Dickinson County residents talk with officials about future flood prevention improvements

SPIRIT LAKE, Iowa (KCAU)– The Dickinson County Board of Supervisors, alongside a local engineer, spoke with residents of the Iowa Great Lakes about how to deal with the overflowing water.

15 residents, many affected by the flooding in Spirit Lake, gathered at the Dickinson County Courthouse. For an hour and a half, citizens listened and pitched their own ideas to the board of supervisors about improvements they would like to see. Several attendees lived in the same area and said their drainage tile was ineffective during the flood.

“They can drain down so many inches per day, but when you’ve got it coming six inches in an hour, you’d have to have culverts 80 inches around to even start taking that, and so we’re nowhere near anything like that. We’ve organized a local engineer to drone and take a look at our local drainage districts to find out what we’re looking at from damage-wise as we move forward,” said Jeff Thee, with Dickinson County Board of Supervisors.

One solution brought up by a resident was a retention pond next to East Lake Okoboji, an old idea the Dickinson Board had talked about many years ago.

“The idea is that you’re placing storage upstream of those areas so that those can fill up and then slowly you’re slowly draining the water out through a pipe and keeping it underground instead of running over top to ground and causing damage to people’s property,” said Collin Klingbeil, with Jacobson-Westergard & Associates, Inc.

However, this plan would help with future floods and not the current flooding. The Dickinson County Flood Task Force Committee was created with Board of Supervisors from Cherokee, Spencer, and Dickinson County to address the water levels in the Iowa Great Lakes.

“This is what we’ve been dealt. How do we move forward on this? How can we safely move forward here? And again, you’re looking short term. You got to look long-term. If we have another event like this in the future, how can we prevent some things from happening that have happened this time? And how can we alleviate maybe some of the problems that we have right now,” said Thee.

Dickinson County Board officials say while they understand folks are frustrated with the situation, the county needs to make sure they have a measured response to the lake levels.

“Got to take it a step at a time and make sure we don’t make knee-jerk reactions and move forward in a smart way that ends up helping as many people as we possibly can,” said Thee.

Cherokee, Spencer, and Dickinson County Flood Task Force also met to discuss solutions.

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