Iowa Flooding Could Be An Act of Man, Experts Say

Kamyar Enshayan, director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa, suspects that this natural disaster wasn’t really all that natural. He points out that the heavy rains fell on a landscape radically reengineered by humans. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Fields have been meticulously drained with underground pipes. Streams and creeks have been straightened. Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed.

“We’ve done numerous things to the landscape that took away these water-absorbing functions,” he said. “Agriculture must respect the limits of nature.”

[S]ome Iowans who study the environment suspect that changes in the land, both recently and over the past century or so, have made Iowa’s terrain not only highly profitable but also highly vulnerable to flooding.

via the Washington Post

My alma mater, the University of Northern Iowa, had a scare today on campus. Thankfully, nothing happened and the UNI Alert system seems to have worked fairly well.

University of Northern Iowa officials have locked down Dancer Hall on campus because a male made several threatening text messages to a female Dancer resident, indicating he was coming to the campus with a weapon, officials said.

This is the first time the alert system has been used. It was just instituted two weeks ago.

via the Waterloo - Cedar Falls Courier

I actually lived in Bender Hall in 1997. Bender is the twin residence hall of Dancer where things were locked down.

I took screen shots of the UNI website as their Marketing and PR folks made updates. The site was stripped of most images in order to conserve bandwidth.

The screenshots are after the cut.

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