page_title: Kickapoo River
section_title: Flooding
hierarchical_section_title: Kickapoo River / Flooding
caption_attribution_description: The Kickapoo River Museum on the w:Kickapoo River in w:Gays Mills, Wisconsin along w:Wisconsin Highway 171. This file was uploaded with Commonist.
context_page_description: The Kickapoo River is a 126-mile-long tributary of the Wisconsin River in the state of Wisconsin, United States. It is named for the Kickapoo Indians who occupied Wisconsin before the influx of white settlers in the early 19th century.
context_section_description: Nationwide, the construction of flood control structures has saved lives and property, but in some cases structures have been found to result in greater loss of life and property than if they had not been built. Dams, for example, encourage downstream development; if they fail, as some do, the destruction can be catastrophic. Today, an increasing number and intensity of extreme weather events is sometimes exceeding the design capacity of flood control structures. Because of the abandonment of the La Farge flood control project the Kickpoo Valley continues to suffer from catastrophic flooding. Major floods have occurred in 1978, 2007 and 2008. In the mid-1970s, Soldiers Grove residents decided on an alternative to the Corps of Engineers' plan to build a levee around the village and undertook the relocation of the community's central business district to higher ground. The relocation was completed several years later, with the business district rebuilt out of reach flooding and heated largely with passive solar systems. The project became a national model of nonstructural flood control. Soldiers Grove was virtually undamaged by the 2007 flooding that cost well over $60 million in the Kickapoo Valley, and after the 2008 floods, communities are being forced by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to move from their historic locations requiring even more unwilling residents to have to relocate.
  The Kickapoo River flooded over its banks in Gays Mills in 2007 and again from the June 2008 Midwest floods. The 2007 flooding cost well over $60 million and after the 2008 floods, communities are being forced by FEMA to move from their historic locations requiring even more unwilling residents to have to relocate. After several years of discussion, a planned relocation of the village began in 2010.
caption: Kickapoo River in Gays Mills in 2010
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