116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Can Cedar Rapids do more to protect McLoud Run from fish kills?
City eyes sensors to detect water main breaks more quickly
CEDAR RAPIDS — Iowa’s only urban trout stream, which runs just east of Interstate 380 in Cedar Rapids, has had 13 fish kills — an average of one every two years — since 1997.
Chemicals that have washed into McLoud Run include termite poison, floor-stripping chemicals, ammonia from dead leaves and, most recently, chlorine from two water main breaks in less than a year.
Fish also are vulnerable to heat shock when warm water flows from parking lots and other urban surfaces into the stream.
“We’ve knocked on doors to let people know what they put in the sewer affects the watershed,” said Cedar Rapids City Council Member Dale Todd, who has worked to develop and protect McLoud Run since the 1990s.
After water main breaks in April 2023 and January sent chlorinated water into McLoud Run, killing at least 2,000 fish, the city now is considering installing a pressure monitoring system to underground water lines to more quickly identify and stop leaks and breaks.
“We think it would help, especially in that McLoud Run area, to try to minimize the duration of those leaks,” said Roy Hesemann, Cedar Rapids Utilities director.
Spring-fed creek an urban oasis
McLoud Run quietly flows over rocks and between tufts of wildflowers and grasses for 2 miles, much of it alongside the Cedar Valley Nature Trail. The thrum of I-380 traffic is muted, despite the highway being just a stone’s throw away.
“Would you realize you were in the heart of the state’s second-largest city?” Todd said as he walked along the trail recently with his son, Adam, and Paul Sleeper, fisheries management biologist for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
The creek is fed by a natural spring near the 3900 block of Center Point Road NE, which keeps the water cool enough to support trout.
“Fifty degrees or below is ideal,” Sleeper said. The DNR has been stocking the creek with trout and other fish since 1997. It does not appear trout naturally reproduce in the creek, he said.
McLoud has had a fan club since the 1970s, when supporters mounted a Save Our Streams (S.O.S.) campaign that opposed routing the creek into a culvert. Instead, the city and the DNR invested in creek bed improvements and parking spaces for anglers in the intervening years.
“I had expected one of my weird fishless ‘adventures’ on McLoud Run,” Andrew Hosmanek posted online in 2021 after a visit. “Instead I caught trout on a pretty stream in a vibrant setting, around people who clearly care about and appreciate this special place.”
History of fish kills
The first fish kill in McLoud Run was just months after the DNR started stocking fish.
On June 25, 1997, DNR officials counted 23 dead fish, including 19 white suckers, the same day as a water main break at 2210 Glass Rd. NE, the DNR reported in its fish kill database.
Treated drinking water contains chlorine, which can be deadly to fish. Six other fish kills have been recorded at McLoud Run caused by chlorinated water, including one on April 3, 2023, that killed 1,970 fish.
That break occurred overnight in the city’s northeast quadrant near Terrace Hill Drive and Evergreen Street NE. City workers discovered the broken line in the early morning and fixed the break.
The DNR in January ordered the city to pay $22,000 to pay for the lost fish and for the cost of the investigation. On Jan. 25 — the same day the order was released — the city reported a pipe burst Jan. 23 in an unoccupied commercial building at 4425 Center Point Rd. NE and sent 450,000 gallons of chlorinated drinking water into the storm sewer and eventually McLoud Run.
“For whatever reason — soil type, pipe age — we’ve had a number of breaks along McLoud Run,” Hesemann, the city’s utilities director, said.
Drought left the creek without much water last year, which compounded the problem, he said.
A small fish kill in a tributary to McLoud Run in 2009 was caused by an employee at Harding Middle School dumping a stripper/wax solution into a storm sewer, the state database showed.
A 2001 study showed elevated levels of chlordane, once used as a pesticide, in McLoud Run, The Gazette reported.
Stopping main breaks faster
Ames, population 67,000, started looking into water main breaks and ways to find and stop them more quickly.
In 2008, a large water main burst under Ioway Creek in Ames. Because the creek was flooding, city officials couldn’t determine where the break had happened, said Justin Clausen, operations manager of Ames Public Works.
“We lost pressure in the entire system,” he said. “When you’ve got to boil water across the whole city, it has an economic impact on the whole city.”
A contractor hit a water main in 2015, causing Ames officials again to advise residents in part of the city to boil their water.
In 2021, Ames installed a pressure monitoring system that includes underground sensors at 27 locations that detect when water pressure drops, which signals a main has broken and water is gushing into a street or other location. The system cost about $200,000, with ongoing annual costs for software, which sends immediate alerts to public works employees on their phones.
“The thing we’ve noticed is it can improve our response time,” Clausen said. Because they know where the break happened, they know which customers are affected and don’t have to issue blanket boil advisories.
A creek by any other name...
McLoud Run has had a bit of an identity crisis.
The creek likely was named for John G. McCloud, who lived in north Cedar Rapids in the mid-1800s, according to the “History of Linn County,” published in 1911, and reported on the FindAGrave website. On another site, his last name is spelled McLeod.
At that time, the creek that ran near McCloud Mill was named Coldstream — which, incidentally, it’s still called on Google maps.
The street that crosses McLoud Run, and provides access to a parking area off Center Point Road NE, is called McCloud Place.
The name of the creek has appeared as “McCloud” and “McLoud” over the decades in The Gazette, but today we’re sticking with “McLoud,” as is the city.
Cedar Rapids eyes upgrades
Cedar Rapids is considering a similar system.
Hesemann said the sensors would be particularly helpful in alerting staff to breaks that happen in the middle of the night so they can fix the pipe more quickly.
“It’s definitely something we could do systemwide, but given the history along McLoud Run, that would be the first area we’d put it in,” he said. “It’s not the cheapest process and technology to install.”
The city needs to decide whether pressure sensors would be underground, as they are in Ames, or above ground at fire hydrants. Aboveground sensors are more at risk of freezing in the winter.
Water mains near McLoud Run may be as old as the 1950s and 1960s, a time period when the steel used to forge the pipes has had some problems, Hesemann said. Still, he does not envision large scale main replacement because it’s expensive and usually is done in conjunction with other street projects.
The city recently arranged to have 2020 derecho debris removed from wooded areas near McLoud Run.
The creek area needs other landscaping work, DNR’s Sleeper said, including removal of invasive plants crowding the bank and dredging in some places to keep the stream deep enough for fish to keep cool in the summer.
Comments: (319) 339-3157; erin.jordan@thegazette.com
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