Forums will feature a look at flood walls

CEDAR RAPIDS - The Army Corps of Engineers is still working to design a flood-protection system for the city, despite uncertainties about federal funding and unknowns about Cedar Rapidians' own desire to help pay to expand the Corps' plan and protect both sides of the Cedar River.

A team of Corps engineers will hold two public forums Wednesday - from noon to 2 p.m. and from 5 to 7 p.m. at the African American Museum of Iowa, 55 12th Ave. SE - to give residents a status report on the pre-construction engineering and design work on an east-side-only protection system.

The report will include computer-generated renderings so residents can get a sense of what flood walls and removable flood walls might look like, said Tom Heinold, a Corps civil engineer and project manager for the Cedar Rapids project.

The Corps is in the midst of a $12 million pre-construction phase of the $104 million project as it engineers and designs a flood-protection system to run from the Quaker Co. plant north of Interstate 380 through the downtown to the Cargill plant downriver.

The proposed system would feature a permanent flood wall north of and along the Quaker Co. plant - the wall likely will be at its tallest, 14 to 15 feet, at that point - and removable flood walls through the downtown, an earthen levee from Eighth Avenue SE to about 14th Avenue SE and a permanent flood wall from there down to the Cargill plant.

Among the points of debate about the evolving design is the question of whether the length of removable flood wall that Cedar Rapids leaders want through the downtown is a design element that the Corps is willing to approve.

Heinold, who works out of the Corps' district office in Rock Island, Ill., said the Corps has asked its engineering research and development office in Vicksburg, Miss., to help analyze just how long a section of removable flood wall should be allowed in Cedar Rapids to ensure the walls can be put in place between the time of a flood threat and the time floodwaters arrive in the city.

Heinold said city officials have said they would like to see a 3,000-foot section of removable flood walls from the park at the First Avenue Bridge through the downtown to about Seventh Avenue SE. Sections of removable flood walls at spots in Bettendorf, Davenport and Waterloo, for example, are in the low hundreds of feet in length, he said.

“The Corps of Engineers has never built a reach of removable flood wall nearly that long,” Heinold said. “What we don't want to do is build something that can't be installed in time. ... We're not, obviously, going to build something that can't be installed safely and in time to defeat the flood that it was designed to defeat.”

The Corps' design is meant to protect the east side of the river against an event similar to the 2008 flood, which exceeded a 500-year flood.

The Cedar Rapids City Council, though, supports a two-sides-of-the-river flood-protection system. A community petition drive is under way to ask voters to extend the city's local-option sales tax for 10 years to provide local funds to build that “preferred” plan.