National Recognition for Iowa River

The Iowa River was declared “the third most endangered river” in the United States this week by American Rivers. Iowa’s failure to enact strong “anti-degradation” policies, especially those that curb silt and pollutant run-off, are named as the key reasons water quality in the Iowa River is bad and getting worse. More details at http://media.www.dailyiowan.com/media/storage/paper599/news/2007/04/19/Metro/Iowa-River.Pollution.Draws.Calls.For.Action-2851549-page2.shtml

As an aside, I remember a guy I talked to below the Burlington Street Dam in Iowa City. Upon learning I was from Minnesota, he explained to me that the Iowa River was a “natural, healthy river” compared to what I knew in Minnesota. He claimed no regulation of water quality was needed, since the Iowa was in such good condition. Having grown up around rivers and streams in which water clarity was measured in feet rather than centimeters, I was too stunned to really say much. That doesn’t happen very often. I should have offered him a glass of clean, healthy, brown Iowa River water, complete with the raw sewage run-off that comes from Fairfax via Clear Creek.

Fairfax??? Isn’t the fine town of Fairfax on the Prairie Creek Drainage in Linn Country? Maybe you meant the Metro area of Tiffin/Oxford and Homestead?

Vikefan,

I probably would have been speechless too if somebody would have told me that. Here are a couple more links on the issue.

http://www.americanrivers.org/site/DocServer/Iowa_River_MER_2007.pdf?docID=5803
http://www.americanrivers.org/site/PageServer?pagename=AR7_MER2007

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Fairfax??? Isn’t the fine town of Fairfax on the Prairie Creek Drainage in Linn Country? Maybe you meant the Metro area of Tiffin/Oxford and Homestead?

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A quick look on a map shows you are correct–it could not be Fairfax that was dumping raw sewage into the Clear Creek drainage as of a couple years ago. I don’t know my little towns down here well at all, and got the name mixed up.

There is some little burg of a few hundred people that as of a year or two ago was stll dumping untreated sewage into Clear Creek, but I am pretty sure it was not Homestead or one of the Amanas. That raw sewage led to very high E. coli levels in the Iowa River below where Clear Creek dumps in behind Taco Bell in Coralville.

That was Conroy. I believe their sewer system amounted to an underground pipe, which dumped into a field tile and then a drainage, which ended up in Clear Creek. Unless things have gotten a lot worse over the last 35 years, the fishing was pretty good in the Iowa River when I was a kid growing up in Iowa City.