Flood — Fayette, Iowa

2008-06-08 to 2008-06-11 · near Clermont Vly Arpt, Fayette, Iowa

Event narrative

The Turkey River through northern and northeast Fayette County experienced a record flood. At Eldorado, the river crested at a record level of 22.11 feet about 9 a.m. CDT on June 9. The previous record crest was 19.6 feet in May 2004. Flood stage is 12.0 feet. Flood stage levels were also exceeded at Clermont.

Damage in Eldorado was surprisingly minimal with flood waters only impacting a few homes directly near the river on the north side of the village. Further southeast though several bridges and roads were damaged or destroyed as debris would pile up along bridge supports and running water flowed over highways. A large bridge north of West Union, called the Huntzinger Bridge, on County Road W42 was broke apart in two sections. County Road B40, known as the river road was also closed and heavily damaged.

In Clermont, the Turkey River heavily damaged the Skip-A-Way Campground on the southwest edge of town. River levels quickly rose out of their banks and swept across many of the camp sites heavily damaging at least 50 of them. Water also flowed into a holding pond and busted a new opening back to the Turkey River leading to even more infrastructure damage. Luckily no one was killed or injured.

In Elgin, local officials decided to breach the road on the north side of the river, allowing flood waters to spill into a nearby rural home to protect the downtown area.

Wider weather episode

A warm front extended east to west across the Upper Mississippi Valley on June 7, which provided the focus for thunderstorms producing excessive rainfall. In fact, these storms exhibited very high rainfall rates, which led to 1 to 2 inch rainfall amounts in an hour. As the storms congealed into a larger scale line of thunderstorms, they continued to move over the same areas, which led to significant flash flooding through the evening and overnight.

On June 8, the warm front was lingering across the region, but a cold front approached out of the northern Plains. Showers and storms would redevelop during the day in the vicinity of the warm front, while a line of storms developed out ahead of the cold front, with these tracking across the region Sunday night. Again, copious amounts of moisture lead to periods of heavy rain.

The heavy rainfall on June 8 enhanced the already dangerous flooding conditions across parts of northeast Iowa. Many roads were already closed from the June 7 rains due to water over the roadways, mudslides, or partial washouts. Conditions only worsened, leading to more road closures, sandbagging, and some evacuations.

While the rain was tapering off and moving east Sunday night, June 8, the rivers continued to rise, and some extremely quickly. Some rivers responded with a foot per hour rises, while others eventually exceeded their river gauges ability to record the river levels. These gauges were under water themselves! All-time record crests were set at a few locations, with top 5 records at many others.

Damage to infrastructure and crops was preliminarily estimated at 70 to 80 million dollars. As a result, Mitchell, Floyd, Howard, Chickasaw, Winneshiek, Fayette, Allamakee and Clayton Counties were all declared federal disaster areas.

View location on OpenStreetMap → (42.9986, -91.6335)

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event_id 117773. Narrative written by the NWS forecast office that issued the report.