It wasn't until this flood that I realized how many of [Iowa City's] critical resources are in flood areas:
* The entire office complex for the Johnson County Administration Building
* The pure water processing plant
* The waste water processing plant
* The central University of Iowa Computing Center
* The Power Plant
* The Hydraulics Lab
* The entire source for steam (heating and cooling system) for the entire campus
If the above resources are knocked out, the entire city would need to be evacuated.
. . .
Some sports require large amounts of open space (and open green space) such as tennis, golf, soccer, baseball, football practice, and other such things. Why not have these in the low lying areas. Instead, the football practice field was high and dry while the critical infrastructure of Iowa City and the University of Iowa was under water.
Even worse is Cedar Rapids.
Just from memory, all of the following are next to the Cedar River or in the flood plain area:
- Fire department headquarters
- Police headquarters
- Linn County Courthouse
- Federal Courthouse
- Linn County Jail
- Library
- Public transportation (bus) center
- Science Station
- Art Museum
- African-American Museum
- Czech-Slovak Museum
- Mercy Hospital
- All four of the municipal water wells (three were compromised during the flood)
- Alliant's Sixth Street generating station
- Alliant's (electricity company) headquarters
When Edgewood Rd has to close because the bridge was covered in water, many people were cut off from an entire side of town. The only way around is to drive to Palo (which was under water) or to worm your way downtown to I-380, which was crawling.
As you know, I no longer live in Iowa (I'm in Overland Park, Kansas, suburban Kansas City) and I talked with some people who were around when the 1993 floods affected Kansas City. They said the downtown airport was closed because of the Missouri River. It's just a regional airport for small planes or private jets. Most traffic goes to KCI, up north. Also troublesome was the Kaw River (aka Kansas River), which drains into the Missouri. Areas of Southwest Boulevard were underwater to the second floor, which is kind of hard to fathom. Lots of great Mexican food down there, I must say.
Update: Er, I wasn't finished earlier with my point there. I hit "Publish Post" instead of "Save As Draft".
Anyway, the 1993 flood supposedly closed the Broadway Bridge (next to the downtown airport) and part of I-70. That left one main vehicle bridge to downtown Kansas City from the North (the Paseo Bridge) and I guess traffic was insane. If you lived in southern burbs (like me) then it was no big deal. But it wasn't like the entire town's vital government functions were going to be shut down.
One of the comments on this post is about the I-380 bridge above the dam in Cedar Rapids. It's shocking to hear that the bridge was almost closed. That would have been a very serious problem for Cedar Rapids. Another comment said the detour to get from Cedar Rapids to Iowa City was hundreds of miles! Imagine if the I-380 bridge in downtown Cedar Rapids was damaged and had to be closed, in addition to all the other bridges being closed! Just going across Cedar Rapids (north to south) by vehicle would have taken an entire day. It's almost hard to comprehend. Do note that all hospitals in Cedar Rapids are located north of the Cedar River, and I-380 was closed where Coralville Lake meets it (on the way to Iowa City), so a significant portion of the population could have had no road access to any hospital in Cedar Rapids or Iowa City. That's a very very bad situation to almost be in, along with the hyper-concentration of governmental and infrastructure services in a floodplain area.
Cities really need to be concerned about building bridges that safely span waterways well in excess of 500 year floodplains. My god, the last thing you want during a catastrophic event is to be completely shut off.
Down here, Kansas City wants to replace the Paseo Bridge with one that is 150 feet taller. There were complaints by the downtown airport because the height was a concern, but that has been rectified. Luckily, the Paseo was never in any danger of being flooded at any time. I guess my point is that if you're going to have a bridge that's a major artery for a community, build the thing tall and make sure you've got lots of green space under and around it.
9 comments:
Areas of Southwest Boulevard were underwater to the second floor, which is kind of hard to fathom. Lots of great Mexican food down there, I must say
Not to mention Boulevard Brewing Company, oh the humanity!
The Edgewood bridge was not closed, but the river was running over Edgewood road.
Not sure how familiar you are with CR, but think about this:
The river flooded (east - west) from Mercy Hospital to close to Veterans Stadium - the river was well over 2 miles wide. Even without flooding it takes about 10 minutes to drive from one place to the other.
Every bridge in town was closed (under water) except for the 380 bridge. The 380 bridge is actually a bridge on top of a bridge on top of a dam. There was some speculation that they were going to close the 380 bridge at one point. Closing that bridge would have cut off all traffic in town going north or south.
At one point during the flood if you wanted to drive to Iowa City (normally a 25 minute drive) you had to drive north to Waterloo, west to 35, south to Des Moines and then east to Iowa City. Four hour drive to go 20 miles.
The scope of this flood was unimaginable. Only a .2% chance of this happening again in 500 years.
Good visual representation of CR flood.
http://tinyurl.com/5guzsb
So what are we supposed to do now? Build any public facilities a minimum of 5 miles from any river, lake or stream?
And I hate to tell ya..but Cedar Rapids and Iowa City need to have wells near the river..thats the water source for those towns...
Same with the wastewater facilities..
EVEN if those facilities in Iowa City or Cedar Rapids were "knocked out"..the entire city would not have to be evacuated...whomever is saying that doesnt have a clue.
If you recall..the City of Des Moines had its water plant and wastewater treatment plant knocked out in 93...DSM's city hall is along the riverfront...
Guess what..the entire city of Des Moines wasn't evacuated. They survived just fine and fixed their facilities as quickly as possible.
Iowa City and Cedar Rapids didnt shut down during these floods. City and county government still operated..police and fire still operated..hospitals still operated.
They may not have been in their buildings..they may have had to operate from makeshift facilities..but local goverment was still intact and operating as best it possibly could.
Hence the difference between how we Iowans respond to a major natural disaster..and how others ala Katrina did.
We didn't sit back and begin screaming for the federal goverment to come save us.
We started to pick ourselves up off the ground the minute we got knocked down.
Overreacting is not going to solve anything right now. This was a 500 year flood..something that we only have .02 percent chance of having every year.
Spending billions of dollars to try to avoid something like this happening again, when the odds of it happening again are extraordinarily remote at best, may not be the most prudent course of action.
You can only protect yourself so much. Even well constructed levees can fail under the right circumstances. Sometimes you just can't stop Mother Nature.
Just to clarify what a "500 year flood" is, as well as a "100 year flood", the odds are that any given year there is a 1% chance of a flood that affects locations in the "100 year flood plain" occurring, and any given year there is between a .2% and 1% chance of a flood that affects locations in the "500 year flood plain" occurring. That means that on average, they will happen every 100 years or so (or every 500 years or so), but they can happen more or less frequently. Just because we had a 500 year flood this year, doesn't mean we can't have one again next year. The odds are very slim, though.
We aren't relying on the NOAA to tell us what the floodplains are and how often floods happen. Determining the frequency and severity of historical floods is a function of the USGS and geologists. It is a relatively straightforward bit of science to determine things like that.
There is no possible economically viable way you can protect every single structure, house or neighborhood in every 500 year floodplain in the US. The Army Corps of Engineers job isn't to listen to the NOAA and build levees to save people from what's happening today. It's to protect the most critical and vulnerable areas from stuff like this. Water overtopped the levees in Cedar Rapids by 12 feet. There is NO WAY you build levees that can protect from that. So yes, you roll the dice when you live in a floodplain. That's why there is flood insurance, and that's why if you live in a 100 or 500 year floodplain, you're an idiot not to have it.
It is a mathematical certainty that floodplains will flood. That's why they are floodplains. The only question is how often and how badly they will flood.
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