PERCIVAL, Iowa (CN) — Andrea Schoville and her family moved from Omaha into a small 2.6-acre farmstead on the floodplain of the Missouri River Valley in October 2018.
She and husband Matt knew the area had flooded in 2011, but floodwaters back then didn’t quite reach the two-story house. And even if they would have to deal occasionally with some flooding, it would be a quiet place to raise their daughters, free of the hubbub of the city.
They fully renovated the five-bedroom house. But five months after they moved in, the Missouri River Valley flooded again, this time it was much worse than in 2011, filling the entire valley with water — and also the home they had sunk so much of their savings and time into.
“New windows, new siding,” Schoville, 40, says now. “We literally put in our new kitchen cabinets two weeks before the flood… Whatever you can think of, we did to this house.”
Now the family of six lives in the nearby city of Hamburg. And the home in which they sunk so much time and money now sits torn open and gutted.
They still have chickens, and goats and horses like before, housed in the sheet-metal barn across the gravel driveway from their wrecked house. But now a 15-minute drive away, a drive they must make twice per day.
Stories like this are playing out in Fremont County in the valley and elsewhere following unprecedented and devastating floods in 2011 and 2019 that wreaked havoc and drove occupants away for months each time.
Many who stayed after 2011, betting the valley wouldn’t flood again for decades, left after 2019, realizing they may have made a bad bet. Still others remain, having decided changes underway to the levee system here will protect their farms and homes in the event the floods repeat themselves.
Randy Timmerman, 63, lives in a small two-bedroom house near the Missouri River.
“It’s peaceful. I just love being away from all the traffic. It’s a nice slow pace,” he said.
Does it weigh on him that his home may flood once more?
“Happening twice in what eight years? You bet it does. And we pray every day that it doesn’t happen again.”
A short distance away lives Pat Sheldon, 59, who farms 2,300 acres in the valley west of Percival, near the river, in a new house, an olive-gray and brick structure built in 2014 to replace his previous house on the same site, damaged in the flooding, which dated to the 19th century, following the 2011 floods. The new one fared better in 2019.
“I’m staying, because it’s home,” said Sheldon. He is the fifth generation of his family to farm in this valley. His son is the sixth.
Down here, near the river, deer wander into your yard. You can hear the high-pitched chirping of quail, wild turkeys gobbling. You can see pheasants darting across the road, with the few signs of human life being Interstate 29 and the BNSF railroad, both running north and south about a mile east.
“We hear a train once in a while when it goes through Percival. When the air is really heavy and there is a bit of an east wind, you can hear some interstate and stuff,” said Sheldon, a longtime member of the Fremont County Emergency Management board. “I’m right where I work. I can walk outside and be there.”
Sheldon figures it may be safe to stay because of the elimination of what had been a pinch point in the levee system, causing water in the Missouri to back up. It’s the site of the Iowa Highway 2 bridge over the Missouri River to Nebraska City, Nebraska.