EP 64: Sick and Tired of Flooding
Iowa Watershed Approach https://iowawatershedapproach.org/
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Transcript
On this episode of Municipal Equation. I wasn't receiving phone calls, that people couldn't get food from one side of the county or one part of the city. Gone are the days when we would recover from an event thinking that it was the once in a lifetime event.
Look. If you're in Fair Bluff, North Carolina or Whiteville or some other community that has been flooded twice in twenty four months, at some point in time, people are gonna roll throw up their hand and say, you know what? Enough's enough.
I'm gonna go somewhere where I can make a living and do I really wanna do this again? If you're in a flood prone area, frankly, you might be getting sick of it. Let's talk about paddling our way out of this with an initiative in Iowa that people are saying is the way forward. Save lives, money. My name is Ben Brown and this Municipal Equation, a podcast about cities and towns adapting in the face of change, brought to you by the North Carolina League of Municipalities, episode 64. If you missed our last episode titled UFO Town, go back and give it a listen. It was one of our more popular episodes in recent times, partly because it was one of our only episodes in recent times. But to step away from municipal talk and get into the subject of flying saucers only to understand we've been talking about economic development and community identity the whole time anyway, it just made for a fun listen, and it got some great feedback, including from a public official who has a UFO story. Story. And I'm gonna see what the possibilities are with capturing that here. Basically, I'm saying it would be fun to go over the response procedures from public agencies when UFOs were reported, which makes it relevant to this podcast about cities and communities and policy and an uncharted territory or newly chartered territory. Just fun to talk about. Nclm.org/municipalequation for all past episodes. Or subscribe on your podcast player so you don't have to worry about it. It'll just come to you. On this episode, well, okay. Let's just maybe get a little depressing for a second. Imagine you live in a small town near, say, a river, a river town. It's been there a long time. You've made your life and career there, and that's your home, right there on this little river town. Except you've had some hardships. About ten years ago, your home flooded under a bad storm. The soil was already pretty saturated, and the water wasn't clearing out quickly enough. And then later on, the river rises and crests and results in those images you see on TV of people driving jon boats down residential streets. Sadly, sometimes it comes with the news of injuries or loss of life. You know, when public agencies are focused on rescues and so on, everybody slammed during this historic storm that everyone's gonna remember from ten years ago. They call it a one hundred year storm or a five hundred year storm sometimes, meaning basically a lot of water in a short time. And if the land and developed systems can't keep up with the volume of water, the stormwater coming in, then you've got flooding and lives turned upside down. But a one hundred year storm though. Right? I mean, that can't come too often. Right? I remember the first time I heard the term one hundred year storm. I think to a lot of people, it sounds like a once in a lifetime event. Just just one big storm that you remember from way long ago, and it's off the charts bad, but it happens. And when it happens, you just gotta recover and you move on. Too big to do much about. That's nature. We survive and move on. And I'm saying all that in quotes because that might be kind of the perception or maybe a mentality, but what if you had to deal with these flood effects fairly frequently? These powerful storms. Doesn't it seem like there's talk of these things happening with more frequency? Let's start to think about that. About living in a place where you have to deal with flood effects way too often. You know,
gone are the days when, you know, we would recover from an event thinking that it was the once in a lifetime event and, you know, therefore, we don't have to worry about this. You know, maybe some future generation will. But the reality has shown that, you know, not only, you know, are these events happening, they're happening with greater frequency. This is Larry Weber. He lives in Iowa, and he's seen his share of flooding. In 2008, and this is just awful,
Cedar Rapids, Iowa was unlucky enough to have experienced a five hundred year storm. Bad. So much water, and it pushed the loss estimate to nearly 5,400,000,000.0 with a b and put 18,000 residents out, displaced that many people. Alright. So let's bookmark that and go to a different part of the country and meet a mayor who said a hurricane prompted him to run for office to see what he could do to improve things for his town, which has a history of bad flooding. Actually, it's believed to be the home of the biggest pre Katrina FEMA buyout in history,
Kinston, North Carolina. Now, the flooding is what's is what gets us for the most part, initially. It's either gonna be the flash flooding or it's gonna be the river flooding. This is Dontario Hardy. He's the mayor of Kinston, North Carolina, and he said he's sick of seeing the live image of flooding again and again. If we can't get the resources that we need to respond, then, you know, we we start talking about recovery. We're gonna be in a hurt locker. It's just like after the storm, Matthew, after the flooding. You know, there were so many folks that had four to, three or four inches of water inside of the structure or or actually overtaking their home by water. I was receiving phone calls, that people couldn't get food from one side of the county or one part of the city. We're blocked off over here on this side. We can't receive food. So he packed his bags and he went to Iowa to hang out with Weber, who we heard from a minute ago. And I learned a lot.
In late August, the Environmental Defense Fund, in collaboration with the Iowa Flood Center at the University of Iowa, convened a diversity of North Carolina based public officials like Hardy and individuals from the private and non profit sectors to see firsthand what's been happening in the Iowa City of Cedar Rapids, which has been working with upstream farmers and landowners to address risk of flooding, something Iowa cities too are tired of. You know, what really got me, you know, it's like about 2,008 and you're talking about my, let's see, 18,000 people displaced.
See the represent I show about 18,000 people. God forbid if that would ever happen here. Yeah. That that would be, I mean horrific. You know, I mean it would be really bad. The city of Cedar Rapids, the local government, was subsequently worthy of an organized change effort and secured just south of $100,000,000
from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development for that. What followed was pretty big. People all over the place were looking at it. It's called the Iowa Watershed Approach, meant to help the ag state's farm economy and to reduce flood risk altogether. So it's designed to foster cooperation between all big sectors affected by flooding. Local government, state government, private sector people, just have an ongoing conversation with these stakeholders to reduce the tension when the time comes to make helpful investments. It's just necessary at this point according to one of the officials in Iowa,
Larry Weber, who works at the Iowa Flood Center. Yeah. You know, and so I I think we're talking about it more and more, one, because of, you know, the, experienced need, that we see, you know, across, you know, many parts of the country where coastal, you know, Atlantic coastal areas have been impacted by, you know, tropical storms and hurricanes one after another after another.
So the Iowa approach is like a systematic redo in flood observation. The flood center works to improve resilience in three cities in nine watershed communities across that state. So that picks up incorporated areas like cities and towns and unincorporated areas like just parts of the county. Because as Weber puts it, flooding knows no jurisdictional boundary. So here's what they do. The work starts with the formation of a watershed management authority. So this is a body specific to the subject that invites representatives of all cities, counties, and soil and water conservation districts in the watershed. A watershed coordinator is hired. The team does a hydrologic assessment and works with planning consultants to create watershed plans. They deploy sensors, the kind that can monitor streams and rivers and soil conditions for moisture and temperature readings that may indicate flooding onset. They assess all conservation work that exists in that watershed. Then they deploy resources to build conservation practices on private lands to hold water back and reduce flooding during heavy rainfalls and improve the water quality. As runoff reduction can reduce the amount of undesirable materials, just gross stuff, from washing into our waterways from these developed areas.
And then we've kind of wrapped the program up by, using mathematical, watershed models, to quantify the benefits of those built conservation practices, along with, you know, the sensor data, that we've collected, you know, over this five year program, to really quantify the benefit and use this program, you know, as a a best practice, you know, example, for how we can improve watersheds, you know, across the rest of the state of Iowa.
So they've learned about all these different conservation measures to help reduce flood risk and just make everything better. And they estimate that they can show a 40% reduction in stream flow during a one hundred year rainfall, which in Iowa is about seven and a half inches in twenty four hours. A 40% reduction in stream flow with full adoption of the conservation measures that they've identified. So, we can, you know, get a 40% reduction in rainfall from these extreme rainfall events.
That's a game changer, you know, for a lot of people that live in communities along the rivers and streams.
Mayor Hardy, who said he learned about the collaboration via the North Carolina Metropolitan Mayors Coalition, which my organization, the League of Municipalities, works with frequently. Hardy said he liked particularly the sensor technology to help better understand how water behaves in different scenarios locally. Sensors collecting data all the time on what water is doing at different times of day, under different conditions, in rivers and streams. So this is stuff they can just continuously analyze.
That that's really, really good, and they have a mapping system that's amazing. This system, you know, actually monitored I mean, you can access it web based, and I've never seen this before. Web based it provides real time science based flood information for more than a thousand communities
Mhmm.
And other locations an hour. Wow.
The sort of, I I guess, advent of, smart city technology and and data application and all that. I mean, that's that's a pretty promising thing for the future of of planning for these things. It is, and and we're using more and more of it. This is Wilmington mayor Bill Saffo, who was also part of the North Carolina to Iowa contingent. And it has, has, of course, helped
us in really focusing on specific areas, and where the and where the problem areas are Mhmm. So that we can really micro, focus on on on those areas that we know will have flooding and then what we can do to alleviate some of that flooding. And in addition to that, using the GIS mapping to really start having some serious discussions about, you know, do we really wanna have people rebuild in those areas? If they have flooded over and over and over again and, you know, the person rebuilds in that area, then we have another flooding event Mhmm. Then the federal government, local government, state government are in there having to fix it and and take care of it, insurance companies. So, you know, having some significant discussions with property owners about possibly
buying them out from the of those areas so we can use it for flood plain. Mayor Saffo and I have something in common. We both grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina. It's right there on the coast. And he's got more history than I do, but but we've both seen our fair share of rough hurricanes and tropical storms firsthand. I've been part of evacuations. I mean, just bad stuff. But overall, according to Saffo, his city has fared pretty well since the introduction in the nineteen nineties of a local stormwater fee to improve conditions on the ground. Understanding that with the growth that we've had down here, we have got pipes and
creeks and, ditches that are undersized based on population numbers of the sixties and seventies. Well, obviously, as as the growth of the area has taken place Mhmm. And and and things upstream from those drainage areas now has gotten much more obvious surface. We're having to upsize the pipes, stream restoration. And so in the city of Wilmington, we fared very well because this has been an ongoing thing for since the nineties, and we've spent, I believe, close to about a $100,000,000 in on these projects. Yeah. So we got a significant amount of projects left to go, but it alleviated a lot of the flooding in the city limits. Now outside of the incorporated city limits in the unincorporated areas of the county, that's where we saw a lot of water rescues up in a place called Torchwood off of Market Street where they had, I think, one night 500 water rescues. Wow. And so the county is now talking with the city about how we implement a stormwater management program, not only for the city of Wilmington, which we already have in place, but what the county can do to start alleviating flooding issues that are that had been happening in the county for a number of years but now have been accelerated because of the of of the growth in the area and the frequency of these storms, which is another part of it. So we're having our stormwater department is sitting down talking with their civil engineers as to how that program can be implemented so they can start making those improvements in the unincorporated areas.
But it takes money and a lot of cooperation. And both Hardy and Saffo, both mayors, said that all levels of government need to come together with private stakeholders, like farmers and industry, to put mutual value in concept proven solutions,
like they're finding in Iowa. I think I think you you you start off with with this these are the possibilities. Mhmm. This is where we would like to go. This is what we need to do. And you gotta have an example. I think Iowa's it has created it, and I think it's a model that can go nationwide. I think that's why they were so interested in people from North Carolina coming out there because they understand what we've been dealing with. Weber said the point is to apply the knowledge wherever it's needed and to share data from other localities that might help. In that spirit, the Iowa team intends to travel to North Carolina to see what's on the ground there for more perspective. And, you know, I would love to see a North Carolina flood center maybe at NC State University or even at USC Wilmington, which is course, putting the coastal engineering department down here.
Useful information coming out of the flood center and the Iowa watershed approach is available online. Because the URL is kinda lengthy and it's kinda clunky to say here out loud, Weber says, and I agree, that the quickest way is just to find it through Google. Just type in Iowa Watershed Approach, and it's usually the first thing that comes up. Final word from Larry Weber of the Iowa Flood Center. You know, this Iowa Watershed Approach project,
you know, clearly the Iowa Flood Center has had a tremendous, leadership role in it. It is a partnership across, you know, all of our, you know, working professionals in the state. We've got, you know, state agencies from Iowa Economic Development Authority and Iowa's Homeland Security and Emergency Management, you know, working closely with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and Iowa Department of Ag and Land Stewardship, and then federal partners in, you know, the weather service and the corps of engineers, USGA and NRCS in terms of deployment of practices, you know, to cities and counties and, you know, the League of Cities and Iowa State Association of Counties. And, you know, so it is one of these, I think, real examples of, you know, if there's a will, there's a way. And there's certainly been a will.
Thanks Thanks for listening. Hokie benefited from this episode. Talking about infrastructure and flooding and all that isn't always the sexiest topic. Sometimes it's out of sight, out of mind. You're not thinking about the pipes that are underground and the maintenance that needs to be done on those. It's expensive and it costs us, but it's gotta be done. We're always getting better at it. Government technology is improving. Utility technology is improving, which like mayor Saffo said, kinda gives some faith that we can do better. We can work together. They all said one of the biggest takeaways from this was just the benefit of getting all the stakeholders in the room because there may be other problems that you might all have to deal with together and already having a good relationship in that conversation just puts you in such better footing to get it done. All past episodes of Municipal Equation are at nclm.org/municipalequation. NCLM stands for North Carolina League of Municipalities. That's who brings you this podcast. I'll have links in the show notes at municipalequation.libsyn.com. Information about the Iowa Watershed approach. Again, they want this to be a national conversation and Iowa is the world class starting point for this. We'll talk to you again soon. We have a lot of exciting episodes coming up. If you have a topic to pitch, you can do so by emailing me bbrown@nclm.org. B brown stands for Ben Brown. That's my name. I've Been doing this podcast since mid twenty sixteen. Different issues that affect the space of municipalities, cities, and towns, and kind of where we take them as people. Again, all past episodes, nclm.org/municipalequation. Plenty of topics to listen to, and we've got more ahead. Thanks again for listening. This is Ben Brown.