Muscatine

 Officials in Des Moines, Iowa, ordered workers to abandon a temporary berm meant to block water gushing through a breach in a Des Moines River levee from reaching more than 200 homes.

Water passes through a sand berm that officials in Des Moines, Iowa had hoped would stop floodwaters.

In Iowa City, more than 200 homes were evacuated as the Iowa River jumped its banks.

"This is our version of Katrina," Johnson County Emergency Management spokesman Mike Sullivan said in Iowa City.

"This is the worst flooding we've ever seen -- much worse than 1993," when much of the Midwest was hit by record flooding.

At the University of Iowa, whose campus is bisected by the Iowa River, students and faculty joined with townspeople and members of the National Guard to fill thousands of sandbags in the area known as the Arts Campus. But it wasn't enough.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/weather/06/14/midwest.flooding.ap/index.html#cnnSTCVideo

compared to the widespread devastation of katrina across mississippi & louisiana and the flooding of new orleans, my guess is that the iowa flood damage is 1% of what happened in katrina. 

Not so sure...... Clearly Katrina's surge effected more people directly, but I see the hard winter and this never ending rain costing more then we care to think. I heard or  read somewhere that corn has risen from $4 to $7 per bushell. I think this will effect a far greater number of people. Well as any good farmer will tell you, corn can't grow under water. This seems to be the condition of most of the fields in Iowa right now.

So take the increase cost of corn, add it to the loss of crops and then throw in the property damage of the floods...........Katrina may become the second most costly event when compared to "FLOOD 08".

i have seen estimates of just the rebuilding costs of katrina at $200- $300 billion.

the damage to cedar rapids (where most of the flooding damage has occurred) is currently around $800 million.