By Jan Wesner Childs and Pam Wright May 01 2019 09:00 AM EDT weather.com

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At a Glance A temporary levee constructed to protect downtown Davenport failed on Tuesday.

By Wednesday morning, waters had receded but some remained on roads in the business district.

Waters were up to six feet high in one area of the city.

Water still remained on the streets of a portion of downtown Davenport, Iowa, Wednesday, a day after a temporary levee meant to hold back the rising Mississippi River failed and inundated the city with more than 6 feet of water.

Local emergency officials told the Weather Channel Wednesday morning the waters had receded but some streets remained inundated.

The flooding that began around 3:30 p.m. CDT covered about four blocks of downtown Davenport, with water up to 6 feet high in some places, David Donovan, Scott County Emergency Management Director, told weather.com Tuesday.

The breach forced some residents to seek shelter on their rooftops, while others were evacuated by boats, the Associated Press reported.

The flooded area occurred mostly in a business district, but there were some apartments in the affected area. Several businesses were forced to close as the flood waters rose, and city workers scrambled to reinforce the levee with sandbags.

Resident Chase Neukam says he was helping others stack sandbags at the Paradigm Virtual Reality Gaming and Training when the floodwaters began to rapidly rise.

"I was standing out front and saw it come in. It was like ‘The Day After Tomorrow ,'" Neukam told The Gazette. “It was like a disaster movie, heading down the street really fast. And then it started getting worse.”

The NWS issued a flash flood emergency for the area due to the breach, and several area roads were closed including Iowa Highway 22 from Davenport to Muscatine and U.S. Highway 67 north of LeClaire.

That warning was lifted around 7:30 p.m. The weather service said the water had not receded Tuesday night, but was no longer rapidly rising. Residents were urged to avoid the area.

The NWS forecasts the Mississippi River to peak in the Quad Cities area, including Davenport, over the next couple of days. Water levels are expected to rise to within a foot off the all-time record high for the Quad Cities, which was 22.63 feet during the catastrophic Midwest floods of 1993.

"Because so much of the Midwest experienced heavy rain last fall, followed by the wettest winter on record, the soils remain saturated over a wide area,” Bob Henson, a weather.com meteorologist said. “It won't take a great deal of rain to trigger additional flooding as the spring unfolds."

Residents and officials are breathing a sigh of relief that no heavy rain is in the forecast for Wednesday or the coming days.