New southern border makes for more stable Duane Arnold emergency planning zone

CEDAR RAPIDS - Updates to the emergency planning zone surrounding the Duane Arnold Energy Center - used in the event of a nuclear reactor incident - have removed more than 4,600 acres of Cedar Rapids land from the response zone.

On Wednesday, the Linn County Emergency Management Commission and Duane Arnold Energy Center announced an amendment to the facility's emergency planning zone.

The new zone, which has been approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is largely unchanged, but does establish Highway 30 as the zone's southern border - eliminating 4,610 acres south of the highway from the zone.

'The boundary change provides us with a stable boundary across the southside of the emergency planning zone,” said Mike Goldberg, director of the Linn County Emergency Management Agency. 'Highway 30 is a much more logical and sustainable boundary from this day forward.”

Required for all Nuclear Regulatory Commission-licensed nuclear power facilities, an emergency planning zone maps out the area and entities required to have emergency planning and procedures in place in case an incident occurs at the plant.

The zone includes numbered and colored zones, along with circles encompassing Duane Arnold at two-, five- and 10-mile radiuses. The colors dictate to which host community people within the zone must relocate during an evacuation, and the zones and perimeters are used in the event of various levels of alerts/incidents.

Entities within the zone must have plans in place and take part in quarterly drills to stay prepared for an emergency.

Duane Arnold's zone covers a 10-mile radius surrounding the Palo nuclear power plant, blanketing portions of Linn and Benton counties, including communities such as Hiawatha, Urbana, Alburnett and large swathes of Cedar Rapids and Marion.

The former map was created in the 1990s, when FEMA rules required that any city that touches the zone be included in its entirety, Goldberg said.

At the time, the map included as the southern border of Cedar Rapids the 4,610 acres of land south of Highway 30, bounded roughly by C Street SW, Edgewood Road and 76th Avenue SW.

Goldberg said the update removes more than 5,200 permanent residents from the zone, along with Kirkwood Community College, College Community Schools and businesses such as Archer Daniels Midland and Red Star Yeast.

Using Highway 30 as a defined boundary will aid in messaging, planning and traffic control, Goldberg added.

While area residents likely won't notice a change, it does eliminate potential disruptions to those schools and businesses no longer within the zone.

'They have some very complicated processes underway,” Goldberg said. 'Those are all removed with this change of the boundary.”

The possibility of an emergency at Duane Arnold is extremely rare - the plant has seen one alert event in its roughly 40 years - but Goldberg said having the emergency planning zone in place is crucial not only to respond to such an event, but the level of interdepartmental communication that takes place during drills aids in all emergencies, such as recent flood events.

l Comments: (319) 339-3175; mitchell.schmidt@thegazette.com