Mayors in Mississippi River towns getting through rainy season and flooding

For the first time in over a year, the Mississippi Valley is not experiencing a drought. That’s mainly because of the heavy rains in recent weeks which led to flooding on the river.

Now that river levels are going down, mayors of towns along the Mississippi are dealing with the flooding. La Crosse Mayor Mitch Reynolds is a co-chair of a group of Mississippi River mayors, and he told an on-line press conference on Thursday that the rain has re-charged area waters.

“In some ways, the rain, the precipitation is welcome,” said Reynolds. He said the area just pulled out of a long drought that cost the nation $26 billion. “And for the first time since 2022, there is no drought along the Mississippi River corridor,” he added.

A National Weather Service meteorologist, Anna Wolverton, says several dams downriver from Wisconsin are still closed because of the flooding, but dams north of Dubuque are now open.

Wolverton says the weather on the Upper Mississippi early in the year did not suggest that floods might be on the way.

“April had above-normal rainfall over this region,” said Wolverton. “May saw that pattern continue, and then June came and there was that extreme rainfall” over Minnesota and South Dakota, which kicked off what she called a “flood wave.”

Wolverton doesn’t expect much rain in the region over the next seven days, as the river continues to go down.