A few weeks ago, news outlets across the nation marked the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with countless articles and broadcasts, and Sally K. Mason, the University of Iowa’s president, found herself bemused by the one element of the coverage. Together the eight colleges and universities in New Orleans suffered just over $1-billion in damage during Katrina. Meanwhile Ms. Mason’s institution alone suffered an estimated $743-million in damage in June 2008, when the flood-swollen Iowa River scoured low-lying parts of the campus and closed 22 buildings.
Now forgotten elsewhere, the flood seems sure to be the defining event of her presidency, which began less than a year before the disaster hit. The flood shut down key utilities for months and soaked lower levels of a 1,000-bed dormitory, the busy Iowa Memorial Union, and the Iowa Advanced Technologies Laboratory, which housed millions of dollars’ worth of research equipment. Hit even worse were the Schools of Art and Music, the Museum of Art, and the 2,500-seat Hancher Auditorium, whose buildings remain locked up two years later.
There’s a silver lining, though: The flood has given the university the chance to rethink some poor decisions made decades ago. The School of Music, which was relocated from the riverbank to temporary quarters in a down-on-its-luck downtown mall, liked the location so much that it will move to a new facility bridging a major downtown street. City and university officials hope that will make the downtown livelier and attract new audiences for music-school performances. Part of the School of Art will move into a new building designed to encourage collaboration among artists in different media, who say that sharing temporary digs in a former big-box store has been unexpectedly energizing. As it has in New Orleans, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will eventually pick up much of the tab for repairs here, covering 90 percent of costs that are judged as eligible for reimbursement.
“There are great opportunities that have come from the disaster,” President Mason says. “You grow from these things.” She was told when she was hired, she says, not to expect to do a lot of building. Instead, she’ll oversee high-profile construction projects—a music school, an arts building, a major auditorium, and possibly a museum—with architects who have international reputations.
Warnings Came Early
Ms. Mason had been in office only about six months when, in February 2008, the university’s risk-management staff began cautioning that heavy winter snows and unusual cold could foretell spring floods. The snow was late in melting and thunderstorms followed, beginning in late April and saturating the soil.
By the second week of June, the situation was dire. Students, faculty and staff members, and local residents banded together to fill sandbags. Amid chaotic traffic jams, the art-museum staff and volunteers raced to pack up the collection and move it out of harm’s way, while art-school students and faculty members began moving the art-history slide collection upstairs. In the student union, the bookstore staff frantically boxed up summer-term textbooks, while in the Advanced Technologies Laboratory, researchers shrink-wrapped equipment that was too big to move. A human chain of volunteers passed books, manuscripts, and photo negatives up from the lower level of the main library. Then water began gushing out of storm sewers behind the lines of sandbags and started filling the network of utility tunnels that connected steam and electric lines to the university’s main power plant, located beside the river.
The university had dealt with floods before, says Rodney P. Lehnertz, director of planning, design, and construction. A 1993 flood that everyone had thought was “the big one” brought the river to a flow rate of 28,000 cubic feet per second and caused $6-million in damage, he says. In the 2008 flood, the river’s flow reached 42,500 cubic feet per second, with five feet of water roaring over the Coralville Dam, just above the city. The flood was 40 percent bigger than its 1993 predecessor.
A turning point came on June 14, when the university’s power-plant staff shut down the facility because the water, already 22 feet deep in the plant’s lower reaches, was approaching electrical controls. By the following day a foot and a half of water covered the stage in Hancher Auditorium, and the orchestra seats were soaked up to Row O. Water had poured through the main level of the adjacent Voxman Music Building and filled the lower levels of the main art building, the art museum, and the theater building. Art Building West, an award-winning 2006 building by the architect Steven Holl, had four feet of water on the main floor.
East of the river, the 80,000-square-foot lower level of the Memorial Union—which held a food court, the bookstore, the credit union, and offices—was also full of water. The Advanced Technologies Laboratory, designed by Frank Gehry, sustained more than $34-million worth of damage. The main library, luckily, remained dry except for a few inches of water in the basement.
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Avoiding Oblivion
Even after the river crested, the flood was achingly slow to recede, frustrating university officials for weeks. They had a little over two months before the fall semester began, so clean-up crews started work in some buildings before the water had all drained away. Mayflower Hall, the big dorm, reopened August 18, and crucial classroom buildings quickly followed. And while portable power plants stabilized the campus’s electrical and air-conditioning systems in the short run, crews had to push hard to get the main power plant and the utility network online before the heating season began. The plant reopened October 28, and President Mason reactivated its steam whistle, which can be heard all over town at 8 a.m., noon, 1 p.m., and 5 p.m.
From an academic perspective, the big concerns for the fall semester were the art and music schools. “The first week was total despair,” recalls John Beldon Scott, an art professor who is director of the School of Art and Art History. Then a faculty member suggested looking at a vacant big-box store a few miles from the campus. It was “a vast open space with pigeons flying around,” Mr. Scott remembers, “but at one point I did call the dean and say, ‘If it’s not that, it’s oblivion.’”
Steve McGuire, a professor of art education, was put in charge of making the empty space work. He helped figure out what should go where and then oversaw the purchase of about a million dollars’ worth of art equipment. The building was ready on the second day of classes, and construction workers had even written “School of Art” in Morse code in the floor tiles just inside the front door.
“The first year,” Mr. Scott says, “was a real challenge.” Painters complained that the overhead lighting washed out colors and eliminated shadows. Everyone complained about the noise. On the other hand, the equipment was modern and safe, and the facility’s shared spaces began to break down the medium-by-medium Balkanization that the old buildings had encouraged. “People get to see colleagues daily that they didn’t see before,” Mr. Scott says. “And we hear a lot of comments from students that seeing people from different media is a boost to their own work.” Indeed, he says, the big-box quarters echo ideas about community outreach and collaborative work “that are becoming important to contemporary art.”
Meanwhile much of the School of Music moved downtown, along with the bookstore and other offices, to the two-story Old Capitol Town Center mall, which had a lot of vacant space. Initially, music students carted their instruments around the city to rehearse, practicing “wherever we could rent,” President Mason says, but eventually the university took over some former movie theaters in the mall and brought in prefab practice rooms with computerized systems for creating different acoustical environments.
“Being downtown puts them right in the midst of everything—they like it there,” Ms. Mason says of the music school. Hence the idea of moving the music school downtown permanently. Part of it will go into the first four or five floors of a mixed-use condominium tower that a developer plans to put up, and the rest in a new performance complex that the university will build across Clinton Street, linked to the tower by a bridge.
Mr. Lehnertz, the university planning director, says the goal is to use the music school’s 200 or so performances a year to “create an epicenter for arts activities downtown.” The university will seek an architecture firm with a national reputation to design the performance complex and the bridge, and the developer has agreed to let the same firm collaborate on the tower. “The revenue potential for downtown is a plus,” Mr. Lehnertz says. “We benefit from the city, and they benefit from us.”
Bureaucrats as Partners
To make such changes, however, university administrators have had to school themselves in the complexities of FEMA regulations, and have had to learn to move at the government’s pace. “As with any bureaucracy, there are challenges,” Ms. Mason says, “but they’re being a good partner.”
A key to relocating the music school, for instance, was getting FEMA’s approval of a plan to split the school’s facilities off from the Hancher Auditorium, which has always been managed separately but which shared an early-70s Modernist complex with the music school. FEMA had declared the entire complex a total loss, but the ruling on splitting reconstruction money between two sites required a second decision.
Mr. Lehnertz says the university considered moving Hancher downtown, too. But its old location offers patrons from elsewhere in the state easy access to parking and to Interstate 80, so the university will rebuild the auditorium on higher land nearby. Governor Chet Culver, a Democrat, has urged the university to make the new Hancher both “a symbol for the arts in Iowa and a national symbol of sustainability in the arts,” Mr. Lehnertz says, so the project will aim for platinum-level LEED certification.
Last week the university chose a high-profile architecture firm, Cesar Pelli’s Pelli Clarke Pelli, for the $125-million project. While they wait for their new hall to be designed and built, Hancher staff members have adopted a new slogan, “Can’t Contain Us,” and this year they have scheduled events in 17 venues in nine cities, according to Charles Swanson, Hancher’s executive director. Even so, Hancher can’t offer many of the big touring Broadway productions that were important elements of its season.
Negotiations with FEMA over the museum and the art-school facilities have been more intricate. FEMA officials determined that the museum could be renovated, but Mr. Lehnertz says insurers have told the university that art cannot be insured for display there, so the university is appealing the FEMA ruling. Meanwhile FEMA architectural historians decided that the Art Building West—one wing of which is cantilevered over a former quarry pond—is architecturally significant, in part because the building earned its designer, Mr. Holl, a prestigious 2007 award from the American Institute of Architects.
The ruling is important because it allows FEMA money to be spent “to protect the architecture, not just the asset,” Mr. Lehnertz says. To safeguard the building in the future—a requirement for any project FEMA finances—the university will create a foundation, disguised as a sidewalk, on which a flood wall of I-beams and panels can be put up around the building and the quarry pond on 24 hours’ notice. As built, Art Center West was a foot above the 100-year-flood level, says Mr. Lehnertz, but now the university’s standard is to protect against water levels three feet above 2008’s.
Across the street, the original 1936 Art Building will be saved, in part to preserve a studio that the painter Grant Wood used while he was on the faculty in the late 1930s and early 1940s. But additions to the building will be replaced with a new building on higher ground that will be designed by Mr. Holl’s firm, Steven Holl Architects. Mr. Scott says the art-school faculty has asked Mr. Holl for “more collaborative spaces, for spaces to share equipment.” The new building won’t be as open as the big-box location, he says, “but we’re trying to create as many opportunities for inspiration and collaboration as possible.”
“Every building we have has a different solution” for meeting FEMA’s requirements, Mr. Lehnertz says. Mr. Gehry’s Advanced Technology Laboratory, for instance, will get a new five-foot concrete flood wall inside the existing metal skin; Mayflower Hall, the big dormitory, will get a retaining wall that will create a plaza for students, plus an elevated annex to house mechanical and electrical systems. Meanwhile the utility tunnels have been fitted with watertight bulkheads so that if one section floods, the rest stay dry. The university’s long-term plans include an additional power plant away from the river.
So far, Mr. Lehnertz says, the university has spent about $160-million recovering from the flood, and FEMA has reimbursed the university for about $40-million of that. He expects the federal contribution to total between $400-million and $500-million by the time negotiations end. Whatever the university spends above that will be paid out of insurance proceeds, donations, capital funds from state and university accounts, and money raised on the bond market.
President Mason predicts that 10 years will have passed before she can show off the last of the new facilities and declare that everything the flood disrupted is back to normal. “I never dreamed I would be looking at these kinds of building projects,” she says, recalling the interviews in which she was told not to expect much in the way of construction. She remembers something else from an early visit to the campus, too—a tour on which she posed a question that now seems prescient: “I did ask, Does this river ever flood?”
