Dams for flood control are pretty common in some areas. I couldn't find a map on a quick Google for Iowa, but the link has the New England system built to deal with floods like '35, '38, and '55. They just hold water until rivers downstream recede.
There are some levees, notably along the Connecticut River. They straightened the river south of Putnam near me after the '55 flood so water can exit the town faster (as well as a big dam upstream to hold more water back).
Most of the smaller rivers present the problem of the towns having been built around a water-powered mill right on the river. Can't build a 30' high levee through the middle of town. So where the Army Corps figured it was cheaper to buy open land and build a dam instead of relocating small cities, they did so.
They sure don't prevent all flooding, but they do protect the infrastructure like bridges, wells, and sewage treatment plants downstream as well as protecting the businesses and residences in the mill villages / small cities from catastrophic floods.
In most if not all of these situations, the people weren't stupid when they built the town. The places they built buildings had no known history of flooding by the farmers who had cleared the land a century or more earlier by the time most of the mills started being built from 1830 onwards.
But as more land was cleared in the hills for sheep, and there was less forest to absorb water...more water ran off. Over generations, silt carried into the rivers raised their river bed height, so water got closer and closer to the banks all the time. These actions where recognized by the 1860s, and have largely continued till today.
As we've paved more land and put in more and more drainage, water flows faster and raises the rivers higher sooner. One of the posters here was complaining he can't get permission to tile off a bit of his land -- it's all interconnected, the more land that is tiled, the less the ground acts like a sponge to slowly drain the water and worse these floods get. It's a cost of improving agricultural output that we have to protect or relocate towns getting flooded worse and more often because of it.
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Today's Featured Article - Harvestin Hay: The Early Years (Part 2) - by Pat Browning. The summer of 1950 was the start of a new era in farming for our family. I was thirteen, and Kathy (my oldest sister) was seven. At this age, I believed tractor farming was the only way, hot stuff -- and given a chance I probably would have used the tractor, Dad's first, a 1936 Model "A" John Deere, to go bring in the cows! And I think Dad was ready for some automation too. And so it was that we acquired a good, used J. I. Case, wire tie hay baler. In addition to a person to drive th
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