By State › Iowa

Iowa: Overview

Download all of Iowa as PDF Print

Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in Iowa exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under Iowa go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

The 2008 flood: a record crest, and no deaths

In June 2008, the Cedar River crested at 31.12 feet in Cedar Rapids, more than 11 feet above the previous record, flooding 10 square miles of the city and displacing more than 18,000 residents. Statewide, the flooding caused $10 billion in damage across 16 counties, yet no deaths were directly attributed to it, a genuine credit to warning and evacuation systems given the flood’s unprecedented scale. See the Risks page for the full data.

The 2020 derecho: the costliest thunderstorm event on record

Twelve years later, Cedar Rapids took a direct hit from a completely different kind of disaster. On August 10, 2020, a derecho, essentially an inland hurricane of straight-line thunderstorm winds, produced gusts up to 140 mph in the Cedar Rapids area, damaging nearly every building across 75 square miles of the city and destroying an estimated 676,000 trees, roughly 70% of its tree canopy. The storm caused $11.2 billion in damage nationally, the costliest thunderstorm event ever recorded in the United States, and killed 4 people in Iowa.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in Iowa: river flood risk deserves the same seriousness this manual gives coastal flood risk elsewhere, Cedar Rapids’s 2008 experience shows how quickly a “record” flood level can be redefined, and this manual’s backup power and debris-clearing guidance carries extra weight given how long derecho-related outages can last, more than 1 million customers lost power in 2020, some for over two weeks.

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