Residents of the northeast Iowa town of Waverly met last night (Thursday) to talk about flood recovery issues. Homes and businesses were damaged when the Cedar River flooded the town of about nine-thousand residents in June. City leisure services director, Tab Ray, says the meeting is part of the effort to recover from the flood.
Ray says the long-term recovery experts from FEMA put up charts that listed things they’ve heard about the recovery, and asked citizens for more input on the things they’ve like to see. Ray says preventing future flooding was one big topic of discussion. He says the discussion ranged from dredging the river, to a rubber dam on the river, improving the storm and sanitary sewer system, to installing levees.
Ray says it was good to get a wide range of ideas on mitigation, as "you don’t come up with solutions if you don’t accept all ideas." Ray says there was a good discussion on what the residents want to see in the recovery. Ray says they listed communication, keeping Waverly the way it was, thinking regionally, and a variety of other items. He says all the information and comments will be put together in a report by FEMA that will be presented to the city at a later date.
Ray says the city is continuing to work with FEMA on repairing the public infrastructure. Ray says FEMA just finished up with the city last week in putting together numerous project worksheets for damage to the city. He says it’s going to take some time to fix some of the things that happened in the flood. Ray says around one-thousand people were displaced from their homes in the flooding, and a rebuilding group that was recently in town says 12 people are still in need of alternative housing.
One of the town’s elementary schools was flooded and Ray says they’ve been holding classes in a former strip mall building.