Flood warnings are likely to remain in effect this week from Wisconsin and Minnesota to Missouri as more heavy rain is forecast.

There's already been historic flooding, inundating parts of Nebraska, bringing down a bridge in South Dakota.

The lasting image of the week is from Minnesota.

Water surging around the west side of the 114-year-old Rapidan Dam on the Blue Earth River,

carrying away a home on a bank just downstream.

Across the country, new weather extremes

are testing aging dams.

According to the federal government's most recent climate

assessment, the number of extreme precipitation days in the Midwest has gone up

45% since the 1950s. Del Shannon is the former president of the United States Society on dams.

It's an organization of professionals who design, build, and operate dams, and they focus on dam safety.

Del, are the dams that exist now,

were they built and designed to withstand

the sort of extreme weather we're seeing now?

Well, John, the average age of a dam in the US and there are 92,000 dams in the US is 60 years old.

And so the majority of these dams were designed to a standard 60 years or older and often that is insufficient to withstand many of the floods that we're now starting to see.

Can Dam somehow be retrofitted to bring them up to standard?

Yes, of course.

It's a tall task at times because of the immense size of these structures,

but absolutely, and they should be, because water is an irreplaceable resource that we have. There's no plan B for anything other than water. So these structures must be upgraded if we want to maintain them as assets in our water portfolio.

As I understand it, the Rappadon Dam was damaged by flooding in 2019 and 2020,

and since then there's been a debate over whether to repair it or remove it.

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