Tim Mahoney walks to the river's edge, knowing the force that may soon be unleashed.
"You can feel the power of the river when it starts to move," said the Fargo mayor, who has hoisted sandbags with thousands of others who've fended off a swollen Red River during overwhelming spring meltdowns.
Like others who live in towns lining Minnesota waterways — from the Red River Valley in the north to the Mississippi River basin in the south — Mahoney is bracing for a rush of rising water.
But unlike the historic flood fights of 1997 and 2009, when rivers overflowed and swamped buildings and neighborhoods in many towns, this spring's experience should be less daunting.
For two decades, cities weary of the labor and money spent battling high waters and cleaning up destruction left behind have invested millions of dollars to move houses off riverbanks, build levees, install pumps and storm sewer gates, raise roads, bridges and buildings and, in some cases, divert water.
"The flood fight is vastly different now," said Bob Zimmerman, city engineer in Moorhead, a stone's throw across the Red from Fargo.

For one thing, the National Weather Service can better forecast floods, said Patrick Lynch, a flood plain hydrologist with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. And river towns are better prepared to handle them when they do happen, he said.
"Since 2009, the state alone has invested more than $300 million in grants to local governments for flood mitigation. And in the 20 years before that, it allocated about $220 million," said Lynch, who co-authored the latest annual report on flood mitigation grants.