Some flood victims returned home, others moved on in Iowa City, Coralville

IOWA CITY — With everything around them covered in mud, the six ceramic figurines sat on the door dry and clean.

Drew and Judy Dillman had placed the items on a bedroom door, set horizontally on two sawhorses 3 feet off the ground, as the Iowa River was on its way to a record height in June 2008.

The water would reach 4 1/2 feet high in their ranch home in Iowa City's Parkview Terrace neighborhood, taking the door up with it.

When the Dillmans returned after a mandatory evacuation, the door had floated from the dining room to a bedroom 20 feet away on the downstream side of the house. It had settled on the floor, the figurines — a grandmother and grandfather with children, pheasants, a kingfisher and two ducks — still atop it.

'So they had a little tour of the house,' says Judy Dillman, 62.

Unlike the figurines, few of the people who lived along the river in Iowa City and Coralville escaped the historic flood untouched. Nearly 800 homes in the two cities and rural Johnson County were damaged.

Across the Iowa River from Parkview Terrace, Taft Speedway residents mostly rejected government offers to buy their properties and successfully fought a city plan to build a levee. The levee would have protected the nearby Idyllwild neighborhood, which has seen half its residents leave since the flood.

No sense of neighborhood

Upriver, Coralville's Edgewater Drive is empty, the homes mostly bought and then demolished by the city.

Parkview Terrace lost nearly 90 of its 140 homes to buyouts.

Patricia and Jack Salladay sold because of uncertainty over the future of the neighborhood and the devaluation of their Normandy Drive home, says Patricia Salladay, who is in her 70s.

'It's sad,' she says of a neighborhood she loved for its people and wildlife. 'But it wouldn't be the neighborhood now because everyone is gone except just a couple.'

There is no sense of neighborhood anymore, Judy Dillman says. It's too far between the homes, with large grassy spaces separating many of them.

They would have taken a buyout, too, but with the flood insurance payout deducted from the amount, it didn't work financially, says Drew Dillman, 64. So they rebuilt their home on five feet of fill, left the first floor a garage and work space and set the living quarters 10 feet above ground.

'But you're never safe,' he says. 'When you build in the flood plain, you have to expect flooding.'

That was underscored with the ongoing flooding in recent weeks, which left water lapping at, but not entering, their home.

Across the river, the people living in the 92-unit Idyllwild condominium complex were not eligible for buyouts despite extensive damage because, as a condo association, it was classified as one property that mostly was outside the 100-year flood plain.

Residents pushed for a levee along Taft Speedway to their south. But the City Council last fall voted against pursuing the project after residents on the other side of Taft Speedway protested they would be between the levee and the Iowa River.

Sally Cline, president of the condo association, says people were 'terribly disappointed' in the decision. But the neighborhood has rebounded since the flood, she says.

Only one unit is vacant, she says. After the flood, the bylaws were changed to allow rentals until 2016, and about 40 of the 92 units are rented out.

It's still a beautiful area with good recreational opportunities and is close to downtown, says Cline, 67, whose condo underwent $70,000 in repairs following the flood.

On Taft Speedway, nine of the 13 homes that stood before the flood remain, the owners refusing buyouts. Joel Wilcox says he and his wife moved into their home in 1992 and, with their two kids, are still among the newer residents.

After 1993, they elevated their home 9 feet and had less damage in 2008. The lowest level, which is not lived in, took on about 1 1/2 feet of water in the 2013 flooding.

'I guess the long and short of it for me is, the best way to prepare to survive down there is to prepare to let the river do what it's going to do and not try to prevent it from doing what it's going to do,' says Wilcox, 60. 'Just live with the river.'

Linda Liedtke compared Coralville's Edgewater Drive with Taft Speedway. It was a self-contained neighborhood of about 30 homes, all of them gone now.

Liedtke, 63, moved to Edgewater Drive in 1979 with her late husband.

In 1993, they got about 6 inches of water in their home. Even after raising it a couple of feet, there was 1 1/2 feet of water inside in 2008.

She took a buyout, reluctantly, and now lives in a condominium just a few hundred feet from her old home. She doesn't like it as much, though. She has to look across a large parking lot to see the river.

'It was a perfect house,' she says. 'It was just the way we wanted it.'