Iowa gets U.S. flood money

By Cathryn Sloane
Daily Iowan
November 2, 2010

Iowa will receive $84.1 million for flood-mitigation efforts, just two years after major flooding ravaged Iowa City.

Officials announced the grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on Monday morning. Twelve other states were awarded grants as well for similar efforts, but Iowa’s grant was the largest. The total amount of grants given nationally amounted to $312 million.

Officials have decided $10 million of the grant will be used for projects related to watersheds, said Emily Shields, the chief of staff at the Rebuild Iowa Office.

“We’ll basically be studying the different things that minimize erosion, deposits, runoffs — things that affect both water quality and quantity,” she said.

Out of the $10 million, $800,000 will be used for watershed-management authorities, a project that Larry Weber, a UI professor of hydroscience and engineering and the director of IIHR, said he is looking forward to working on.

Managing watersheds is particularly important to preventing flooding, Weber said, because the shape and type of watershed determines where water goes after it falls.

Creating management authorities will allow every watershed to improve significantly, Weber said.