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Iowa Flooding 2016

Iowa flood is a flop, and thank God for that

Kyle Munson
The Des Moines Register

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — As with most sequels, #Flood2016 as seen from Iowa’s second-largest city lacked the drama of the original blockbuster.

Kip Schoettmer, owner of John’s Tire, looks out a doorway of his business as the flood water begins to recede on Monday, Sept. 26, 2016, in Vinton.

But we’re in the Heartland, not Hollywood. So that’s very good news.

When a natural disaster underperforms, that means lives are saved and more homes stay safe.

Also like a typical sequel, the plot of this flood has been more ponderous and procedural. And everybody saw it coming, with about five days to heave sandbags and brace for impact.

Cedar River peaks below projections; flood walls holding

Tuesday was peak day, when the Cedar River here crested just below 22 feet — a foot lower than the most recent estimate, and at least a few feet below what had been feared last week when rains hit. And, of course, it was far less water than the record 31-foot crest eight years ago that swamped 10 square miles of the city.

“The other 3 feet would’ve made a huge difference around here,” said Carol Ekstrand, standing just west of the river with friend Scott Pinter in front of his dry Cedar River Landing bar. “It bought a lot of people their homes and businesses.”

Down the street, plant manager Rick Schmerbach oversaw the effort to pump about 6 inches of water from the basement of Johnson Gas Appliance. This flood turned out to be more a story of the unseen enemy of seepage into basements, with pressure from the swollen river forcing water to gurgle up from below.

As many neighborhoods emptied of some 10,000 voluntary evacuees, an eerie silence descended on parts of the city.

“My wife says it feels like an episode of The Walking Dead down here,” said Dylan Smith, walking his blue heeler-pit bull mix, Nahla, Tuesday morning in the trendy NewBo business district along the northeast riverbank near downtown. What the area lacked in bloodthirsty zombies it more than made up for in stoic sandbags and the drone of water pumps.

About 10 miles of temporary flood barriers — HESCO-brand sand-filled cubes of wire frame and fabric — were assembled along the river for $5 million to $6 million within a few days, as if some giant Lego project. The city also deployed 250,000 sandbags, many of which remained dry and can be recycled.

The drama had ebbed enough at Tuesday morning’s press conference that Mayor Ron Corbett took time to get philosophical about comparisons between the wait-and-see nervous tension of a flood crest day and Election Day. And the local Red Cross spokesman read from his journal to help encourage residents to write about their feelings on the flood.

The obvious horrible tragedy Tuesday had nothing to do with the flood, except perhaps a tangential connection that school had been canceled for the week: A 13-year-old girl was shot and killed on the southeast side of the city, a murder that had squad cars abandoning their flood patrols to swarm to the scene and swiftly arrest three young suspects.

Even in the last massive flood nobody died as a result of the disaster itself.

“It’s not time yet to go back to life as usual,” City Manager Jeff Pomeranz said Tuesday, “but we’re getting close.”

On the sand-swept vacant streets of the core downtown business district it was easy to spot metallic birds that have proliferated in the last eight years: drone cameras launched to survey the watery landscape by air.

We should remember that these are the early days of #Flood2016. The water isn't expected to drop below major flood stage until the weekend. In the early days of any disaster, summaries and statistics can fluctuate as frequently and wildly as the forecast. The broader themes and lessons learned from this flood haven't had time to jell.

But this much seems clear, or at least it’s a local consensus based on nearly everybody I talked to: Cedar Rapids deserves high marks for its preparedness and response. As a journalist I would add that the daily public city council meetings and press conferences, complete with a Facebook Live feed and a sign language interpreter for the hearing impaired, provided a model of open government in the face of disaster. Any reporter or citizen could walk into the Ice Arena, sit down, and listen in as the council received updates from local chiefs and department heads.

As part of the morning ritual, city officials tended to hammer on the abiding need for permanent flood protection that could cost 100 times as much as the HESCO barriers, about half-a-billion dollars.

As early as Sunday, Corbett touched on the city's classic east-west divide: The rebuilt downtown business district on the east and the residential neighborhoods such as Time Check to the west that have been decimated by flood buyouts. He said the city couldn't accept a solution that protects only the richer eastern side.

"We wanted to protect both sides of the river," he said. "We didn’t turn to some bureaucratic formula to make that decision. … The downtown wasn’t more important than Time Check.”

City Councilwoman Ann Poe later made a case for her city: “We process the grain that comes from all over the state,” she said. “So protecting this city is economically the right thing to do for this state.”

By Tuesday, a resident stood up and asked the city manager, "Why can’t we just build (permanent flood protection) ourselves and quit this monkeying around?”

Pomeranz reiterated that it's "great being on the list" for federal flood relief passed through Congress and signed by the president, he said, "(but) we need the dollars, and that comes through appropriation."

State Sen. Rob Hogg of Cedar Rapids, who shouldered his share of sandbagging in recent days and also vacated his law office, remains upset that permanent flood protection hasn't been built to "provide certainty and security."

“The politically responsible people have ceded their authority to unelected bureaucrats,” he said.

Self-described "ecological restorationist" Rich Patterson of Cedar Rapids has a question for his neighbors: “How many floods is it going to take before it sinks in?”

Patterson is an aquatic biologist originally from New Jersey who retired a few years ago as the longtime executive director of the Indian Creek Nature Center. He has written decades of pro-environmental opinion pieces to implore his fellow Iowans to act, long feeling like a lonely voice in the wilderness, and not because he plants his yards in native prairie.

“I’m really kind of tired of the heroic stuff,” he said of the way the city tends to focus on the human drama of floods. And he doesn't think any permanent levee can be built high enough if officials don't also take other measures.

“Why don’t we just do the dull and boring stuff?” he asked.

Follow Kyle Munson on Twitter: @KyleMunson

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