Comment: Why a Menard's representative made me laugh

Which flood was this??

(The following is a comment by decorahnews.com's Paul Scott):

"Menard's Real Estate Representative Tyler Edwards has written something that made me laugh out loud.

In discussing steps the company is promising to take to handle water drainage on the Freeport site of the proposed new Menard's store, he referred to 'super floods like in 2016.'

If Edwards wanted to use a label which implied the 2016 flood was unusual, he missed the mark.  Heck, we had two different floods in 2016, so it wasn't clear to me which one he is referring to.  Or was he thinking of what the National Weather Service described as "the memorable summer of 1993?"  Or maybe June of 2008, which the NWS says was a "flooding event for the history books" just one year after severe flooding in 2007.  Or maybe 2013, when the flooding came in April instead of June.  Or in 2016, when it came in both June and in August.  Or in 2018, when we already had a flood scare a few weeks ago. 

'Super flood?'  We all wish this was a once in 500 years problem.  We've had at least five major "500-year" floods in 25 years—an average of one every five years!

Flooding is such an issue in Decorah that if you do a search of not quite nine years of decorahnews.com archived news stories, you'll discover that 375 of the stories are about "flooding."  After getting hit twice by flooding in 2016, I posted a comment (http://www.decorahnews.com/archived-stories/2016/09/14646.html) asking readers for suggestions on ways we could reduce the risk of flooding in the future.  Apparently Mr. Edwards' suggestion is to fill in a good chunk of the Freeport floodplain and build a 200,000 square foot building on it.

Let's welcome Menard's to Decorah--but up the hill, not in a floodplain so we'd be coping with flooding every couple of years.  There's nothing super about having to cope with 'super floods'!"