DELANO, Minn. — At Bridge House Coffee and Café it’s not the flow of java that may spoil the spring.
It’s the Crow River, just across the street.
“For sure,” owner Lynn Eidahl says. “It's higher than it historically has been.”
Feet from the bridge deck, the surface of the river stands frozen – an eerie indicator of what might be in store.
“We do have a potential for some significant spring flooding this year,” Craig Schmidt, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service, says.
Every chart Schmidt relies on for forecasting spring flooding shows colors he'd rather not see. On one map, an ominous green blob stretches from Montana to Michigan.
“The soil moisture in the upper Midwest is all at 99 percentile, which means the highest one percent we've ever measured for late winter,” Schmidt says.
Wetlands and farm fields are saturated like a sponge in a bucket from last year's sopping wet summer and fall, with nowhere good for the spring melt to go.
“Basically, the upper Midwest is about as wet as it can get,” Schmidt says.
While too soon to predict another spring of '97, river communities like Delano know the threat is real.
Eidahl points across the street. “Three Crows was right across there,” she says.
Three Crows was Delano's old coffee shop. “They were flooded, yep,” Eidahl says.
A small park was carved out of the space Three Crows once occupied along the Crow River.
When Eidahl and her husband opened their own coffee shop five years ago, they took the lessons of the past to heart.
Eidahl points to her shop’s concrete floor as one example. “We put this flooring specifically in because it would be easily cleaned up if there was flooding,” she says
Schmidt says a lot of things will have to go right, for the region to avoid spring flooding – the kind of things that happened last year after a similarly dire report.
In 2019, the melt-off ended up being gradual and spring rains minimal.
“Last year was kind of an aberration,” Schmidt says. “We really can’t expect that to happen again.”