Water Always Wins

A few places along the 2019 flood course had previously taken a Slow Water approach. Davenport, Iowa, which sits along the Mississippi River, decided in the early 2000s to restore Nahant Marsh, a 305-acre wetland right near the urban area, and to use riverfront parks to accommodate high flows. In 2019, Nahant Marsh absorbed as much as a trillion gallons of floodwaters, protecting much of Davenport. Eventually part of the downtown flooded, but the damage was much less severe than it was elsewhere. Marsh managers bought an additional thirty-nine acres of farmland in 2018 between Nahant Marsh and the Mississippi River, restoring it to wetlands and prairie. Now they are looking for more. The city is embracing the wisdom of a local professor of civil and environment engineering to “let floodplains be floodplains.”