Document Listing

JBC home

Background

August 15, 1993, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 1; Page 30; Column 1; National Desk

LENGTH: 663 words

HEADLINE: Iowa Area Floods While the Corps Takes a Break

BYLINE: Special to The New York Times

DATELINE: IOWA CITY, Aug. 14

BODY:
After four weeks of maintaining 24-hour flood-watch shifts at its regional headquarters in Rock Island, Ill., the Army Corps of Engineers thought it could take a break. It was wrong, say residents along the Iowa River here. They found their homes and businesses inundated on Tuesday after frantic calls to the corps went unanswered.

Heavy rain overnight on Monday raised the river two and a half feet, flooding 14 neighborhoods and several University of Iowa buildings here and 150 businesses and 160 houses or apartment units across the river in Coralville.

Along with the damage, the rain has brought criticism of the corps's policies and graphic evidence that the summer flooding has not ended with the record crests last month.

Officials at the Coralville Dam, a flood-control reservoir a few miles up the river, say they might have been unable to prevent the new flooding even if they had taken action.

Lack of Monitors

But city officials and residents, many of whom had just finished cleaning up from the flooding in July, were startled to find that no one was on duty overnight to monitor the flow from the dam. And the corps itself said it was not monitoring the National Weather Service reports.

"The ground is so saturated here that every cloudburst they need to be on watch, but it's obvious they thought the flooding was finished here," said Doug Kidd, owner of a Donut Land franchise that was flooded. "I felt like we were totally abandoned by the corps."

The National Weather Service had been predicting storms for much of the state Monday afternoon, and by 9:30 P.M. it was issuing severe storm and flash-flood warnings for the Iowa City-Coralville area.

During the night, several local officials and business owners made frantic calls to corps headquarters in Rock Island to get officials to reduce the water flow from the Coralville Dam. But no one was there, because that day the corps had returned to its normal shifts, with a 5:30 P.M. checkout.

The Coralville reservoir manager, John Castle, was at home. He was not called by a staff member, said Randy Haas, assistant manager at the dam.

Manager Cuts Flow

But shortly after 3:30 A.M., James McGinley, coordinator for Johnson County emergency services, telephoned Mr. Castle to tell him that the University of Iowa water-treatment plant was being threatened by rising water. Mr. Castle hurried to the dam, Mr. Haas said, and decreased the flow to 13,000 cubic feet per second from 17,000, lowering the Iowa River here by about a foot.

But that did not save the businesses along the Coralville Strip, a collection of hotels, restaurants, car dealerships, gas stations and stores at the confluence of the river and Clear Creek.

"We had the worst floods so far, higher than in the last five weeks," said Kelly Hayworth, Coralville's city administrator. "A lot of businesses and households had started remodeling work, and now they're washed out and ruined all over again."

At China Gardens, a large restaurant that had $300,000 in damage when it was flooded a month ago, workers had just finished putting up new sheetrock, said James Ma, an owner. But the flood on Tuesday filled the first floor with water three feet high, a half- foot higher than before, causing over $100,000 in new damage, Mr. Ma said.

Ron Fournier, a spokesman for the corps, said early this week that the corps did not routinely monitor National Weather Service reports and did not normally make changes in water flows based on weather reports.

Mr. Fournier said that reducing the flow from the dam would not have prevented the flood, but Mr. Hayworth disputed that. In any event, the complaints since the flooding appear to have had an effect. On Friday, the corps was back on its 24-hour emergency shift at the Rock Island headquarters, about 60 miles east of here. And the corps has decided to go to emergency mode whenever it looks like rain, said Mr. Haas, the assistant manager at the dam.

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

LOAD-DATE: August 15, 1993