Iowa flooding could be man’s fault, experts say

Source: MSNBC

(Kamyar) Enshayan, director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa, suspects that this natural disaster wasn't really all that natural. He points out that the heavy rains fell on a landscape radically reengineered by humans. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Fields have been meticulously drained with underground pipes. Streams and creeks have been straightened. Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed.


"I sense that the flooding is not the result of a 500-year event," said Jerry DeWitt, director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. "We're farming closer to creeks, farming closer to rivers. Without adequate buffer strips, the water moves rapidly from the field directly to the surface water."

Corn alone will cover more than a third of the state's land surface this year. The ethanol boom that began two years ago encouraged still more cultivation.

Between 2007 and 2008, farmers took 106,000 acres of Iowa land out of the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to keep farmland uncultivated, according to Lyle Asell, a special assistant for agriculture and environment with the state's Department of Natural Resources (DNR). That land, if left untouched, probably would have been covered with perennial grasses with deep roots that help absorb water.





Read more: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25254541/

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Land ill-suited for deluge
Crop rotation may also play a subtle role in the flooding. Farmers who may have once grown a number of crops are now likely to stick to just corn and soybeans -- annual plants that don't put down deep roots.

Another potential factor: sediment. "We're actually seeing rivers filling up with sediment, so the capacity of the rivers has changed," Asell said. He said that in the 1980s and 1990s, Iowa led the nation in flood damage year after year.

highway system is one of the largest watersheds in the state

Into a 5 lb bag(channels, levees, locks and dams) for too long allowing people to build on the floodplains. That's why they are called floodplains. Mans attempt to "tame the rivers" seems to have backfired. Same with N.O., you just can't build below sea level and think you can divert nature around the city, I don't care who is in charge of the levee system.

destroying the marshlands. Most of the heavy damage was in areas that couldn't have been built without the drainage and levee systems.

The bigger the waterway, the wider the unfarmed buffer zone full of trees and brush and grasses. Let the riparian ecosystems and wetlands do what they were created to do. We have NO right to destroy them, and we are paying the price for having done so.

Humans are so stupid. We know the biology and hydrology here, and we ignore it. Such hubris and greed. Like Esau, who sold his birthright for a mess of potage, we have sold out or natural buffer systems for one-time profits.

50 feet is a pretty small amount of space - it's about 15 yards, not enough to really do much in terms of flood control, but 50 ft of riparian habitat would be better than no riparian habitat at all!

Unfortunately, the only way to get people to move 500 feet away would probably be to wash away their buildings in a huge flood and forbid any rebuilding....

The 5 feet or whatever it is now just isn't cutting it.

Actually, there's been some work of this sort in Ohio in buying up land around the Scioto River, one of the major drainages into the Ohio River. I believe it's been the DNR doing it, and they've been able to get some huge acreages in spots. Of course, elsewhere along the river you still have tenant farmers plowing right up to the river banks and then wondering why the amount of acreage they can plant decreases every year...

total incompetence and deteriorating infrastructure.

We're very lucky to have someone whose vision for the city projects beyond the next couple year's tax rolls. I keep thinking, my kids, if they stay here, will see how wise Kamyar was being and how short-sighted the other members were ... that is, if there still is a Cedar Falls fifty years from now.

Though very few Iowans work the land any more, the economy here is still extremely dependent on agriculture. The problem is that there are still so few who can envision anything but the corporate, chemical-dependent, fall-plowed, corn until you've depleted the soil totally, kind of ag now practiced. There is starting to be more crops grown, better conservation practices, but who knows if it's too late or not?

What this part of the country needs, as much as money, is a vision for how the needs of a large population can be balanced with practices that allow the land to absorb the rain fall and renew its productivity.

Sorry, I couldn't resist a little joke with the double-meaning of the headline :-)