Graphic: After the 2008 floods almost every home in the city of Palo, Iowa was under 
water. City officials worked to mitigate future flooding in a variety of ways.

Tom Watson, City of Palo, IA - Infrastructure Commander: This little project we just 
completed. There are a couple of phases to the project.  Palo is very flat so water cannot 
flow very fast or very thoroughly through an area it moves fairly slow because there is not 
enough slope on it. So every Spring we usually have a snow melt over this road and the 
ditches fill up, water will go across these roads and these homes will get some kind of 
flooding action with the snow melt just because it cannot carry the load of all the 
surrounding fields and stuff down through these ditches so after that happened initially 
we put some plywood as you can see here in front of these two barrels of the culverts to 
restrict the flow of water going down into the town���heart of the town here. That was 
very successful at the time we seen  were backing up more water up into the fields and 
stuff so we constructed a by-pass culvert underneath this road so as the water backs up 
now it goes into this retention/detention area over here this green space then slowly goes 
out and is discharged along the road and not go through town. So we���ve not done a 
complete by-pass, but our theory is we take some of the water put it here put it there if 
ground conditions during our flooding area in the summer time we have more absorption 
areas for water top go into the ground and then frozen times we have more area for water 
to go and by-pass the heart of town. So it is a lot of little projects a lot of little pieces of 
the puzzle that make things work.  And this is just one example where we have created a 
little bit of by-pass, a little bit of restriction divert the water flow a little more in 

different direction for retention and detention. 

Graphic:   This project has already paid off for Palo.  After heavy rain and flash flooding 
in August 2009 that would have close this road, there was no standing water. 

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