A 120-year-old levee—still holding, but rapidly deteriorating as of late Monday afternoon—is all that’s protecting about 150 homes and the road that leads to them in Wisconsin.
More than a week of heavy rains have caused the Wisconsin River to rise, and some residents of Portage, Wisconsin, in the central part of the state have been evacuated. The area’s levee system was built around the 1890s by local farmers and residents, and it’s constructed largely of sand. A spokesman for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has referred to it as a “relic.”
For several years, the government has been attempting to certify structures such as levees, dams, and dikes, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been remapping the nation’s flood zones and reclassifying some areas as being in a floodplain. Many areas protected by a levee or dam are now considered to be in a floodplain until the structure can be certified, and it’s levees like the one in Wisconsin that pose particular problems—they’re extremely old, no engineering documents exist, and determining their structural integrity is a slow and difficult process. In most cases, though, we hope the test doesn’t take the form it’s taking this week in Wisconsin—trial by flooding.
Although earlier Monday officials estimated that the river would begin to drop sometime Tuesday, they now expect that it will remain above flood stage at least through Wednesday. Sandbags are being used to shore up parts of the levee.