I am having a blast playing with a very useful tool.
For MAY DAYS, I'm basing my fictional town on the town I used to live in. It sits quietly along the Cedar River in Iowa -- until the river floods. I have three disasters for this book -- an F5 tornado (I lived there in 1968 for that), a 500 year flood (close to it in 2008), and an F3 tornado (to my knowledge, not yet). This map shows the damage to the town for the various river heights, and the 500 year flood is truly devastating. For my research, they experienced record flooding (25 ft) in June 2008, and there are some good YouTube videos. Also, there's a Facebook page for the 1968 tornado with some excellent photos. I'm getting useful information from a 40th Anniversary spread the local paper did for the tornado.
The IFIS has several other Iowa towns wired up with sensors and can generate maps as well.
2 comments:
That is really cool! I'll have to keep maps like that in mind for future research.
I thought you might have some use for it -- if Newport has stuff like this. I knew this area had the tornado and the floods, so I wondered about flood zone maps. That I found an interactive tool was a huge bonus.
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