Following the 2008 flood that killed one person and caused an estimated $7 billion in damage, the Iowa Legislature passed a law providing $1.3 million for the establishment of the Iowa Flood Center to study flooding in the state and provide research to reduce the impact of future floods.
The center’s research will be published on a public website in the form of flood maps that are available to communities, said Witold Krajewski, the center’s director. “All the information, all the products are then constructed in the form of those maps and the maps are presented in an easy-to-understand way,” he said. “That way anybody out there with a computer and a browser has access to that information.”
One of the drivers behind establishing the Iowa Flood Center was the realization that valuable knowledge and expertise was leaving the state as communities hired private-sector consultants to advise them about recovery and future mitigation efforts. "Perhaps they help us, but then they leave and they take with them that expertise that they actually developed thinking about our problems,” Krajewski said. “But the state and the people and the communities are left not necessarily better prepared for the future.”
The center is working with multiple agencies, including: the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, the National Weather Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Iowa Department of Transportation, the Iowa Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Rebuild Iowa Office.
Current Research
The Department of Natural Resources gave the center funding to deploy 50 of the $3,000 prototype sensors in a test later this summer that could provide early warning for flood conditions. The department is choosing the deployment sites, but Krajewski said communities’ response to the sensors, which will require minimum effort on their part, has been strong.
Participating communities will be responsible for paying for the cell phones’ data plans and some light maintenance of the sensors.
Data from the sensors will allow center researchers to begin building a flood model that Krajewski said will do most of the work in providing local emergency managers early warning of potential floods.
The sensors’ data should be available online by September or October.
[Photo courtesy of Greg Henshall/FEMA.]
