As the cleanup continues from the worst flood Ames has ever seen, talk is now turning seriously to mitigating—or even preventing—future disasters from flooding. Driving through the southeast part of campus, though, brings some perspective. Swaths of mud-choked grass stretch from beside Jack Trice Stadium to beyond Hilton Coliseum—the parking lot of which is still a staging area for trucks and equipment needed for water damage remediation. Witnessing the extent of the flooding and the unpredictability of nature makes the engineer in me realize the full complexities of the problem. Water can be a relentless and powerful force.
The fixes put in place after the 1993 flood worked well. This time, water surrounded, but did not enter, the Maple-Willow-Larch dormitory complex. Yet, despite good efforts and intentions, the post-1993 engineering did not keep Hilton Coliseum dry this time.
I’ve heard ideas emerge, and offered a few myself, for what to do next. It’s a complex problem, and the variables range from the short-term ground saturation levels to global climate change. One thing is certain: waters have risen in Ames before, and they will again. As steps are taken to plan for the next time, we’ll need to keep some fundamentals in mind.
First, if you prevent the rising waters from going in one direction, they will assuredly just go someplace else. As one citizen pointed out in a recent Des Moines Register article, no one wants to be in that other place. A holistic approach to this problem with a sound technical basis will bring the best we can hope for when the next flood arrives: that as few of us as possible, on campus and off, are affected.
Second, a single idea applied to a single place is no solution. There may be some collective work involved, in which changed behavior—on the part of citizens, farmers, and communities—makes a difference.
Weather, budgets, politics, and a host of other issues will be involved in the decision-making. Those are merely constraints. And we engineers thrive on coming up with solutions that meet the constraints placed before us.