Iowa's Waters: A Mirror of the Land

Abstract

In June 2008, floods of historic proportions raged across the Iowa landscape. For weeks, rivers rose to leave their banks, in many eastern Iowa locations spreading farther and deeper than at any time in recorded history. Hardest hit were towns along the Cedar and Iowa Rivers. In Cedar Rapids, floodwaters rose to a stage of 31.12 feet, 11 feet above the previous historic high and 19 feet above the flood stage of 12 feet, and flows crested at 140,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). Discharges of the next largest floods here (in 1961 and 1993) had been about half that size; the average Cedar River flow in Cedar Rapids is a mere 3,807 cfs. More than nine square miles of downtown business and residential buildings, or 1,300 city blocks, went underwater; 25,000 people were evacuated in Linn County alone. Twenty miles to the south, Iowa City felt the largest floods since the construction of the Coralville Dam sev eral miles upstream on the Iowa River. At the University of Iowa, nestled along the Iowa River in downtown Iowa City, twenty-two major buildings?including the entire School of Music and most of the Art and Art History complex?took on water. University flood damages were estimated at $232 million. For the state as a whole, losses of physical property (including crop losses) were estimated at $3.5 billion, fema declared eighty-five of Iowa's ninety-nine counties federal disaster areas. Even before the floodwaters peaked, Iowans began asking why. Why now, why here? Cloaked in that question were feelings of anger as well as self-recrimination: What did we do to deserve this? But also, what have we done to cause this? Some clung to the fact that Iowa has always flooded, long before the state's transformation to one of the world's most intensively managed agricultural land scapes. Others stated that a flood was inevitable given the year's weather conditions?rivers running high with snowmelt from the unusually cold, wet, long winter; the cool wet spring preventing planting of crops that would have helped to dry soaked soils; and the intense May and June rainstorms that fell on a saturated land