Mississippi River suffers one of the most severe floods in its history

The Mississippi River is experiencing one of the most severe floods in its history. Copious snowfall this winter now being met with spring warmth is causing river thaws stretching from Minnesota and Wisconsin to Iowa and Illinois and leaving images like these:

The river is thus experiencing floods and overflows after an extended dry season. The situation is so severe that the National Weather Service issued, as of Thursday morning, a total of 58 flood warnings for Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois and Missouri. In these areas, the flooding of the river is already wreaking havoc and flooding roads, fields, parks and businesses.

And citizens are preparing, as they do every year, to deal with these weather complications. Jack Murphy of Camanche, Iowa, is one of them. He explained to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel how he protects his home, located very close to the river, from too much damage during flood season.

He does this by creating a sandbag barricade in his backyard. However, that doesn't take away his concern and he wakes up around 4 a.m. to check the water levels. "You don't sleep at night," he explained.

In this locality, flooding is expected to reach its peak on Monday. On that day, experts say, flooding of up to 23 feet could occur. This figure would place the river's flood volume as the third highest in the city's history.

In Minnesota the situation is not much better. Flooding of the Mississippi River forced the closure of several roads and parks in the state as a precautionary measure in the face of rising river floodwaters. "Preparation matters. If we didn’t have these levees, it would be so much worse," Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said in front of the levees erected by the Army Corps of Engineers in St. Paul.