The Crow River in Delano is now cresting its banks — its high waters lapping lower sections of the town bridge.   

“There was water going across the road a little ways down,” notes Kelly Miller, who lives just outside town. “I think that’s when they made the decision to put up the levee.”  

The aerial view from CHOPPER 5 shows floodwaters expanding the river’s profile after last week’s snowmelt and high temperatures across Minnesota.

“The melt goes into the river,” explains Delano Mayor Holly Schrupp. “Last fall, you could’ve walked across the river from side to side and you had spots where your ankles didn’t get wet.”

But not anymore.

On Tuesday morning, city crews installed a metal floodwall.

“I think it’s just, you know, to help prevent flooding on this main drag that’s our kind of awesome downtown,” Miller says.

 The city bought the wall in 2014.

But those giant metal sheets, with removable brackets to hold them, have only been used twice: in March 2019 — and now.

“They are waterproof,” Schrupp says. “They lock tight in between them, so they have like a rubber piece that is in between each one, and they just lock together, kind of like Legos. They stay together like Legos.”

It’s technology that wasn’t used here when the main streets were severely flooded in 1965.

That year, the river crested at 23 feet above normal.

Schrupp says the metal floodwall is a big improvement over sandbag levees, which she says can be messy, and take a week to put into place.

“We would close the main street because obviously, we’d use large equipment to bring in the dirt — and the public works department assembled a levee, a makeshift levee,” she said.

Tamey Dobrava’s home décor shop — ‘Mark 12’ — is on River Street, not far from the Crow River’s swollen banks.

She says she’s happy about the wall — and the fact that she can stay open.

“Oh, much better — we appreciate it,” Dobrava declares.

But she says she’s concerned about the foot-deep waters in her shop’s basement.

“It’s a lot of water down there,” Dobrava says. “We don’t have a sump pump in the building.”

City Administrator Phil Kern says that the flooding is from groundwater rising at about the same rate as the river.

He says the wall will remain up until authorities are convinced the river has receded for the season —that’s expected to take at least several days.  

Dobrava says she’s just thankful her showroom and the street out front have remained dry.

“It’s very nerve-wracking for us,” she says. “We are a newer business, our livelihood is people on the street being able to park and get to us so, we’ve been really worried about shutting River Street down.”