Transcription:

Jen Winter (Guest): Temporary protection only works to a certain level and then it becomes very difficult to protect the city without permanent flood protection.

Bill Klaproth (Host): Meet Jen Winter, Public Works Director for the city of Cedar Rapids.

Jen: The people of this community, our leadership and our council has really understood that in order for Cedar Rapids to continue to be a thriving, vibrant community that people want to live and work in; permanent flood protection is a very critical piece of that.

Host: This is Inside Cedar Rapids, a monthly podcast that introduces you to the people, projects and programs of your local government. And on this episode, we talk Flood Control Prevention with Jen Winter. Hi Jen and welcome to Inside Cedar Rapids.

Jen: Hi Bill, thanks. I’m happy to be here.

Host: Thanks Jen. Happy to have you on the podcast. So, what does the Public Works Department do for the community?

Jen: Well, we have a fairly large department. Kind of in simple terms if you drive on it, walk on it, flush it or have to sit and wait at the light for it; it’s probably the Public Works Department. So, we have five major divisions in our department. So, we have a streets operations division that takes care of all of our repair and maintenance on our streets. A traffic division that does all of our pavement markings, traffic signals, signage. An engineering division so our engineering does a lot of our engineering design and construction of our projects. We have a real estate group that does a lot of our real estate acquisitions and then a sewer operations group that takes care of our storm sewers and our intake source.

Host: Now that’s pretty good, if you drive on it, walk on it, flush it or sit at the light waiting on it; it’s probably the Public Works Department. That pretty much sums it up. So, Jen, your department then is directly involved in citizen experience every day. There’s a lot of different touch points.

Jen: Yeah, there is. We probably have the department that takes the most number of phone calls and requests in a day and that kind of changes by season. During the summer time, we have got a lot of calls on road construction and road closures and detours. In the winter time, we do all of the snow removal, so any of the snow removal and then this time of year, we always get the risk of flooding and after a tough winter like this, we get some of the pothole questions of when are my potholes going to be fixed.

Host: Absolutely. No one likes those potholes. So, let’s move from the road to the river. Every year, we talk about spring flooding and what that means for Cedar Rapids. What preparations does your staff go through every year?

Jen: Yeah, historically in the city, most of the flooding has occurred in the spring and we’ve seen that change a little bit over the last few years where we kind of know that we have to be ready for flooding at all times. So, we go through regular checks of our equipment. In the springtime, we probably do that a little bit more diligently than throughout the other times of the year. So, both kind of the equipment and materials that we need for underground and above ground protection as the river comes – as we anticipate the river coming up.

Regular training and response measures. We’ve got different procedures that we put in place based on how high we think the river is going to go, so we have to review that. We’ve got new employees, bringing them onboard, making sure what their role is in the event that the river rises. We don’t always have a lot of time to prepare and we don’t know when it’s going to happen. So, oftentimes we have to have fast, fast training to be able to work 24 hours a day over the weekend and we have to trust that they go out there knowing that their role is and what they have to do. We also have a really good relationship with the National Weather Service.

So, we talk pretty frequently with the National Weather Service. They are the ones who do a lot of the modeling. They give us a forecast elevation so we can talk to them and they can kind of show us what they are seeing and why they are predicting a certain river elevation and how confident they are that we will either stay under that elevation or reach that elevation. Because the elevations that they give us for the flood is – we really rely on those predictions to know what we have to do from a protection standpoint.

Host: Right, absolutely. So while moderate flooding seems to happen annually, what exactly does a major flood look like and what does that mean for the general public?

Jen: Yeah, well major floods are our big events. There is a lot of work that goes into them. But they are not scary as they sound. They’re not really that much of an anomaly. We tend to hit major flood stage pretty frequently. Technically, that is any elevation that goes over 16 feet. So, once the river hits 16 feet, we consider ourselves in major flood stage. Last year we had several major flood stage threats that were between that 16 and 18 feet and generally once we hit about 10 feet, we start putting some action measures in place and then it kind of what needs to go in place, the amount of work that we have to do just increases as the river elevation increases. So, starting at those lower elevations, a lot of what you’ll see is underground and the normal traveling public probably wouldn’t notice a whole lot going on until we get into that major flood stage up to 16, into 18 feet. Then you can see more impact. You see more road closures; more work being done above ground.

Host: So, let’s talk about that. You just mentioned at 10 feet, you start to put measures in place. I know there’s a lot to it. But tell us briefly some of the tactics you use to hold back high river levels.

Jen: Sure. Yeah, when the rivers are at lower elevations but rising; a lot of the work is underground. So many of the storm sewer pipes that we have throughout the community eventually drain into the river at some point. So, those are really our most vulnerable points for water to come back through the system. So, where are in normal stages where the river is low, those storm sewers will flow out and dump, empty out into the river. As that river starts coming up, then the opportunity increases for the river to actually back up into the storm sewers and flood from underground by backing up and causing problems in that storm sewer system. So, one of the first steps we take is really having to plug off those storm sewer outlets that go into the river, so that way we make sure if the river comes up it can’t back up.

We do that in a few different ways. Sometimes we do that with a plug actually in the sewer. Sometimes you will see a concrete well or a cone that is sitting on top and people wonder why those cones are sitting there. That allows the water to back up into that a little ways without having to go through the sewer any further than that. So, that’s a lot of our – a lot of the work that we do initially as it’s coming up is just working to stop the river from coming back through the storm sewers.

Host: So, then when the river starts to rise, what happens?

Jen: As the river starts to go up, then we have to kind of look at a few other things. Some of our above ground measure that we do. So, we have Hesco barriers on hand. So, Hesco barrier are really just barriers that we fill will sand that withhold the water and they work very similar to an earth berm or an earth levy. They are just a little bit faster to construct and a little bit easier to put up. In some areas where we don’t have a good ground service to put the Hescos on, we do still have some places as the river comes up where we will put earth berms or earth levies that go up to protect against the river. And then also, a big part of the work is just monitoring road closures. So, as the river comes up to higher elevations, we sometimes have some of our low lying roads that go underwater, and we have to make sure that we stay ahead of that. We always want to make sure that we have those roads closed before any water is flowing over them. Just really for the safety of the public. It is just never safe to drive through running water or standing water on a road.

Host: Jen, that’s a really good point. Don’t ever try to drive through high water. So, these temporary measures are put in place as the river rises, but Cedar Rapids has several projects underway for permanent protection. Can you tell us about those?

Jen: Yeah, we’re really excited about the permanent flood controls and really each piece of that, that comes online, really helps us. So, I think some people think that really the flood protection system won’t help us until the entire thing is in place. And that’s really not true. So, we’ve started building that permanent flood control and each time we get a piece of that brought on, it really takes down the amount of work that we have to do with these interim measures. So, last year we finished completion on a levy in the NewBo area, so it is done on the east side of the river down by 16^th street. We finished that levy. There’s a pump station there. There’s a detention basin and that was one of our lower lying areas along the river and one of the first areas that would flood historically in the past.

That levy has really helped us. Now we have to spend very few of our resources there. We have a levy, we have gates that we can automatically close to prevent the river from backing up. We have a detention basin that holds the water that comes. So, if it does rain while the river is coming up, we have a detention basin that can hold that water and then we can pump it into the river through the pump station.

In the past, we have spent a lot of amount of staff time and resources in that area that we no longer have to do. We are working on a similar project on the west side of the river in Czech Village that will do the same thing for Czech Village. So, it’s another low lying area that we spend a lot of time and resources on that we will be able to put some permanent protection in place. And also, I think people probably don’t realize that there’s a cost to using that temporary flood control protection.

So, we know there’s a cost to building the permanent system, but back in 2016, the flooding that we had cost the city approximately 10 million dollars during that 2016 flood fight. So, it’s not an insignificant cost each time that we have to put up these temporary measures. So, not only are they obviously more reliable, having a permanent levy or berm or a permanent flood wall is obviously more reliable than having temporary structures filled with sand along there. The risk is much, much lower once we have that permanent protection in place.

Host: Right. So, temporary is good but ultimately, permanent flood protection is the goal. Let me ask you this Jen. You said earlier major flood stage is 16 feet. How high of a flood stage will the new permanent sections protect against?

Jen: In 2008, the river elevation was at about 32 feet. The permanent protection will be a little higher than that because as we kind of constrict the river flow in it obviously won’t be able to spread out like it did in 2008. When we kind of constrict the flow of that river, the elevation will increase so the actual protection elevation will be higher than that 32 foot, but it will be the same current height in terms of volume of water. So, that same volume of water, which is about a 500 year flood elevation. So, substantially higher than the 16 feet that we are seeing today or the 16 feet that we consider to be our major flood stage.

We do also, I should mention, what’s pretty exciting is, we’ll have a lot of the work – so the city, several years ago received a federal grant that was never funded. So, we had federal money that was appropriated into the system, but the actual money was never appropriated. It was just approved to be in the system and last year, that was approved, and we are moving forward. So, we’ll see a lot of work happening on the east side of the river in the next two years that we are working with the Army Corps of Engineers on.

We are still continuing work on the west side. Our plan is still to have flood protection on both sides of the river because of that insertion of the federal money that we are able to do a little faster, the work on the east side will be going a little bit faster than the work on the west side.

Host: Well that has to be comforting to the community, knowing the permanent protection is raising the flood stage to 32 feet. So, you’re in the office. You get a report that the river is going up. What goes through your mind?

Jen: Well generally we have a team of us that are kind of on alert. So, we watch the National Weather Service models pretty carefully all the time and it’s usually a race to see who sees it first to know that we need to put things – get measures in place. But we take this role very seriously. We know that the community is depending on us. We saw that back in 2016 the just immense outpouring of support that we got from the community and flood protection is very, very important. So, we usually sit down as a team and we talk with the National Weather Service. We’ll talk to them to see how confident they are in the current prediction that they have out and then we have to make a decision as a team to what level we are going to build that protection.

Fortunately for us, we do usually have some time in that. So, as the river rises, we know some of those storm sewer plugs and things that we need to get in place at lower elevations and while we are doing that work, it allows us to kind of continue to rethink measures as the river comes up. So, fortunately, the river doesn’t usually come up fast enough that we can’t react to it and plan for it to come.

Host: Jen this really sounds like a 24-7 job. What keeps you coming back to the office every day?

Jen: Yeah, that’s a good question. I get asked that from time to time. I’ve been working for this city for about four years and when I took this job, I spent most of my career in the private sector. I did a lot of work on the private side for the city of Cedar Rapids and I really liked what the city was accomplishing and where the city had gone in the past decade and I was really excited to be a part of that. I think in the Public Works Department, we’re very proud people.

So, we’re very proud of what we do and despite the fact that there are probably very few people that have jobs with as much scrutiny as we have. Everything that we do is in the public eye. We are taking care of the streets. We are taking care of the sewers. We are taking care of the traffic signals. And there’s a lot of scrutiny too – all of the employees within this department. But I think the people in this department really take pride in the work that they do. People across the city are just really proud of seeing what we’ve been able to do, and I think that the work we do is really important.

So, I think all of us feel that the work we do here is really important. It’s important that we keep the city safe. It’s important that we keep the transportation systems moving, that we keep people moving around and able to function and really, I think the credit to our staff is that a lot of times, even when the city is under flood stage; the majority of the people are able to kind of go about their lives as normally as possible with very little interruption and we’re really proud of that.

So, I think pride in the work that we do, our love of the community are a couple of things that really make me want to come to work every day.

Host: Great answer. Jen thank you for being on Inside Cedar Rapids.

Jen: All right. Thank you.

Host: To learn more about the flood control plan, go to www.cityofcr.com/floodcontrol, that’s www.cityofcr.com/floodcontrol. Ready to hear more? Be sure to subscribe to Inside Cedar Rapids wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also check out the full library at www.cityofcr.com/podcasts. This is Inside Cedar Rapids. I’m Bill Klaproth. Thanks for listening.