WEST BRANCH, Iowa (KCRG) - As the Hoover Creek babbled through the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site on a sunny Sunday afternoon, it didn’t look too threatening as bicyclists, walkers, and dogs passed by it.
The cottage where President Herbert Hoover was born, pictured on March 1, 2020, is one of multiple historic structures threatened by flooding each year at the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site in West Branch. (MARY GREEN/KCRG)
But Pete Swisher, the superintendent of the West Branch park, said just wait until spring arrives.
“It is very likely sometimes to have those heavy rainfalls in the spring that’ll close the park due to flooding,” Swisher said.
Visitors like John Black of Cedar County, who walks through the park weekly, have seen it.
“It gets worse every few years, it seems like,” Black said.
Closing the park isn’t the only flood-caused issue, Swisher said. Just about every time it floods, he said the creek waters also flood the basement of the nearby Friends Meetinghouse, a Quaker-built structure from the 1850s, and they’ve come dangerously close to the cottage sitting on the other side of the creek where President Hoover was born.
But starting next week, the park will begin a project to mitigate that flooding.
“Some of our earlier planning documents from the mid-1990s all call for some type of storm-water mitigation, so this has been really a long time coming,” Swisher said.
In March, the park will remove about 100 trees from around the Hoover Creek, which will later be widened.
Most of those trees will be replanted, and the land dug up to widen the creek will be repurposed to build a berm that will serve as a noise barrier between the park and Interstate 80, which runs alongside it.
Construction will then kick into high gear in September and is scheduled to wrap up in the summer of 2021.
“We hope to keep the national park open throughout the entire project,” Swisher said.
Work will include rebuilding the Downey Street Bridge, which connects the land on which the cottage sits to the land on which the meetinghouse sits, and building a detention basin upstream from the park.
“The detention basin will capture that water that would otherwise come out of bank, and then the wider creeks will help to move water through the park a little more efficiently,” Swisher said.
Swisher added that this work should limit the number of days the park has to close because of flooding, though it won’t fix every problem.
“This work in the park will take care of most of the nuisance flooding that we receive,” he said. “The 25- and 50-year flooding, we just don't have the topography to fix an event like that.”
The park, one of just two national parks in Iowa, held a meeting Sunday to answer questions about the upcoming work.
Black, who attended the meeting, said it sounded like a good plan to him, to not just promote recreation but also to preserve valuable history.
“To see how a president from an itty, bitty town in Iowa got to be president of the country, and you’re just like, ‘That’s unbelievable,’” he said. “It’s pretty cool.”
The total price for the work will be around $3.4 million, a cost the National Park Service is covering, according to Swisher.
2020-03-02 04:36:39Z
https://www.kcrg.com/content/news/Hoover-National-Historic-Site-to-soon-start-multi-million-dollar-flood-mitigation-project-568384301.html
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