Indian and Dry creeks get their Army Corps due: a flood-protection feasibility study

CEDAR RAPIDS - The flood-prone Indian Creek and Dry Creek watersheds finally are getting their own Army Corps of Engineers' flood-protection feasibility study.

The Cedar Rapids City Council this week is slated to approve the Corps' study, which will cost $343,100. The study, half of cost of which the city of Cedar Rapids will pay, is expected to take a year.

The feasibility study was first called for in 2004 after the Corps conducted an initial assessment of the creek watersheds.

Since Cedar Rapids' historic June 2008 flood, the call for a creek feasibility study had taken a back seat to the significantly larger study now under way in Cedar Rapids of the Cedar River, into which Indian Creek flows.

“We've been the forgotten citizens on this,” Linda Langston, a Linn County supervisor, said on Monday. She also is a resident of the Sun Valley Neighborhood in southeast Cedar Rapids, which sustained significant damage in a flood along Indian Creek on June 4, 2002.

Langston said the proposed Corps study will take a wide look at the 77 square miles of watershed to see what kinds of strategic steps across several jurisdictions might be taken to lessen the flood risk along Indian and Dry creeks.

At the same time, she said the city of Cedar Rapids is taking some small steps right in the Sun Valley neighborhood related to flood water backing up from sewers, she said.

At the time that the 2002 flood hit the Sun Valley neighborhood, concerns about flooding in Cedar Rapids were on City Hall's side burner. The city attributed the 2002 flood along Indian Creek to a lot of rain in the wrong spot at the wrong time.

However, neighbors in Sun Valley said bad development practices in the watershed and poor management along the creeks also contributed to problems. The neighbors hired their own University of Iowa expert, whose report prompted the city officials to clean up areas along the creek to reduce the number of downed trees and other impediments that could hold back water.