I was in China during the summer of 1993, when weeks of torrential rain caused reservoirs and rivers to overflow their banks in the U.S. Midwest. I got the news from back home in Iowa by watching Dan Rather. The very day I returned was the day the highway from the Cedar Rapids airport to Iowa City reopened; otherwise, the route home would have been convoluted.

FIve years later, I moved into one of the neighborhoods most snarled by the floods–an area that in any case had the nickname “Mosquito Flats.” The homes most affected were those backing up on the river; their street itself turned into a river, and people had to get in and out by canoe. That’s the 100-year floodplain area. My house, perhaps a quarter-mile from the river, backs up on Lower City Park. We’re supposedly in the 500-year flood plain, somewhat safer.

We had a lot of snow this past winter, which meant lots of melt into the Coralville Reservoir, upstream from Iowa City, accompanied by a good deal of rain in the spring. The river already had lapped up into the park behind my home and created vast warm shallow-water ponds replete with very large carp. Just as the water seemed to be receding, we got more rain. Last week we learned that the reservoir was nearing capacity, so the Army Corps of Engineers was planning to lift the sluicegates to let more water flow downstream. This means the Iowa River will rise further and start creeping up the back yards of those homes on the river, and the water table will rise above the storm drains and spill into basements, as occurred back in 1993. This time, however, it’s being done on schedule, so people know roughly what to expect. We even can look on the web for lake level forecasts and other “Coral Rez” information.

The Coralville Dam was completed in 1958, and when the reservoir filled up with rain those 15 years ago, it topped its emergency spillway for the first time ever. The overflow propelled torrents of water across a swath of woodland, washing away not only trees but that 10-meter-thick Iowa topsoil and exposing a fossil bed that’s 365 million years old. The Devonian Fossil Gorge is now my favorite place to take out-of-town visitors; you actually can clamber around on limestone slabs pocked with impressions of ancient worms and shells and fish that lived all those eons ago. Yes, this vast stretch of the heartland used to be a seabed!

Back to the present. City engineers have gone through endangered areas in the last few days, visiting every home or business that might get waterlogged and telling people whether they need to sandbag, and if so, where. The city has driven in truckloads of sand, and for the past couple of days volunteers from all over our town and the towns around have descended to fill sandbags and help position them around house foundations. The fortifications have gone up behind most of the houses right on the river. Meanwhile, just about anyone in the neighborhood with a lower level is sump-pumping, and the sidewalks are awash. My home is on a slab, so even though we have nowhere to hide during tornado warnings, which aren’t infrequent here, I feel lucky not to have a basement.

The kids around here seem to find all this commotion pretty exciting. I went over to see friends at a couple of of adjacent houses with backyards on the river. The engineers had told one family the water wouldn’t reach the house, and they don’t have a basement, so they didn’t need to sandbag. Next door, 13-year-old Nick took me out back to show me their barricade, and said the water would likely wipe out the peonies out back and half the back lawn — but that’s ok, he added with a grin, because then he won’t have so much to mow.

All this is nothing compared to typhoons in Burma, the Sichuan earthquake, or even the Parkersburg tornado a couple of weeks ago that basically leveled that small northeast Iowa town. Still, I feel like we’re getting a very scaled-down reminder of the power of nature. Along with the very best of the human response.