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Jim Gano has survived 10 floods throughout decades of life in Cherokee. He’s never left his home during any of the floods. Until Saturday.
Nearly everything he owns at his East Willow Street residence has been destroyed. The one-story house that has been passed through the Gano family since the 1950s was overtaken by the Little Sioux River’s floodwaters on Saturday afternoon.
He left home at around 8 a.m. that morning.
When he returned around noon, the floodwaters reached his knees. All he could retrieve were the biker flags that were hung high on his bedroom wall. His neighbor was only able to rescue a single duffel bag. The rest of his property is completely ruined.
“This is the first time I’ve ever had seven feet of water swirl around my house,” said Gano, overlooking the wreckage on Wednesday afternoon. “I wanted to cry, damn it.”
Gano has mixed feelings on his current circumstance. Most of his possessions were swept away in a matter of hours.
He’s angry; he said he wants to go back to Vietnam and fight in the war again. (Gano was deployed from 1968 to 1970 — hence the nickname, Jungle.) He’s bitter, too. He foresees discussions with his flood insurance company or a negotiator with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Still, the veteran remains hopeful. The floodwaters are down nearly a dozen feet from the Little Sioux’s crest on Sunday, according to Cherokee County Emergency Management.
Floods are a way of life in Cherokee. Humans have lived around the Little Sioux River valley for thousands of years. As recently as 2019, flooding inundated the area and subsumed dozens of homes.
Around 35 opted to stay and rebuild in the floodplain.
Jungle Jim intends to stay this time, even if it means tapping his flood insurance and risking another historic flood. He said in the 70s, he used to fix flood damage himself.
“It can be rebuilt,” said Gano, overseeing his house that was flooded with seven feet of water. “I won’t do that work. I refuse to at 75.”
His floor is now covered in mud and debris. A stench of mold and earth emanates from nearly a block away from Willow Street in the baking sun. Cherokee County Emergency Management is already encouraging affected residents to steer clear from houses and streets that have been exposed to floodwaters since Saturday. Air quality conditions are of concern. Volunteers in flood-damaged homes are expected to be exposed to mold amid hot, humid temperatures outside.
But Gano expects to be back on Willow Street one day.
“It’s a piece of cake,” he said of cleanup and restoration efforts.
The Little Sioux is believed to have smashed a record crest in Cherokee early Monday morning. Modeling from the National Weather Service has estimated the river crested at 34 feet; the previous record was just under 28 feet in 2013.
Much of Cherokee’s infrastructure remains inoperable and inaccessible, according to Emergency Manager Justin Pritts. The river near Cherokee is around 27 feet as of Wednesday afternoon. The floodwaters are receding slower than anticipated. On Tuesday the river was dropping around a half inch per hour. On Wednesday, the river’s recession decelerated, Pritts added. He’s waiting until it recedes to 22 feet, at which point the City of Cherokee’s lift stations can resume operations. Bridges can be inspected and possibly opened if damages are minimal. A running tally of bridges and roads that have been closed wasn’t immediately available before presstime. Sheriff Derek Scott noted a trip inside Cherokee earlier in the week would require a “boat or helicopter.”
At some point, electrical power across the city can be restored. Geoff Greenwood, a spokesman for MidAmerican Energy, said 94 homes in Cherokee either lost power or were de-energized.
“The river is dropping at a record low. It seems like it’s going down so slow,” he said. “When you consider the amount of water that was coming at us and the width of the farm ground, the storage basin that we are in, so to speak. North of us, the amount of water that’s actually still sitting in storage is unreal.”
Cleanup will last for months. Pritts said the city has been “devastated.” Basements have collapsed. The floodwaters are believed to have reached over 100 houses and much of the downtown. Preliminary estimates of damages across Northwest Iowa have ranged in the millions. Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell is expected to visit Cherokee in the coming days.
Much of Cherokee has experience with disaster-level flooding, and FEMA, Pritts noted. The federal agency purchased 98 properties from Cherokee residents from the floods of 1995. More were purchased in subsequent floods, according to City Manager Tom Letsche, who estimated the city’s housing stock shrunk by over 200 since the 1993 floods.
Pritts said affected homeowners will likely face a tough decision: either rebuild or relocate somewhere else. Some have flood insurance. Others don’t.
He expects Cherokee’s green spaces to grow around the flooded areas. Flooding has become more frequent and more severe, raising the risks that those in the flood zone could lose everything. The last historic flood hit Cherokee in 2019; the one before that occurred in 2013.
Pritts pointed to a recent conversation he had with someone in the green space on Hwy. 59. The homeowner’s house flooded. Floods in previous years wiped the neighbor’s houses, which were occupied by his relatives.
Pritts doesn’t expect the block to exist in the near future.
“I anticipate that we’ll see buildings, businesses come down,” he said.
The causes for Cherokee’s flooding are all the same.
Torrential upstream rains in Southeast South Dakota and Southern Minnesota flushed into the Little Sioux. Agricultural drainage has vastly improved — more water leaves the landscape at a faster rate, leading to higher discharge in the Little Sioux. And a drought has overtaken the region, stripping vegetation that would’ve absorbed the rain.
“You’re changing the way the water escapes, where it goes, changing the flow,” explained Shel Winkley, a meteorologist with the non-profit, Climate Central of Princeton, N.J.
Rain totals exceeded 18 inches near Canton, S.D. Some areas in Iowa got as much as 15 inches of rain. Hot temperatures and a high pressure system over the East Coast have slowed storm systems in the Midwest, meaning more rain fell on ground that was already wet — 2024 reversed a years-long drought trend in Northwest Iowa.
“This dome of high pressure, not completely uncommon at this time of year, it’s bigger and it’s more intense than you would expect of high pressure at this time of year,” Winkley said.
Winkley described the rains as a feedback cycle for the planet’s warming over the last 50 years. For every one degree of warming, around 4% more water vapor becomes trapped in the atmosphere. The U.S. has warmed around 2.6 degrees over the past 50 years. That means the atmosphere is also holding onto around 10% more water, “and the atmosphere has to work in equilibrium,” Winkley said. In other words, the atmosphere can’t hold excess water vapor.
When it rains, the rain is more severe because of the vapor excess, he explained.
The excess discharges into rivers, which run to the Gulf of Mexico. River gauge records across Northwest Iowa have been smashed twice in the last five years.
“Rainfall is becoming heavier, it’s happening more frequently and it’s also becoming more extreme,” he said.
Pritts, the emergency manager, commended Cherokee for its resilience. The emergency manager has been through two floods and a tornado in Aurelia since he was named to his role in 2014.
Hundreds have volunteered. Sandbags have been filled. Equipment has been mobilized. Shelters have been erected. County and city employees have been closely monitoring infrastructure that’s under threat.
“I’ll tell you what, this darn community does it every time — it makes me choke up a little bit,” said Pritts. “They just show up for each other and it’s such a wonderful place to live.”
Much of Cherokee has started to reopen.
Dr. Chris VandeLune of Sioux Valley Family Health near Hwy. 59 said he, his staff and other community volunteers have been pumping sewage out of the clinic’s basement for three days straight. The sewage water cleared from the basement Tuesday morning, when the clinic reopened with half staff.
VandeLune said Tuesday afternoon that the clinic had already seen “several people that were wading in water and doing things with cuts and worried about infection.”
“We had somebody that was depressed because they haven’t been able to get home for three days, so it’s taking a toll on people,” VandeLune said.
Pritts declined to speculate on when the city would resemble itself again.
First, the county must assess how much damage the area suffered. Second, everyone affected must make a choice: rebuild or destroy the property and move. Some can restore their homes because the damage is minimal.
Others will have to make a decision they didn’t expect to reckon with just days ago, Pritts said.
Gano wants to rebuild. His home on Willow Street is the only home he’s known for the last 20 years. But the prospect of a buyout from FEMA is appealing. Most everything he owns will be thrown in a dumpster over the coming days. His house will be gutted.
And he can start over. He doesn’t really know where.
“I'll just tell everybody the hell with it and I'll take the money and run,” said Gano, who expects the federal government to offer buyouts for more floodplain homes. “And I'll go back down to where I came from: Skidmore, Mo.”
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