Spring was dry in eastern Iowa this year. Sandbars lay exposed in the channels of rivers that last summer were inundating whole towns. Farmers were hauling away the logs, tree roots, and sand left by last year’s flood. Long dust plumes marked the movement of tractors putting in the corn crop.
The Corps of Engineers has been fighting a battle against the Mississippi for the past century. The battle escalated in 1936 with the passage of the federal Flood Control Act. The plan was to tame the river, reduce it to the placidity of a duck pond on a corporate campus in the suburbs. The weapons in this battle were dams, locks, levees, and other “structural” approaches.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Nobody has done the comprehensive studies that could precisely apportion the responsibility for these frequent floods, but the opinion of practically everyone who has studied the question is that much of the trouble comes from changes we have made in the watershed. The presettlement watershed included thousands of square miles of marshes, bogs, swamps, and sloughs. These wetlands soaked up heavy rains or snowmelt and released the water slowly and gradually. But Illinois has lost 90 percent of its wetlands; Iowa has lost 98 percent.
All these changes in the watershed have created a system that delivers water to the river very rapidly and then tries to confine it to a narrow channel. Which means that anytime we get heavier than normal rains we can expect heavy floods.
All this would not matter so much to the farmers if Mud Bottoms were protected by a levee that was built by the federal government. When government levees break the taxpayers cover 100 percent of the cost of repairs. But almost all of those levees are on the Mississippi itself, where the floodplains that are protected are larger, making it possible to justify a large government investment.
Parsons had heard that there were government programs intended to add to our dwindling stock of wetlands by buying out landowners with property that before the creation of levees, drainage ditches, or other “improvements” had been natural wetlands, and he began investigating. First he called Bob Gabeline, the largest landowner in Levee District Eight, to sound him out on the question of a buy out. As it happens, Gabeline had done some talking to Shawn Dettmann at the U.S. Soil Conservation Service office in Wapello after the 1990 flood, so he was interested. Parsons said, “Well, you’re interested, and I’m interested, and Ed Yotter is interested. And with us three, that’s way more than 60 percent of the land down there.”
“We were told right up front this was not a forced buy out,” Parsons says. “That quieted a lot of the landowners down. They didn’t want the Department of Agriculture or the Fish and Wildlife Service coming in and telling them they had to sell.”
