DOT view of I-29 near the Honey Creek exit after water went over the roadway a second time. The water has since gone back down.
Some state roadways in western Iowa were covered more than once after flood waters went down and came back up.
Iowa Department of Transportation planner, Scott Suhr, says they’ve been lucky that repairs held up on roadways like Interstate 29, which was recently flooded once again. He says I-680 had water over it as well and it performed well. Suhr says they put what’s called flex-o-mat on the south end of the roadway and they are pleased with the way it held up.
Suhr says they are continuing to make flood repairs on some roadways. “We do have segments of 333 down near Hamburg that we’re still working on. Outside of that we’ve got another project on Iowa 2 where we are actually building overflow bridges to help remove a pinch point along the Missouri River which would give us more time in the event that we have flooding again,” Suhr says. “That’s on the eastbound lanes, and traffic is currently head-to-head on the westbound lanes.”
He says you don’t always know what is going to happen when a road that was repaired after flooding gets flooded again.
“There’s always a concern when water is over the roadway — but we were pretty pleased to see with this last event we didn’t incur any damage,” according to Suhr.
He says we seem to be moving out of the time when the roadways could be flooded again. “Right now the river is fairly full. We are watching it, we are communicating with the Corps of Engineers and the National Weather Service,” Suhr says. “A lot of it just kind of depends on Mother Nature. If we get an unusually large amount of rain, we’ll have to monitor it a little bit more closely. Typically this time of year we are not in flood season — so we will just wait and see what happens.”
Both directions of I-29 from Crescent to Loveland in Pottawattamie County were closed and later re-opened last week after the flood waters came back up and covered parts of the roadway.