Weeks later, Ames is still reeling from the damages of the floods of 2010.

With damage to many of the stores on Duff, private property damage and Hilton Coliseum unusable, at least until basketball season, the floods are easily the most damaging natural disaster to hit Ames since the floods of 1993. Thousands and thousands of dollars will be spent, not only in repairs, but in prevention of the next flood. It may come as a surprise, then, that a few hundred years ago, the flood that devastated Ames a few weeks ago may never have happened.

As Cody LeClaire, senior in landscape architecture, said, “The extensiveness of the flood is caused by our over-draining the Iowa landscape.”

The natural prairie land in Iowa tended to absorb and hold water, and let it drain into the rivers, only slowly over time. The watershed of the Squaw Creek and the Skunk River, the two rivers that flooded on Aug. 11, would have taken about two weeks to drain.

Ever since settlers started moving to Iowa in the early 19th century, they have been putting in tile drainage systems to drain the farm land. Our cities have been designed to drain even faster, with slick roofs, grassy lawns and concrete streets that have drainage systems that go directly to the rivers. With all of this, the draining that had taken nature nearly two week, now only takes a day or two. We drain our cities and fields so fast that the system is almost designed to back up after a major rainstorm like the one Ames experienced on Aug. 10.

Most of the rebuilding and prevention Ames is paying to have done is at the end of the pipe-levees, redesigning or moving out of flood plains. However, this only puts a patch over the problem. It does not address the root of the problem. In the long run, this emphasis on putting a patch on the problem every time the system fails will cost far more than a one-time redesign of our drainage systems.

We already have the technology and the resources to make our drainage systems better.

The New Aquatic Center has a bioswale, which holds water and slows the draining of the parking lot runoff. Cody has worked on a neighborhood in West Ames that has storm water gardens, which slow the draining of rainwater. There are also ways of redesigning farm land so that it drains more naturally, while not compromising the yield of the farm.

Redesigning our farmland would not only help with flood prevention, it could also help make Iowa’s farms more sustainable and limit the amount of pesticides and other chemicals that make it into Iowa’s waters. Redesigning our drainage systems may even make Iowa’s landscapes and cities more beautiful. We as Iowans need to seriously look at how our resources are being used in flood prevention, and we should start thinking about how to fix the root of our problems instead of simply patching the system we already have.