Chapter 11 and 12 Review

Book Review: A Watershed Year Anatomy of the Iowa Floods of 2008 Edited by Cornelia F. Mutel

11.The Dam and the Flood: Cause or Cure? Robert F. Sayre

12.Was Climate Change Involved? Eugene S. Takle

An Iowa historian named Irving Weber wrote in 1985 that the Coralville Dam and Reservoir, since its construction, has made the Iowa City area safe from disastrous flood. However, the floods of 1993 and 2008 have shown that this is not the case. Weber it seems was living in a dream because he even cited 4 floods in his article that would have cause the dam to flood. The Coralville Dam and Reservoir has a max capacity of 435,300 acre feet, which is only enough to hold 2.6 inches of runoff from the Iowa River’s 3,115 –square mile drainage area above the dam. This means that flooding in the low lying Iowa City area is always a possibility.

When full the Coralville Dam and Reservoir releases water at 20,000 cfs per second which would cause moderate flooding. The four floods mentioned by Weber had cfs of 70,000 (1851), 51,000 (1881), 42,500(1918), and 33,800(1947).  The flood of 1993 had a cfs of 21,900 and the flood of 2008 had a cfs of 41,100, meaning that there were larger floods in Iowa’s history. The difference was that the floods in the mid and late 1900s took place when Iowa was barley settled. During that time Iowa’s infrastructure was very weak. Some places didn’t even have infrastructure. Some people even say that the flood of 1851 destroyed Des Moines.

Weber’s beliefs were shared by many people in Iowa. This led to the construction of many University of Iowa buildings and Parkview Terrace. These structures were flooded in 2008 because they were built on the floodplain.

Another issue with the dam is the way it’s run. The Corps run the dam according to a set of government documents. The documents are Emergency Plan for Coralville Dam (1984), Regulation Manuel for Coralville Dam (1991), and the Water Control Manual, Coralville Lake (1991). These documents are all lengthy and provide a vast amount of data, but as you can tell by the dates they are very old. Times have changed and new documents are needed. One of the reasons we don’t have new manuals is cost and time.

What all this means is that we need to understand that the dams cannot protect us from everything. We need to use our knowledge to create plans that will make dams more effective. Structures that are in areas that cannot be saved should be bought out, so that people can at least recover some of their money. FEMA needs to help state governments with any plans.

Personal views: From the research I have gathered it seems that the construction of structures such as dams, which are meant to protect infrastructure from floods, may cause areas to receive greater damage. People start to develop a sense of safety, and they start to believe that the dam will protect them from any amount of water. Dams can fail, and when they do the water that is released can cause the loss of a lot of lives. The places we build have also increased because of dams. We think that we can build on floodplains. This might be true most of the time, but when we have a large flood the amount of damage increases because there is so much infrastructure in areas that can be hurt by flood water.

Chapter 12

Can we blame climate change for the flood of 2008? Many scientist have been saying that global climate change has been affecting the weather patterns on the planet. These scientist are not as worried about events that have already happened, but instead they want to know if there will be an increase in such horrific natural events. If these events do increase we will have to change the way we deal with them. Our resources distribution and reaction time will have to be handled better. We will not be able to rely on luck, but instead plans that are well organized will have to dominate flood prevention.

It has been shown that rainfall in eastern Iowa has increased by 1 to 2 inches during the spring over the past 30 years. The increase is not something specific to Iowa because most of the central U.S. has seen a similar increase since 1976. There has also been an increase in severe weather during this time.

Participation levels all over the state have gone up. Cedar Rapids for instance has seen an increase from 28 to 37 inches in the past 113 years. This could be coincidence, but global climate change provides a better answer. These changes have been happening in the winter and summer months, and it seems like they will continue.

The best proof is that we have had 2 massive floods in the past 15 years. This means that private and public organizations will have to increase flood techniques in Iowa. Thing might get worse, especially since so much of cities like Iowa City are found on floodplains.

Personal views: We have talked about global climate change in my Environmental History class, and from the information we covered it seems like a problem. It's not like that we don't know it exists because we know it does. What we have to do is figure out how to stop it from accelerating because we want to prevent the destruction of our world. Like the book says private and public groups have to take an interest. The private sector can create new ways of using resources (green building, cars, materials, better ways to recycle), and the public sector can increase policy (better green policy, incentives for companies to go green, hold violator responsible, Kyoto Protocol type international treaties).