DES MOINES, Iowa — Local 5 has more on how city officials are working to keep Des Moines safe through its levee project.
To start off, let's clarify what exactly a levee is. A levee is a barrier on the side of a river that prevents flooding. In Des Moines, this can look like a small hill or a concrete wall.
“The system in Des Moines, like most cities that have neighborhoods along the rivers, you either have the choice of leaving a large undeveloped area - kind of an open floodplain area or you can build a levee," Des Moines' Public Works' Patrick Beane said.
He says the city’s been working to improve its levees for 10 years.
“It just protects it when we’re getting not so much localized rain. It’s rain further up in the watersheds so, as you follow Des Moines River further north and west, the more rain we get up there, as it comes down, river levels start coming up," he said.
It all started when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers raised the standards for levees in our area.
“We’ve been getting more heavy rain more consistently, more intense rains and so that causes the base flood elevation requirements to go up thus we need to take a look at the height of our levees," Beane said.
Most of that work will go unnoticed to the untrained eye but it's these small measures like building some levees to be six to 12 inches higher and improved drainage that will make all the difference.
“You’ll see significantly more riprap along the edges of the river where we’re actually protecting that embankment so when the river does come up it doesn’t undercut underneath the levee and cause a failure in the future," Beane said.
And it's not done yet. The project is project to be finished sometime between 2028 and 2030, according to Beane.
In the meantime, there’s no reason to worry.
“Mostly it’s you need to raise it just a little bit so we have the protection we need to meet the core requirements. Even without the raise though, the protection we have here meets the previous standard, which would require a major storm event to have any sort of an issue," Beane clarified.
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He says this has been an intense undertaking worth well over $100 million all together.
Levees aren’t the only anti-flooding project Des Moines is taking on. Beane tells Local 5 that, since 2018’s storm, storm water projects have become a higher priority. In fact, he says the city’s spent about $50 million on neighborhood storm water projects since then.
Click here to see where these projects and other Des Moines projects are. The levee alterations look like long, green, skinny lines on the map.