A Watershed Year: Anatomy of the Iowa Floods of 2008

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments In early June 2008, my husband and I left our home near Iowa City to visit our grandchildren and their parents in Switzerland. The skies were crystalline blue and cloudless, the air fresh. Crossing the Coralville Reservoir on the way to the airport, I commented that the water level was unusually high, but gave the matter no more thought. By the time our plane landed and we had slept off the trip and turned on the computer, the news from home was dominated by flood fears. I was stunned. For the next several weeks, I stared obsessively at the computer screen watching videos of rising waters and their effects, reading flowpredictionsandstoriesofhumanwoe.Idirectedalong-distanceevacuation of my university office, which overlooks the Iowa River. And I felt horrible— horrible about not being there to help with the sandbagging and evacuations. And horrible about missing out on a larger-than-life event that was going on in my own backyard. Throughout my life, I have been a student of the natural world, studying native plant communities even as I listened to nature’s quieter voices, trying to discern what they said about process and change. Now process and change were occurring at breakneck speed throughout eastern Iowa, and I wasn’t there to witness. viii preface and acknowledgments We returned to a post-flood world struggling to recover from shock and devastation. I volunteered to help feed hundreds of abandoned pets stashed in horse stalls at a nearby community college. I helped gut a flooded house, carrying to the curb moldy dolls and water-stained pink ballet skirts eerily similar to my granddaughter’s. I listened to friends—one who told me how the entire inventory of his small business had been swept down the Cedar River, another who said that her boyfriend was moving in for good because the river had taken his house. These were stories of lives changed forever in an instant. And I—like thousands of other eastern Iowans—wondered how to cope with the mixture of personal emotions and life-reshaping changes that were swirling within and around me. This book was the result of these observations and emotions. It started out as my attempt to help my community deal with the floods and evolved from there. I planned to produce a document that would clear up confusion, address complexity, and confront misinformation by explaining the science and facts necessary for dealing with future floods and recovering from this one. I intended to edit a book that would be usable by the experts, yet understandable to the lay public and students of natural disasters as well as administrators, land managers, and policy makers. The potential audience would thus be broad, including anyone with an interest in the subject or working with these types of natural disasters. I thought that the book could become a standard of reference for the 2008 floods and for future floods that are sure to come. But I hoped that more than this, it would stimulate discourse and feed into policy decisions by broadening the public’s vision of flood processes, causes, costs, and remediation. Editing this book was far more complex and time-consuming than I originally assumed. My first job was finding and engaging chapter authors—which meant defining book content. The latter continued to evolve as engaged authors revised their chapters and as new authors joined the project. Early on, I decided to concentrate on the scientific and fact-based aspects of the floods but to minimize discussion of their social and policy aspects, important topics but too large to be folded neatly into this science-based project. I also conceived of the book as a relatively rapid response to the flooding. As such, I realized that it would not be comprehensive and that chapters would sometimes be based on preliminary data and research. I thus acknowledged that conclusive and comprehensive works on the floods could not be published for years hence. I sought authors on the basis of their expertise on a given subject. Many are researchers or land use managers who are regional or national experts in their preface and acknowledgments ix fields. Some are administrators working onsite to manage the flood response. All had intimate experience with flooding. I guided their writing, encouraging an approachable style and simple explanations of technical matters. The authors and I passed chapters back and forth, often several...