In a Small Iowa Town, a Solution to a National Crisis
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Transcript(20 claims)
If you find yourself bewildered by this moment where there's so much reason for despair and so much reason to hope all at the same time, let me say I hear you. I'm Ezra Klein from New York Times Opinion, host of the Ezra Klein show. And for me, the best way to beat back that bewildered feeling is to talk it out with the people who have ideas and frameworks for making sense of it. There is going to be plenty to talk about. You can find the Ezra Klein Show wherever you get your podcasts.
This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.
I'm David Leonhardt of New York Times Opinion. I work on our editorial board where we spend a lot of time talking about the country's biggest challenges. Last summer, one of my colleagues became a little obsessed with one problem in particular, flash flooding. Climate change is increasing the number of floods, just as president Trump is cutting government programs that help communities deal with those floods. It doesn't have to be this way.
Even if the president doesn't undo his cuts, and he should, my colleague, Jillian Weinberger, set out to find out whether other people can make a difference in the meantime. And she discovered that the answer is yes. She found a place that has taken steps to save money and, more importantly, save lives. Jillian found a rare thing in America in 2026, an inspiring story about the government doing something right.
The story begins in Riverdale, Iowa. It's home to just 550 people and at least one deer. I am standing in front of the City Hall. Just in front of me is a deer. Hi.
She watched me make my way into city council chambers, where I met Riverdale's mayor, Anthony Hettleston. Hi. Hello. Welcome to Riverdale. Thank you so much.
Mayor Huddleston has long sideburns and a mustache that curls around the corners of his mouth. The day we met, he was wearing his patriotic glasses emblazoned with the American flag. Are your eyeglasses the red, white, and blue? Are they oh, wow. They're magnetic.
So they're the yeah. Yeah. The the eyeglasses that you can swap out.
So I wanted to meet mayor Huddleston to hear about a harrowing stormy night last summer. The rain had started coming down that afternoon.
I am hoping to have a nice, relaxing, calm evening and, you know, take take take the edge off, watch some TV, whatever. I had made myself a brandy old fashioned.
Anthony soon realized that the rain was coming down pretty hard.
Flooding, a high possibility with these storms coming in this afternoon into the evening.
This was a week after the deadly flash floods in Central Texas, the ones that hit Camp Mystic. Riverdale is also at high risk for floods. It sits at the confluence of two bodies of water, the Mississippi River and Duck Creek.
We have more time to prepare on the Mississippi, usually days at least to if not weeks to prepare for whatever's coming. Duck Creek's a much flashier stream, so you've got more like hours to to figure it out.
Because Riverdale is such a small town, Anthony serves as mayor only part time. In his day job, he's a civil engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers, and he's kind of a weather nerd. He's got a whole weather station set up at his house.
It sets off an alarm if it gets too high of a rainfall rate. And so it's going off in the background. All the cues are telling me something's gonna go south here in my evening. Right?
Flash flood warning remains in effect until 9PM this evening for Southern Scott and Rock Island Counties.
Until recently, mayor Huddleston had help in situations like these from the federal government. The feds ran a gauge on Duck Creek, a little brick house with a sensor inside. It measured the height of the creek and posted the information online. Local officials would use that information to make decisions about evacuations during storms. But the mayor no longer had that crucial service at his disposal, in part because of President Trump and Elon Musk.
To understand how all of this unfolded, we have to rewind a few months from July back to May. That's when the mayor went to check the height of the creek online.
He said this gauge has been discontinued. Please email Gary Johnson if you'd like to ask any questions. And I was like, oh, wonderful. I know Gary Johnson from work.
Gary worked for the federal agency that runs the gauges. The mayor had met him through his day job.
I was like, I'll just call him up, and I kinda typed an email. Hey, Gary. How you been? I haven't seen you in a while. Like, hope everything's great.
What's going on with this cage? And I immediately got a response back, and it said, hey. This is Gary Johnson. I've taken the deferred resignation program, and I'm not available to help you. And I was like, oh my goodness.
Deferred resignation is what the Trump administration offered tens of thousands of federal employees last year. It allowed them to stop working but continue getting paid for a few months while they look for a new job. Gary Johnson had taken the feds up on the offer. So the mayor asked around to see what was going on with the gauge. He discovered that the feds had ripped the whole thing out, and it would have eventually cost the town more than a $100,000 to replace it.
Riverdale, population 550, does not have that kind of money lying around.
That is a big ask of residents of our community.
But mayor Huddleston was in the middle of flood season. He worried he couldn't protect his city without the information the gauge provided. Now in most states, the mayor would have been, if you'll excuse me, up Duck Creek without a paddle. But the mayor was very lucky because Iowa is different. Engineers at the Iowa Flood Center have developed an incredible tool.
Larry Weber is the director there. He showed me the gauge in his lab. If you had to describe this to someone who couldn't see it, how would you describe it?
I would say that this is at the size of a big shoe box. You know, I just bought myself a new pair of cowboy boots, you know, and I'm gonna have a little cylinder the size of a Red Bull can sticking out the bottom and a couple little probes out the top that are antennas. So pretty straightforward, really.
This is a gauge. It's a fraction of the size of the one the federal government built on the shores of Duck Creek. Cities and towns can buy the gauge from the flood center. Local officials like Anthony can attach it to the side of a bridge over a body of water, and the sensor inside measures the height of that water. It then posts that information online with a predictive model so local officials can see how, say, a rainstorm is likely to affect their creek.
The data from the federal gauge is part of a national weather forecasting system. The Iowa gauge is not. But otherwise, that's pretty much what the federal one can do for way less money. The Iowa made gauge cost about $7,500.
That's a pretty great pretty great deal.
When Anthony realized his federal gauge was gone, he bought one of the smaller gauges from the Iowa flood center. He bolted it to a bridge over Duck Creek, and it was ready for him on that rainy July night as the ice melted in his old fashioned. The predictor model attached to the gauge said that given the rain, Duck Creek was likely to rise eight feet sometime in the middle of the night. So the mayor decided to go down to the creek and measure the flood wall. Could it contain eight extra feet of water?
I had a tape measure with me. There's a a set of steps that goes down into Duck Creek, and each one of those is about eight inches. And I said, okay. One, two, three, four. Right.
And I I did the math, and I said, woah. That's that's right about eight feet.
Steps were about eight feet in total, the same number of feet the gauge predicted the creek would rise in the rain. That might mean the creek could inundate the homes next door.
I said, oh, that's a big question I need to ask myself there. You know, we're talking about potentially we need to evacuate people.
Mayor Hetelston thought of one resident in particular, an older man who lives right next to the creek who uses an oxygen tank, someone who would need extra time and care to get out. And if the creek hit eight feet in the middle of the night, that is a tough time to evacuate.
I was wanting to ask the flood center that night, how accurate is this prediction? Like, do I need to tell everyone out right now because it's not accurate low, or do I need to not worry about this because it's not accurate high? Or or is it really accurate and it's gonna be right at the top of the floodwall, and I better tell people like, well, you better be ready.
Remember, this is the first time Anthony is using the new gauge in the midst of a potentially disastrous flood. He wants to make sure that the prediction is accurate so he's confident in his decision to evacuate or not.
So I call the flood center. It's Friday night. They're not a twenty four seven operation. Right? And so there's nobody there to answer the phone.
Can you talk about just, like, your headspace at the point where, you you know, it's pouring rain, all these things are going off. You are responsible for this town of people and, you know, these federal officials had taken a deferred resignation who you had once depended on and Yeah. You know, what what were you thinking at that point?
It's just it's it's so heavy. I I've never I was there were a couple of times where I was furious that evening that I couldn't get ahold of people, that they were gone. That is a heavy a heavy heavy weight to put on somebody to have to make that decision. I felt like I earned my whole paycheck that night. Right?
Like, that that was a that was a weighty decision.
Now it's about 10:30PM. Mayor Huddleston heads up to the emergency operations center the county set up. He contacts the Red Cross about arranging a shelter in case he needs to evacuate residents. He drafts a message to send through his emergency alert system.
So then we still had to, like, kind of figure out, like, well, what's what's the risk here still, right? We don't know.
He had the information from the gauge. It predicted the water would rise to exactly where the flood wall ended. But he knew there was some margin of error there. What were the chances the gauge was underestimating and the whole neighborhood next to the creek would flood? Thanks to the magic of LinkedIn, Anthony tracked down an engineer at the flood center named Felipe.
He agreed to run a different model to see if he could get a more precise answer on how high the creek might rise. Then all the mayor could do was wait and wait. He decided to head back down to the creek to monitor the situation.
So we get down there, and as I'm standing there at the flood wall, it's still raining on us. Duck Creek is a raging inferno. Like, it is it is a scary high velocity flood. And if it were to go over that flood wall and hit those houses, we're not talking about, you know, a soaked 1st Floor in a ruined basement. We're talking about knocking things off foundations and people's lives being ruined and people's lives being lost.
Right? It's a it's a scary situation. So it's a it's not a thing that you wanna be wrong about. Right?
And then finally, as he was standing there panicking, watching the creek rise, at around 11:30PM
Felipe calls me back, and he says, hey. It's only gonna be four feet. I did the math. The the model's over predicting a little bit.
Four feet, far below the level of the flood wall.
I can breathe. I can sleep tonight. It's gonna be okay. The
mayor finally made it home around one in the morning.
Just kinda walked in the door, took off my rain jacket, and just yeah. Right? Big sigh of relief. At that point, I recalled to myself that I had made myself a brandy old fashioned that was sitting downstairs at my desk, And, I was like, I am doing it. Like, so I went down and I drank my old fashioned.
What a night. The mayor knows how lucky he is to have the Iowa flood center. It's the technology of the gauges and their modeling predictions and importantly, the human experts on call in a crisis. And after what the mayor went through that night, the flood center added its leaders' cell phone numbers to the website. Iowans can reach them anytime.
If mayor Huddleston hadn't been able to reach the flood center last July, he might have had to evacuate the neighborhood in the middle of the night for no reason. That might not seem like a big deal on its face. But think about the stress, the panicked phone call, waking up your kids, the decisions of what to take with you, what to save. And then to later realize you evacuated for no reason, that risks a real loss of trust in local government. Those officials want to get evacuations right, to save lives, but also to preserve the relationship with their residents.
I talked to about a dozen local officials across Iowa. They absolutely love the Iowa flood center and all the information it affords them. The gauges are connected to an online mapping system they use all the time. Here's one local official, an emergency coordinator named Rick Wolfkull from Buchanan County, Iowa.
We just had a proposal from a developer come through, and they were proposing putting a 30 home subdivision right in the floodways. So the next meeting I went to, I said, you realize this area has been underwater every time a frog farts. And that is literally what I said. So I am not about putting 30 families in harm's way.
This mapping system lets officials game out where to build, how to prepare for extreme weather, and whether to risk lives to rescue stranded residents. For example, during a major flood in 2024, one local official called the gauge developer, Larry Weber, asking if he could risk taking boats into the flooded streets to rescue 300 people.
So then we run our model. We give water velocities in all the streets and say, you know, you're better to go down 3rd Avenue to get to this street, to go to there, you know, and and give them that kind of information.
Larry would love for other states to do what he's done in Iowa. He gave me a price tag. He said the average state could do it for about $2,000,000 to start and then about half 1,000,000 a year to maintain it. That is a small fraction of the tens of billions of dollars most states spend every year overall. For now, Iowa is the only state in the country with a system like this one.
City officials elsewhere have to rely on data from the National Weather Service and FEMA maps from the federal government, which are notoriously limited. The interface looks like it's from Internet one point o. That's clunky. I tried looking up my address in Washington DC, and that part of the map hasn't been updated since 2010. It's just not that useful.
But it's not just a tech design problem. Back in the nineteen sixties, Congress mandated that the federal government create flood maps for major rivers in the coast. But Congress didn't say anything about small tributaries or streams, areas like Duck Creek. And while the FEMA maps were designed to account for hurricanes, the models don't account for intense bursts of rain that lead to flash flooding, which, because of climate change, will be a much bigger problem just as president Trump is rescinding federal support. It took an unprecedented flood back in 2008 for Iowa to invest in its system.
One expert told me that's typical. Few communities will do what Iowa has done until after the next catastrophic flood hits. But then, as I was wrapping up with this expert, he paused. Look, he told me, what president Trump is doing right now is kind of its own disaster. So it could be the motivator communities need to get moving on preparing for climate change.
As federal officials continue to disappear, as federal funding evaporates, as the storms hit harder and furious floods overrun the riverbanks, Iowa has a plan, a blueprint for other states to follow. They should use it.
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