only feasible option. But moving away can come with its own pain, whether it involves an individual through a home buyout, or numerous people and businesses through the partial or total relocation of a community.

Relocating a town is “always expensive, complex and contentious,” wrote Nicholas Pinter, a professor at the University of California-Davis, in a 2021 paper.

Paying people to leave their flood-prone homes, meanwhile, has cost the Federal Emergency Management Agency billions of dollars and still won't be enough if the climate gets wetter. Further, a Columbia Journalism investigation found the money doesn’t flow equitably; places with a higher share of residents of color than the national average received about 40% less funding per person. And the buyout process often takes too long. What’s left is not always attractive to the remaining residents. 

“It looks like missing teeth in a poorly maintained mouth,” Pinter described in an interview. “It is not your vision of a thriving town.”  

The cost of relocation

Charley Preusser, editor of the Crawford County Independent newspaper in Gays Mills, remembers the sound the water made as it rushed over the ridge one night more than a decade ago. 

It was the first of back-to-back floods of the Kickapoo River that hit the tiny, southwestern Wisconsin town in 2007 and 2008. 

The next day, he made his way carefully from his home in the hills to the newspaper office downtown. He used a canoe to get down Main Street. The first thing he saw when he opened the door to the office was a mini-fridge, floating in nearly 3 feet of water like a fishing bobber. 

It took weeks for the small staff to get back into the office, where the water and mud destroyed everything but paper archives — which rescue crews had thoughtfully stacked atop a high shelf — and a clock on the wall. 

After a second flood 10 months later, Gays Mills secured more than $10 million in federal, state and local grant funding, as well as private money, to move. A few years after the floods, it had a new village hall, library and community center, a mercantile building for businesses, and several houses and apartments situated along Highway 131 overlooking the river’s backwaters, safe on higher ground. 

Not everyone agreed with it, and not everyone moved. Even before the historic floods, some noted, the village had flooded 20 times since 1900. 

But when the community got walloped with a third record flood in 2018, it was helpful to have fewer businesses and residents in the floodplain, and thus less damage, said Larry McCarn, who was village president during the floods. It also helped to be able to work from the village hall, which was left untouched because it was on higher ground.

Driving into town today, visitors first come upon a general store attached to a gas station, elevated and protected from the river below. Inside, the items for sale include fresh produce, dairy and meat. It’s unusual to have a grocery in a village of this size — population 523.

“If we hadn’t (relocated), there would not be a (grocery) store in Gays Mills,” McCarn said. “There would be absolutely nothing.”

As is common for relocated communities, Gays Mills has sought to stay connected to its history by hosting events in the old low-lying downtown area. The village hosts its annual Apple Festival there every fall, and in the grocery store, a sign advertises square dancing in the old community center once a month. 

Relocating communities away from flood hazards on rivers and coastlines has been happening in the U.S. for more than 100 years. For communities that can achieve it, it’s often bittersweet. But it works to reduce flood damage down the line and help drive economic growth. 

Soldiers Grove, a small village about 10 minutes from Gays Mills, moved to higher ground in the 1970s. Today, nearby Ontario and Viola are both pursuing new construction in parts of town outside the floodplain.

Pinter said communities typically come to a crossroads about relocating after a particularly catastrophic flood, needing to decide whether to rebuild in place yet again or “solve the problem once and for all.” 

Whether to stay or leave

The future for flood-prone Freeport looks much different. 

Two years after a historic flood in 2019 in which the Pecatonica River rose more than 17 feet, FEMA granted the city nearly $3.4 million so it could buy out roughly 120 properties in the river floodplain. City officials authorized another $1.1 million in matching funds. 

Thomas said she’s known her neighbors, some of whom are family, her whole life. The amount the city is offering to leave isn’t enough, she said, plus many are too old to start over someplace else.

“The lady over there is in a wheelchair. She’s been there all her life. These are older people,” Thomas said, pointing up and down the street. “Where the hell are they going?” 

At least in Gays Mills and Freeport, money was offered. Pinter pointed to the case of Pinhook, Missouri, a majority-Black community that wanted to relocate wholesale to preserve its social bond after massive flooding in 2011. But they weren’t able to find the support to foot the bill. Residents scattered, leaving behind a veritable ghost town.

In August, nearly a year after Freeport launched its home buyout program, Patricia Norman was the first east-side resident to accept an offer on her home. She remembers a flood a few years back so bad that the fire department had to come evacuate their home. 

“My mom was, at the time, 92,” Norman said. ”We just knew that this was not a good situation for her.”

Norman has fond memories of growing up on the east side, going to Taylor Park School and watching the fireworks from Taylor Park. 

“All the activities that used to take place on the east side," she said. "Well, none of those take place now."

Due to severe repetitive flooding, the Freeport School Board voted unanimously to close Taylor Park School – the only elementary school on the town’s east side – in 2020. 

Norman didn’t disclose the offer the city made for her home but said she was satisfied. She’s sympathetic to people like Laurie Thomas who don’t want to sell.  

For her part, Norman plans to move to higher ground in Freeport.

The city, after all, is home.

Doomed efforts to control the water

Other areas in the basin are exploring different responses.

The western border of Atchison County, Missouri, follows the twisting path of the Missouri River. Acres of corn and soy fields once lined its shores, but after a nearby levee suffered seven breaches in a 2019 flood, the cropland was ruined.

Instead of rebuilding the levee and replanting the crops, Atchison County decided to let the floodplain be a floodplain. Knee-high prairie grass now covers the open space, providing a greener, more sustainable form of flood control.  

“It's nuts how bad things were,” said Regan Griffin, a local farmer and Atchison Levee Board member. “But how quickly nature reclaimed stuff … here we are, everything's growing back already.” 

People have lived along the river for millennia, the benefits competing with the risks. Modern levee systems built in response to flood disasters in the last century weren't designed for the newest risk: increased rainfall caused by climate change.

“Everyone agrees there's more water,” said journalist Tyler J. Kelley, who authored “Holding Back the River: The Struggle Against Nature on America's Waterways.” “The question is, what do you do about it?”

Municipalities have struggled to keep their residents safe. Many across the basin — like Atchison — are shifting away from traditional mitigation tactics to make room for the water instead. Creative, nature-based solutions might mean river communities look a lot different in 100 years: greener, safer and more sustainable.

Before humans tampered with its flow, the Mississippi River meandered. High waters bathed thousands of square miles of floodplain, bringing rich sediment to swamps and forests. 

Indigenous peoples adapted to the Mississippi's unpredictability. But early European settlers tried to restrain and control rivers — raising natural levees and cutting off the regular flow to floodplains — for navigation, agriculture and development.

The Army Corps of Engineers built channels and levees for navigation throughout the late 1800s. When it began managing flood control, it prioritized protecting agricultural lands built in floodplains, which often meant building or expanding levees. 

These protective measures proved fruitless against what is known as the Great Flood of 1927.

“It was tremendously destructive,” Kelley said. “There were levees all up and down the whole river by '27. But they weren't equipped for floods like that.”

Months of heavy rainfall plunged 27,000 square miles of land underwater after the levee system collapsed. Flood waters didn’t subside for months, killing as many as 1,000 people and displacing more than a half million from Illinois to Louisiana. The overall damage was equivalent to around one-third of the federal budget at the time.

While the 1927 flood largely impacted the Lower Mississippi, the Upper Mississippi had its own reckoning in 1993. Increased rainfall claimed 50 victims and around $15 billion in damage across nine states. More recently, floods in 2011 and 2019 also rocked the region — their relative proximity to each other underscoring the growing influence of climate change, said John Anfinson, author of ​​”The River We Have Wrought: A History Of The Upper Mississippi."

The country’s primary reaction to these major floods was to continue fortifying levees to protect agricultural and urban areas. That historical infrastructure still defines the basin’s contours. But it is aging, like much American infrastructure, and not built to withstand the new threats. 

“It wasn't that the levees are broken,” Kelley said. “It's just that they aren't really built for the weather of the future.”

Learning to work with nature

The Cedar River runs through the heart of Cedar Rapids, Iowa’s second most populous city. During the flood of 2008, the river drowned the city. Existing levees couldn’t protect the area from a record-setting 31-foot crest.

The Cedar River flood caused an estimated $7 billion in damage and destroyed properties. Residents feared the day the water would rise again. Their new plan? Making more room for the river and integrating flood infrastructure into plain sight. 

A new amphitheater, encircled by a berm, doubles as a basin designed to take on water. Further downstream, a levee was moved back a few blocks. Bridges, trails and buildings are being raised higher to temper future flooding. Altogether, the city is opening up 77 acres of floodplain after purchasing 1,400 properties.

Rob Davis helped restore damaged buildings after the flood surged through the city. Now, he is heading efforts to combine flood control, recreation and nature as Cedar Rapids’ flood control program manager. 

“We're working with the environment, but we've not lost the community aspect or the business aspect,” he said. 

Other municipalities across the basin are also embracing waterways in the form of green infrastructure or “nature-based solutions,” said Lightbody, of The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Flood-Prepared Communities project. 

Communities are opening up floodplains. Cities and towns are enacting building restrictions in flood-prone areas. Governments also are buying flood-prone properties, letting residents relocate to safer locations and converting the areas back to green space.

“The answer is simple, right? Don't keep building new communities in these flood-risk areas,” Lightbody said.

Research has found that these nature-based solutions successfully mitigate flooding. Buyouts, combined with levee setbacks, reduced flood risks in communities all along the Mississippi River. The resulting floodplains offer opportunities for recreation, ecotourism and increased ecosystem services.

“There's more and more research that's making it more compelling … and it’s often less costly,” Lightbody said. 

Still, local political and economic interests prevent more communities from making green adjustments. Giving rivers and floodplains back to nature often means taking space away from future development in seemingly prime riverfront real estate.

Congress has slowly begun to direct agencies to craft programs that offer communities more support. In 2020, FEMA launched the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program geared toward funding locally led projects that fortify areas before disasters strike.

This month, FEMA will have $2.3 billion for such projects — a windfall compared with past years but still a fraction of the $460 billion spent on disaster response between 2005 and 2019. Further, so far, Mississippi River communities have received a smaller percentage of BRIC dollars than coastal states, according to a Headwaters Economics analysis. 

A FEMA official told the Ag & Water Desk the agency was working to make the money more accessible to small towns like those in the river basin. 

The Army Corps of Engineers is also working on adapting its programs, operations and policies. It has established a Responses to Climate Change program, which aims to ensure that future mitigation projects are built with resiliency in mind. 

It's all part of the growing recognition that when it comes to protecting against future flood risk for Mississippi River basin communities, levees and floodwalls alone aren’t working anymore. Flood risks will continue to increase until communities make room for the water.

“Locks and dams are the concrete and steel embodiment of past visions for the river,” Anfinson said. “What is our 21st century vision?”

This story was reported by Madeline Heim of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; Bryce Gray of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; Connor Giffin of The (Louisville) Courier-Journal; Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco of WNIJ-Northern Public Radio; Keely Brewer of the Daily Memphian; Eva Tesfaye of Harvest Public Media; Brittney J. Miller of The Gazette of Cedar Rapids; and Halle Parker of WWNO-New Orleans Public Radio. All are part of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at theUniversity of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and the Society of Environmental Journalists, funded by the Walton Family Foundation.