Gazette Daily News Briefing, June 26
This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette Digital News Desk, and I’m here with your update for Monday, June 26.
According to the National Weather Service it will be another day on the cooler side Monday, with a high near 81 degrees. It will be breezy with winds gusting as high as 30 mph. There will also be a light chance for isolated showers after 11 a.m.
The National Weather Service tracked several strong storms as they rumbled through the area on Saturday evening. There were reports of golf ball sized hail in Van Buren County and tennis ball sized hail near Ottumwa. A brief surge of wind, measured at about 70 mph, ripped through the Davenport area, leading meteorologists there to move to their safe space after a potential tornado was spotted nearby.
Between 1 and 2 inches fell in much of Eastern Iowa, which may give brief relief to drought conditions in the state, although much more rain is needed to remove the state from drought watch entirely.
According to reporting from the Associated Press, the U.S. government may have to pay tens of millions of dollars to landowners along the Missouri River after a court ruled it worsened flooding there since 2007 that killed crops and wrecked homes and businesses.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a lower court's 2020 ruling that the federal government must pay for the landowners' loss of value to the land. But the appeals court went even further in its decision last Friday, saying that the government must also pay them for crops, farm equipment and buildings lost to the flooding and finding the government contributed to the devastating flood of 2011.
Courts have found the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers responsible for recurrent flooding since 2007, three years after it changed how it manages the Missouri River’s flow to better protect the habitat of endangered fish and birds. It did so by notching dikes to increase water flow, keeping more water in reservoirs and reopening historic chutes, allowing the river to meander and erode banks.
More than 370 landowners in Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and the Dakotas are currently represented in the lawsuit, and a merger with another class-action lawsuit of an additional 60 landowners could happen later.
