Connie Mutel: Lessons Learned, Preparing for the Future
On March 9, 150 people gathered at the Iowa State Historical Building in Des Moines for CGRER’s symposium, “A Watershed Year: Anatomy of the Iowa Floods of 2008; Lessons Learned – Preparing for the Future.” The event featured presentations from experts in flood-related fields, a book signing and a panel discussion about how Iowa is preparing for the future.
Keynoting the event was Connie Mutel, editor of the recently-released A Watershed Year: Anatomy of the Iowa Floods of 2008 – a diverse collection of essays that scientifically dissect the Iowa floods of 2008.
The following is the eloquently-penned text from her speech about what the 2008 floods taught Iowa, and how the state should prepare to meet future environmental challenges.
A Watershed Year: Anatomy of the Iowa Floods of 2008.
Lessons Learned, Preparing for the Future
Iowa State Historical Building, Des Moines IA
Connie Mutel’s introductory comments
March 9, 2010
I think that many of us recall a specific moment when the reality of the 2008 floods touched something deep within us, and spurred us to action. For me, that moment occurred when I pulled a frilly pink ballet skirt out of the flood debris, a skirt very much like one my granddaughter had worn for me a few weeks earlier. When I saw that skirt, I knew that I had to act. So when I was asked to put together a book on the floods, I said yes.
The result was Watershed Year, a book with 25 chapters written by 30 authors, nearly all Iowans, each one an expert in his or her field. The book focuses on the science of the floods.
It’s a fact-based compendium that explains the nuts and bolts of how floods work and what they do. It tries to address the questions that many, in the summer of 2008, were asking, but few could answer. Questions like – How can we have another major flood, so soon after 1993?
What caused the floods and made them so large? Why did forecasts keep changing? What did ag land, and city streets, contribute to the massive flows? And why? Are the floodwaters safe?
How can we prevent future floods, or at least minimize their damage?
I hoped that addressing these questions would help guide public responses to the floods. I hoped then – and I still do – that the book would lead us into putting our money proactively into wiser flood mitigation programs, so that the probability of needing to react to major flood damage in coming years would be reduced.
Watershed Year is a diverse book, that’s intended for a diverse audience. Its short chapters, many graphics, and straight forward language I hope will appeal to the lay public - that is to anyone with flood questions and concerns. But with the diversity of information, it’s a book for experts too. I think anyone can learn something new from its pages. I certainly did, during its preparation. I hope it will also become a sort of a toolbox for people working on flood issues – be they policy makers, land managers, or administrators.
The book focuses on the 2008 floods, particularly as they played out in the Cedar and Iowa River watersheds, and in Linn and Johnson county, those most intensely affected. But its basic descriptions of flood processes hold true throughout the Corn Belt. Watershed Year thus provides a template for describing Midwestern floods in general, both those in the past, and those yet to come.
The book’s diversity of topics fall into 4 sections –
- Traits and descriptions of floods in Iowa,
- Causes of flooding – including landscape alteration and climate change,
- Effects of flooding – on land, water, air, nature, and the economy,
- And flood mitigation – that is, how to minimize their damage.
These 4 sections encourage readers to examine the relationships among rivers, the weather, and society. When we do so, through the pages of this book, we begin to see patterns, and understand flooding processes more broadly.
We see, for example, that most Iowa floods happen in spring and early summer, with peaks in March and June. March peaks describe present concerns about flood risk, and June peaks define the 2008 floods.
We understand that a 100 year flood has a 1% chance of happening each and every year. Combine this information with an understanding of floodplains – that they are functional parts of a river’s bed, just parts that are used intermittently, not continuously – and we see that a 100-year flood, covering a 100-year floodplain, is a moderate, not extreme flood. And yet our policies continue to be geared to this benchmark.
Reading about land use in Iowa, we see that we have altered the prairie’s flood resistance in a major way. We have decreased the landscape’s water storage capacity, and increased and accelerated surface flows from both agricultural and urban areas. Today’s more rapid, voluminous runoff has totally changed the character of floods in Iowa. Today’s floods are magnified in size and extent. They rise and fall more rapidly, and spread farther, than floods would have a few hundred years ago.
But we also come to understand that the 2008 floods were caused by a perfect storm of conditions. Nothing could have stood in the way of large quantities of water, running off a saturated landscape, into rivers flowing full, with flows from different major storms coalescing to produce, in CR, the largest flood in the city’s history.
While we perhaps could not have prevented the 2008 floods, Watershed Year points out that we understood ways in which we could have limited flood damage – for example through better land use planning, across an entire watershed, and by increasing infiltration of ag lands. And yet we did implement these safeguards. Thus the 2008 floods were free to inflict more damage than they should have done.
So, what now? Will we be unable to resist the pull back to the comfort zone of business as usual, a pull that understandably tempts each one of us?
Or might this book help stimulate discussion, education, and research that leads each of us, with our own poignant memories, in a new direction? Will we accept the sometimes painful truth that floods are not an aberration, but rather a natural component of river cycles and of a planet that on the whole embraces regeneration and ecological integrity, and then learn to live with floods? Can we muster the courage and political will to make 2008 a turning point, a truly beneficial watershed year for embracing new beginnings and different futures? Might Iowa even become a model for how a healthy and resilient landscape, wise planning, and well thought out flood mitigation policies and strategies can reduce flood damage?
We know that the rivers will rise again, as they have for eons. Watershed Year describes how Iowans dealt with the 2008 floods with valor and courage, and I have no doubt that if necessary, Iowans will do so again. But need this be? Quoting the last chapter in the book, “Will we again leave future generations to deal with the challenges that we should have met? We owe it to them to do better.”
