Environment of Iowa - Floods

Floods

See also: Iowa flood of 2008, Great Flood of 1993, Flood of 1851, and Category:Natural disasters in Iowa

Major flood events occurred in Iowa in 1851, 1892, 1965, 1993, 2008. The Great flood of 1851 hit all of Iowa, and almost destroyed the nascent town of Des Moines. "The Des Moines and Raccoon rivers rose to an unprecedented height, inundating the entire country east of the Des Moines river. Crops were utterly destroyed, houses and fences swept away." After the town of Dudley was destroyed, survivors moved to higher ground and founded Carlisle. The flood of 1851 produced record levels on the Iowa River at Iowa City and the Cedar River at Cedar Rapids that stood until the Iowa flood of 2008. The flash flood of 1892 destroyed much of Sioux City. The Flood of 1965 affected eastern Iowa, from Cedar Rapids to Dubuque, with cities along the Mississippi hardest hit. The 1993 floods were widespread across the upper Midwest, causing extensive damage to Coralville and Iowa City.

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Famous quotes containing the word floods:

    the cold eternal shores
    That look sheer down
    To the dark tideless floods of Nothingness
    Where all who know may drown.
    Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)

    When raging love with extreme pain
    Most cruelly distrains my heart,
    When that my tears, as floods of rain,
    Bear witness of my woeful smart;
    When sighs have wasted so my breath
    That I lie at the point of death,
    Henry Howard, Earl Of Surrey (1517?–1547)

    But it is fit that the Past should be dark; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition. It is not a distance of time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials. What is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still. Greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and daylight in her literature and art. Homer does not allow us to forget that the sun shone,—nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)