Editorial: New Normal – Storm Lake Times Pilot

Sioux Rapids residents watched as water from the Little Sioux River poured into the Main Street business district Sunday morning.

You may think that climate change is a hoax, or that it’s something for the future, or that it has nothing to do with the gasoline we burn to combat flooding in Sioux Rapids or Cherokee, or the way we eat proteins. cultivation and production. Shriveled corpses of nightcrawlers, fried on Sunday morning’s sidewalk, roughly marked the night’s high flow before they swept down from Spencer through the Valley of the Little Sioux and suffocated Cherokee. Stranded people in Rock Valley were rescued by boat and helicopter. It’s really enough.

Vintage cars in Cherokee experience flooding. They say this is the worst ever. Records agree. Even the river stage monitors were washed away. Manual measurements showed it was a foot higher than ever before. Cherokee has been withdrawing from the Little Sioux for decades, at least since the 1993 floods, and has replaced buildings with parks. The consequences of flooding have been greatly reduced. Still, it’s bad enough.

Who would have thought that the Spencer Mall at the intersection of Highways 18 and 71 would go under? We have always believed that the Algona Mall should not have been built in the flat at the East Fork of the Upper Des Moines, but that a dollar store stood on dollar land knee deep in the river. The center of Algona was high and dry because the founders knew they were not allowed to build in the flat. Developers go for the marginal land. We call that progress. Despite the best efforts in Cherokee, we couldn’t get there from here unless you go through Larabee. The sheriff carefully closed the access roads.

It all illustrates the confluence of factors contributing to the erratic weather raining on our best-laid plans. Iowa has been getting warmer and wetter for decades. Farmers don’t need NOAA or NASA to tell them that. Around here we have at least doubled the size of the Agland Islands drainage network by replacing clay tiles with more efficient corrugated plastic, and we are laying the tiles half the distance to remove water from the landscape. Water has no chance to slow down. The ponds and grasslands were drained and plowed, the creeks were straightened for faster water movement to the Gulf and stunningly better crop yields. Corn doesn’t like its feet wet, and everything we do is built on that premise.

The head turns as the weather changes. Four years of drought. When will it end? Every year we got a shower in the nick of time. Again, bumper crops. Amazing technology. Corn is relatively cheap. This also applies to pigs. This year it doesn’t seem to stop. Six inches to Okoboji and see what happens. Sewers are overwhelmed and bypassed along the Little Sioux toward Linn Grove. The beans from the river bottom go to St. Louis along with the nitrate.

The weather is more extreme because of the carbon dioxide, nitrogen and methane we produce and emit, from making steel for our cars, burning ethanol from corn, which feeds on nitrogen from methane (a process discovered in making bombs during the World War II World Championships). The suggestion that humans have no influence on the climate is a disarming rationalization, the same kind that suggests that laying concrete next to the river or planting soybeans makes perfect sense, or that we should not regulate drainage in any way except to it is more efficient (as the legislature and the courts have suggested). Rationalizations won’t keep Highway 59 to Cherokee open. Rationalizations brought the south end of the Spencer to the rowboat.

Things will return to ‘normal’. The river recedes. Our problem is being passed along the Skunk River to Ames, where Iowa Department of Transportation planners are consulting with climate experts at Iowa State University to figure out how to keep cars moving on I-380 while the Cedar River crosses Cedar Rapids is raging. This is what we call the external costs of burning fuel: rebuilding sewer and transportation systems with the weather is not cheap. FEMA ordered Linn Grove to run because the dam was being undone, which could undo the bridge downstream. That’s how it goes.

It will take a long time for Spencer to recover. How does it recover? How do you get out of the next six inches of rain, which could happen any day now? When every last inch of Northwest Iowa is built on or laid on hard ground, the water has nowhere to go but the basement or living room. The pools were drained 50 years ago in Palo Alto County. Now we’re trying to dot the landscape with mini wetlands to slow and filter the pollutants from the water. Engineering, a technical problem is everything. It’s absurd to think that you could set aside much more land as grass, that you could restore wetlands, that you could have clean air and clean water, that we could all do better if we If we could change our way of doing things even slightly, we could lighten the burden and adapt to the land instead of trying to conquer it. This is a new normal. Years of drought followed by floods, fueled by oil worth sparking a war for its control. You cannot insure yourself for that. We’ve all been there sandbagging and waiting to see what happens next.