to Iowa’s Board of Regents, which governs Iowa’s
public universities. “Ayres has been very responsive to
our needs and our demands,” Wieland said.
“In the end, we’ve come up with projects that are
technically sound, well-thought-out, integrated with the
campus, and preserve the architecture and the intent of
the buildings,” Pletcher said.
Wieland said Ayres Associates has equipped the
university with effective measures against a future
flood. “Ayres was able to provide more accurate
modeling of our river so we have a better feel for water
levels based on different flows that could come through
our campus, all the way up to the 2008 level and
beyond, so we can anticipate what could happen,” he
said.
6│TRENDS
That new knowledge will benefit more than just
the university. “Once Ayres developed that model, we
shared it with adjacent communities, and they are using
it for their flood recovery and flood mitigation efforts,”
Wieland said. Each community has developed its own
mitigation plans and entered them into the model,
resulting in one master model showing all entities’
impact on the river.
Five years after the 2008 flood, Wieland is able to
see a light at the end of the tunnel: “Within the next
three years, we will be back to where we were prior to
the flood.”