Five years after the 2019 flood, are Nebraska and Iowa better prepared?

The massive flooding that hit the region days later claimed five lives and caused an estimated $3.4 billion in damage in Nebraska, as many of the area's rivers swelled to record levels.

In March 2019, floodwaters caused the collapse of a dam in northeast Nebraska and breached 41 levees across the state, inundating some communities. For days, the flood stranded the 27,000 residents of Fremont, Nebraska.

The flood swamped or threatened roads and railroad tracks, an Omaha wastewater treatment plant, Lincoln's drinking water wellfields, and other critical infrastructure. It poured into parts of Offutt Air Force Base and the Nebraska National Guard's Camp Ashland, costing more than $1 billion to repair. It destroyed homes and businesses, killed livestock and ravaged farmland. 

Across an eight-state region, damages totaled $13.1 billion from a historic event considered "one of the costliest U.S. inland flooding events on record."

This week's anniversary of the flood is more than an opportunity to remember the devastating event and the efforts still underway to rebuild and recover. It's also a chance to examine whether the region and its residents have emerged better protected and better prepared for the next flood.

The exact confluence of weather conditions in 2019 — bitter cold, heavy snow and already-sodden, frozen soils followed by a rapid warm-up and a bomb cyclone — created an arguably unique disaster. But it's also a certainty that major floods can and will happen again in this region carved by water, particularly with a warming planet fueling more frequent and potent storms.

Local officials say the region is more prepared for another flood of the same magnitude, although there still is work to be completed.

Many structures repaired, new ones 'built for resiliency'

Sizeable pieces of damaged infrastructure have been rebuilt, many to a higher standard than before. Two levees along the Platte and Missouri Rivers — R613 and R616 — that protect Offutt and the Omaha's Papillion Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant and parts of Bellevue, for instance, have been repaired and raised an average of about two feet, said John Winkler, general manager of the Papio-Missouri River Natural Resources District. 

Erv Portis, assistant director of the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency, said some 440 applicants sought funds — mainly federal dollars — for more than 2,000 projects to repair public infrastructure, including roads, bridges and sewers. About half have been completed. He estimated those repairs will approach $600 million by the time they're completed in several years. It can take a decade — or two — for disaster recovery to wrap up.

But he noted that the list of projects goes beyond protective structures to include initiatives intended to mitigate future hazards and boost resilience. To keep a future flood from impacting its well, for example, Peru last month connected to Auburn via an eight-mile pipeline to get its drinking water, a $5 million project.

Plattsmouth eventually plans to shutter its water treatment plant along the Missouri River and instead tap a Metropolitan Utilities District plant near LaPlatte for drinking water. The community also is building a new wastewater treatment plant out of the floodplain, which will eliminate flood losses and the need to send untreated wastewater into the Missouri. 

"These hazard mitigation projects are being built to eliminate these repetitive losses," Portis said. "They're built for resiliency."

Other efforts are aimed at improving communities' ability to plan for and respond to floods. The Lower Platte North NRD has worked with the Papio NRD, Dodge County, the City of Fremont and the U.S. Geological Survey to add high-quality cameras along the Platte River, said Eric Gottschalk, the Lower Platte North's general manager. 

In response to the 2019 flood, the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources and NEMA recently launched the Nebraska Real-time Flood Forecasting tool, which can quickly produce inundation maps that visualize where water is expected to go based on predicted river stages. Such maps are local agencies' No. 1 request when floods threaten, said Jamie Reinke, division manager of the DNR's floodplain management section. But in the past, they have taken considerable time to create. 

A two-year grant from the Nebraska Department of Economic Development, funded using federal money, will go toward improving awareness and resilience in flood-prone communities through threat identification, community outreach and mitigation planning. Led by Zhenghong Tang, a professor with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's College of Architecture, the project launched Jan. 1 and will focus on Douglas, Sarpy and Dodge Counties. He and others recently met with Fremont-area residents. 

Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers has been conducting what's known as the Lower Missouri River Flood Risk and Resiliency Study to reassess the flood risk on the lower Missouri River, from Yankton, South Dakota, to Herman, Missouri. The study does not address management of the upstream dams.

After the 2019 floods on the lower Missouri, the corps was urged by the governors of Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri to "do something different" when it came to flood resiliency. As part of the study, the corps also is updating flow and stage frequencies on the lower river in order to provide accurate tools for flood risk management.

Colleen Roberts, a program manager with the corps' Kansas City District office, said the agency now has two more decades of data than the last time it examined flows in 2003. In general, the agency is seeing more extremes in high flows and low flows. 

The agency has identified some problem spots and this summer begin to talk about possible solutions and who can address them, she said. A draft of the study will be available in 2025 followed by the completed study in 2027. 

Work remains to protect communities from floods

Despite all the repairs completed so far, however, work remains to protect communities along rivers, and weaknesses will remain even after scheduled work is done. Some private levees along the Platte, Missouri and other rivers were damaged and have not been repaired, Winkler and others said. 

The Platte River levee that protects Camp Ashland near Ashland, Nebraska, for instance, has been reinforced. But the camp, a Nebraska National Guard training facility, still is vulnerable from Salt Creek, which overflowed into the camp in 2015 and 2019. To mitigate the impact of future floods, the Guard raised buildings to allow water to flow without causing extensive damage. Guard officials also hope to work with other agencies to come up with a flood-control plan to direct overflow into the Platte before it reaches the camp.

Iowa plans to seek out potential levee weak spots, which could lead to opportunities for upgrades. The state launched an Office of Levee Safety within its Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management in June as part of a larger levee improvement program.

Levee safety officials, who met recently with residents in Council Bluffs and Sidney, Iowa, are tasked with analyzing the condition of the state's levees and developing a rating scale to identify those most at risk. The Iowa Geological Survey will survey nearly 900 miles of levees in the coming years.

Meanwhile, local agencies have continued to buy out flooded properties to mitigate future flood risk. The Papio NRD, tapping federal dollars, purchased about 130 flood-damaged homes or cabins in the Bellevue area between 1993 and 2019, said Lori Laster, a stormwater management engineer with the NRD. That avoided some damage in 2019.

But that buyout process can be slow. Seven residents in the area were interested in buyouts after 2019, but only one is still pursuing that path, she said. In the King Lake area in northwest Douglas County, 50 residents initially were interested in buyouts, but the NRD expects only 10 to follow up by the time a grant expires in June. Buyouts also have been offered in many other communities.

For residents of hard-hit communities, flood recovery efforts remain front and center and the trauma lingers.

In others, the pandemic, the passage of time and several years of drought have eroded memories of the 2019 event. In much of the Omaha metropolitan area, high water had little direct impact. Much of the community's interior, including the downtown area, is protected by topography, levees and flood walls as well as zoning rules and dam projects. 

"When we're talking about the 2019 flood, the larger metro area outside of those along the Missouri or Platte Rivers, didn't see a lot of flood damage," Laster said. "People say, 'Oh, we were really lucky.' But actually there's been about 60 years of planning, construction and regulation that went into keeping us safe at that time."

World-Herald staff writer Steve Liewer contributed to this report.

Coming Monday: How Offutt Air Force Base and the Nebraska National Guard's Camp Ashland are being rebuilt after the 2019 flooding.