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Kirkwood Community College, particularly its veterinary science program, is sheltering hundreds of pets displaced by the floods. According to this story by Kathy Kaiser, of the Kirkwood News Service:

A dedicated team at Kirkwood Community College has taken in hundreds of pets rescued from the record flooding in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The Iowa Equestrian Center on the college campus has been transformed into an emergency animal shelter to assist the Cedar Rapids city facility overwhelmed by the flooding situations of mid-June 2008.

Along with the hundreds of cats and dogs in the Kirkwood flood shelter you will see geckos, a green lizard, an iguana, a rabbit, a macaw, birds of all sizes and a cage full of rats.

There are some local “celebrities,” too: The dog rescued from a roof by firefighters, Sam the cat featured in the local newspaper. Others have stories that may never be told until and unless they are reunited with their human companions.

As the more than 370 animals arrived, they were evaluated by one of three teams consisting of a veterinarian, a vet technician and vet assistant. Kirkwood Animal Health Professor Anne Duffy estimates 85 percent have owners. The others have been separated from their families, were from the animal shelter or simply strays.

Some animals arrived with their families who lost everything and were heading for one of the local shelters set up in school gymnasiums and churches. After losing everything they owned in the floods, it was difficult to leave their pets.

Kirkwood also has a Community Training and Response Program, and its affiliations include AgTerror, a program whose purpose is to make agricultural targets less attractive to attackers, and more resilient in case of attack. Pretty cool for a community college.

Thanks to Futurismic for their post -

The Mosquitoes Are Coming! reports Futurismic, based in Wisconsin, where

the record rainfalls over the past month have become something of a concern. The biggest water-related concern Southeast Wisconsin - Milwaukee in specific - has had in the last 20 years is the cryptosporidium scare we had in 1993. Now, though, with nearly an entire summer’s worth of rain in just less than a week, we’re in trouble. Why? Mosquitoes.

The biggest hazard with mosquitoes in Wisconsin in the West Nile Virus. With large - and I’m talking football-field-sized - ponds all over the area, it’s prime breeding grounds for large quantities of mosquitoes that carry the virus. The National Health Administration and the CDC have warned of a possible outbreak. It’s one of those concerns that a people don’t really think about, and it carries potentially lethal outcomes.

Many people are rebuilding after the devastating floods, and this will only be an additional burden. It’s one of those times when it’s nice to be advanced enough in medicine to deal with such large-scale problems.

The Disaster Accountability Project Blog reports that an investigation has been called for into allegations that the Corps of Engineers and contractors knowingly installed defective pumps in New Orleans.

In September of 2007 the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) ordered Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, to conduct an investigation into the allegation that defective pumping equipment was delivered and installed at the three new gated closure structures in New Orleans. These are the main pumps protecting the city of New Orleans in the event of a major hurricane or flood. OSC said in its letter to Gates that they concluded the allegations made by this whistleblower had a substantial likelihood of validity and that these pumps are “inherently flawed” due to poor design and have still not been properly tested.

Also, the OSC went on to state this same pumping equipment had previously malfunctioned under favorable contractor testing conditions and was subsequently shown to be defective, yet was knowingly installed by the Corps of Engineers.

In addition, the OSC went on further to state the whistleblower, a veteran Corps engineer who was the Team Leader of Pumping Systems Installation for New Orleans, alleged USACE employees and MWI (the pump manufacturer) circumvented contract requirements in an effort to complete the task, all at the expense of public safety. It was reported that key safeguards were circumvented and “there is an erroneous assumption that…hydraulic pumps are fully operational, and hence, the risk to the public remains high,” in the words of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.

New Orleans Pumps Still Questionable at The Disaster Accountability Project Blog.

Image by Alex Brandon of the Associated Press on DayLife.Com

From Jill Fehrenbacher and Sarah Rich at Inhabitat, we learned about Waterstudio:

In the months following Katrina, one of the most interesting design solutions we found for dealing with rising water levels was the amphibious architecture of Dutch firm Waterstudio. Architect Koen Olthius specializes in a unique technology that allows land-based buildings to detach from the ground and float under rising water conditions. Olthius’ claim to fame is that he focuses exclusively on aqueous design - design for building in, on and at the water - in a country where water dominates the landscape.

Link to Inhabitat’s post.

This design - if a flood-prone city grid were designed around having, say, 10% of its building stock built this way - would provide precious evacuation time - and since these structures are might well survive serious flooding - they’re the avant-garde of the recovery. Once the water recedes - these structures won’t need to be rebuilt.

From Commissioner Joseph Bruno’s announcement:

What if New York City were hit by a Category 3 Hurricane?

In New York City, over eight million people live on land that has 578 miles of waterfront. By 2030, the population is expected to reach nine million. At the same time, global climate change has put New York City at an increased risk for a severe coastal storm. In recent years, storms have become more intense, occur more frequently, and continue farther north than they have historically. The city would face many challenges during and after such a storm; one of the most difficult is the possibility that hundreds of thousands of people could lose their homes.

With financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation and in consultation with Architecture for Humanity-New York, the New York City Office of Emergency Management is sponsoring an open competition to generate solutions for post-disaster provisional housing. “What if New York City…” is a call for innovation and an opportunity for designers and policy-makers to collaborate on one of the biggest challenges facing densely settled urban areas after a disaster: how do we keep people safely and comfortably housed while reconstruction proceeds?

A jury of experts in the fields of architecture, design, urbanism, and government will choose ten entrants who will be awarded $10,000 each and technical support to develop their proposals into workable solutions. These solutions will provide support for New York’s most vulnerable communities and be a precedent for dense urban areas all over the world.

This design competition will rely on a fictional but realistic New York City neighborhood devastated by a hypothetical Category 3 hurricane.

Competition main page here.

Our GIS chops are what they’re going to be - so with a tip of the hat to the historian Daniel Soyer, here’s what we believe to be the relevant data about the behavior of storm drains local to ZIP 11218 during last weekend’s storm:

1. water was on the sidewalks - overflowing from the curb - at the Caton School, the public school which is the nearby reception center in OEM’s flood planning. We’re not sure if there is a storm drain at that intersection; if there was, it wasn’t working very well.
2. At the traffic circle at Coney Island Avenue and Parkside (the beginning/end of Coney Island Avenue - water was surging out of the storm drains a full 24 hours after the rain had stopped. This is a location which is diagonally across the Parade Ground from the Caton School - and even closer to the buillding which houses both Parks Department personnel and the NYPD’s Brooklyn South Task Force.
3. During the storm, the drains on the other side of the Parade Ground - at the intersection of Caton and Stratford, the drains were clearly not functioning.

It certainly seemed as though a major flood-evacuation reception center might, given heavier rains, have been renderes less useful. According to the National Weather Service records, most of our area has gotten about ten inches of rain for the entire month - including last weekend’s storm.

By appearances - and to untrained eyes, to be sure - it seemed as though a larger amount of rain - say 24 inches - would have interfered with the operation of the reception center planned for the Caton School building - not least because of the difficulties of using motor vehicles in water.

There may be some other planning or mechanisms of which we’re not aware. We’re still on this.

For all of you who submitted data, and helped us test the form, we thank you. We hope in the near future to have a more sophisticated, easier to use interface - which might allow both long-term, planning-related and fast-and-dirty real-time data collection. We’re working on it.

JS