Devastating flooding struck the Northwest Iowa town of Rock Valley one month ago, and its mayor says work is underway to bring temporary housing to town.
Kevin Van Otterloo said an estimated 150 houses are no longer inhabitable.
“We are working hard on trying to get housing options, trailer court options. We’re working on a lot of stuff. We are at first working on temporary options for people to at least have a place to stay at night instead of staying with relatives because that can only go on for so long," he said.
Van Otterloo said Rock Valley is still waiting to get the all-clear from the federal government to start moving people into campers and trailers that are being staged at the Sioux County Fairgrounds, about 10 miles away.
He added that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is still assessing the damage and will decide what kind of buyout will be offered to impacted residents.
It was Rock River flooding in late June that impacted Rock Valley, and it was the Big Sioux River that impacted the Riverside neighborhood of Sioux City.
A railway bridge that connected North Sioux City, South Dakota, to the Riverside area collapsed on June 23, 2024, into the river as it reached a record level of 45 feet.
The bridge is owned by the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, which is attempting to set some plans to remove the bridge. Railway officials are now working with U.S. Army Crops of Engineers for permission to do that, and public comment on that possibility will be taken by that federal agency through August 5.
In other news, a Sioux City community college has reached a second lawsuit settlement with foreign students who accused the school of human trafficking.
After a special board of directors meeting Wednesday afternoon, Western Iowa Tech Community College has officially settled both of the two lawsuits involving foreign students who accused the school of human trafficking via the now-defunct J1 Visa program.
The combined total of the two settlements is $5.3 million.
Regarding the first lawsuit, the college’s board of directors in April approved paying $3 million to students from Chile who filed a lawsuit in November 2020. The second lawsuit settlement was for $2.3 million, and it involved nine students from Brazil.
The students said they were promised a free two-year program with internships, but were instead forced into working manual labor jobs to pay off tuition.
In a statement, WITCC President Terry Murrell said the program did not live up to the high standards of the college or meet the expectations of the students, who received free tuition in the J1 Visa program in 2019.
Murrell said he “disagrees with the way the program was mischaracterized in the lawsuits. All the students in the program were free to leave at any time and were paid for every hour they worked.”
Board President Russell Wray said the members are glad to have put the matter behind them, and to learn from the episode to better serve diverse learners at WITCC.
(Western Iowa Tech Community College holds the license for Siouxland Public Media.)
