82 FORTUNE FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021
Ben Olson, a fourth-generation farmer in Benton
County, was out hauling manure; Willie Fairley, a Cedar
Rapids restaurateur was picking up supplies for his rib
shack; Steve Shriver, a Cedar Rapids business owner, was
grabbing lunch with his mom; Maria Gonzalez, a social
worker in Marshalltown had just gone out with her dog,
and her husband had run to the bank.
Father Craig Steimel, the pastor at five Catholic parishes
in rural Benton Country, returned from running errands
in the Cedar Rapids area just as the sky turned dark. His
home in Norway is adjacent to St. Michael’s Church, and
the next thing he knew a garbage can flew by his window
and then St. Michael’s 110-foot, 140-year-old steeple
landed in his yard. As the storm raged for another 30 min-
utes, he wondered if his house would collapse. Would the
church blow over? “It was just ungodly,” he says.
The storm was a trauma. But it was also more than that.
It was a collision of disasters—this extreme weather event
hit America’s heartland in the middle of an economy-
bruising pandemic and a summer of bitter polarization.
For many, the derecho layered on more hardship and stress
when they could least afford it. For local health officials, the
storm complicated the already challenging task of managing
a raging virus. For leaders, it piled another few Jenga pieces
on the COVID-19 socioeconomic balancing act.
It’s not fair to reduce Iowa’s very real disasters to sym-
bol, but on Aug. 10, with its flattened fields and exploded
barns, Iowa looked like America felt.When the rest of the country thinks of Iowa,
they almost certainly conjure up long, flat stretches of
cornfields and farms; flyover country populated almost
exclusively by white people. But the state today is far more
complex and diverse than the old stereotype suggests—
like anywhere in America, it’s a place in flux, full of ten-
sions and contradictions.
One of the nation’s top producers of corn, hogs, and
soybeans, Iowa’s economy remains driven by agriculture
and related manufacturing. But as those industries have
shed labor, Iowa’s growth has shifted to more populated
urban areas, powered by sectors like banking, insurance,
business services, and health care.
Iowa has one of the nation’s highest labor participation
rates—it’s a quirk of the Plains states that many middle-
aged and older women work—but there aren’t enough
job opportunities to match the number of highly skilled
workers the state supplies. Indeed, Iowa exports a lot of
the talent it develops. “We educate the hell out of Iowans,”
says Dave Swenson, an economist with Iowa State Univer-
sity. “But the way our economy is configured with its heavy
loading, production, manufacturing, and agriculture—all
of that talent we educate, we can’t use it.”
Over the past decade, 70 of Iowa’s 99 counties lost popu-(pronounced deh-REY-cho), a term coined in the 1880s
by Iowa’s first official weather observer, Gustavus Detlef
Hinrichs. A cantankerous, polymathic professor who had
a hand in developing the periodic table, Hinrichs believed
there should be a term to distinguish Iowa’s straight-line
wind events from rotational ones (a.k.a., tornadoes).
He settled on the Spanish term “derecho” (meaning
“straight”), which is defined today as a windstorm that
travels at least 240 miles with sustained winds over
58 mph. Though such storms occur about every two years
in Iowa, the term was not widely known in the state. Even
DuWayne Tewes, the veteran disaster coordinator based in
FEMA’s Kansas City office who led the agency’s response
in Iowa, conceded he’d never heard the term before.
Tornadoes are of course the common disaster of the
plains—terrifying and devastating, but short-lived and
limited in their path of destruction. Derechos tend to
be longer and more sweeping affairs, and this one was
especially so. The storm essentially traveled due east along
Highway 30—the old Lincoln Highway—and Inter-
state 80, cutting a swath of the state 90 miles wide that
includes valuable farmland, a handful of meatpacking
towns, Iowa’s two largest university campuses (Ames and
Iowa City), and Iowa’s two largest cities (Des Moines and
Cedar Rapids).
They were all caught, like Glisan, more or less un-
prepared. Derechos are especially complex, impromptu
storm systems, making them hard to forecast with much
lead time. Most impacted Iowans started their day with
a standard August weather report and went about their
activities, with no inkling that they’d have to shelter from
100 mph winds in a few hours, let alone live a week or
more without power.
MINNESOTANEB.IOWA50 MILES MISSOURIWISCONSINILLINOISAMES
MADRIDCEDAR RAPIDSDES MOINES
OMAHATAMAMARSHALLTOWNHIGHWAY 30
IOWA CITYFT. DODGEMASON CITYOTTUMWACOUNTIES DECLARED DISASTER AREA AFTER THE AUGUST 2020 DERECHOTHE STORM’S PATH OF DESTRUCTION
SOURCE: FEMAWHAT COMES NEXT : THE HEARTLAND