Record flooding and violent tornadoes battered areas of Iowa for weeks this spring, destroying or damaging hundreds of homes, blocking roads and bridges, and causing over $130 million in infrastructure damage, officials said Thursday.
The disasters affected two-thirds of Iowa’s 99 counties, beginning with destructive tornadoes in late April and May. Then, in June, severe rains caused certain river levels to reach unprecedented heights, flooding communities in South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa.
The storms destroyed more than 5,000 homes, with at least 2,000 likely irreparable, according to Reynolds.
“The need is staggering, and it’s immediate,” Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said of the displaced families, business owners, and communities.
She announced additional programs to assist residents who need to repair or rebuild their homes, including the state’s first-ever application to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a temporary housing program in counties under presidential disaster proclamation. Iowa has twenty-three counties with the distinction.
If authorized, the initiative would give temporary but long-term housing options such as travel trailers or mobile homes paid for by the state using federal funds. It has been employed frequently in hurricane-prone southern states, but never in Iowa.
“We jumped on it,” Reynolds explained. “When you look at how massive the disaster is, you just got to think differently.”
Scientists believe that without precise research, they cannot clearly attribute a single weather event to human-caused climate change, but that it is responsible for more powerful and frequent catastrophic storms, droughts, floods, and wildfires.
The state is also introducing other programs to stimulate new home development in communities that have been flooded or ripped apart by tornadoes, as well as to cover some of the interest payments for farms seeking US Department of Agriculture loans to repair the damage.
According to Reynolds, tornadoes damaged almost 70 farmsteads in just one county. During the flooding, she described witnessing farms fully swamped, with machinery underwater and grain bins ruined.
Flood damage in two municipalities — Rock Valley and Spencer — extended into schools, destroying some teaching materials, electronics, school buses, playgrounds, and libraries and requiring administrators to seek temporary accommodations ahead of the start of the academic year.
After Iowa Flood: National Weather Service Seeks Increased Observer Participation
Meanwhile, flooding throughout the Mississippi River valley in the state’s east has not reached record levels, according to data released Thursday by the US Geological Survey.
According to ABC News Rain from Hurricane Beryl’s leftovers has helped ameliorate drought conditions in the region, which have persisted since 2022, as well as counteract saltwater incursions from the Gulf of Mexico. The low-water season in the lower Mississippi River valley is expected to begin a few months later than typical, around September or October, she added.
“This rain was good,” she said.
Mitch Reynolds, mayor of La Crosse, Wisconsin, and co-chair of the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative, a coalition of 105 river mayors advocating for a sustainable river, said he’s largely dealing with flooded parks and washed-out hiking paths, but no neighborhoods have been threatened.
“Our impacts are pretty negligible,” he informed me.