Amid all the frantic sandbagging and levee building, Davenport's minor-league baseball team has been forced out of town by high water for the third time in the past decade. The Quad-City River Bandits are playing their home games on higher, drier ground in Illinois, across the swollen Mississippi River.
Teams hate the locker rooms and the drainage - well, the drainage is lousy.
Home plate was floating outside the stadium along the first base line Wednesday, slowly moving with the current under the Centennial Bridge. Only the tip of the white cover on the pitching mound could be seen through the brown floodwaters. Now he and six other team employees are looking for jobs. Dozens of homes across the region have been swamped by floodwaters this spring, fueling debate about whether Davenport should build permanent flood protection. The city is the largest on the upper Mississippi without it.