Flagpole installation inAmes, IA

Flagpoles in Ames

A research town rather than a market town: the state's land-grant university, a Department of Energy laboratory, a federal animal-health research centre and the Iowa DOT headquarters, all inside one small city. We cover Ames and the Story County area, including the Iowa State University campus and Campustown, the Main Street district downtown, Jack Trice Stadium, the ISU Research Park, the Ames National Laboratory, the National Animal Disease Center and the Iowa Department of Transportation headquarters.

Wind here. Ames sits in an open, tile-drained central Iowa area, which works out to roughly 110 mph under the code your town uses. That figure decides how wide and how thick the pole has to be, so we check it against your address before we quote. Story County sits on the Des Moines Lobe, the youngest glacial ground in Iowa: flat till rather than rock, and land that had to be drained by tile before anyone could farm it. Two things follow from that. The water table can sit close to the surface in spring, so a hole will sometimes take water before it takes concrete, which is a reason to dig and pour in one visit rather than two. And there is clay and plastic tile running under a lot of Story County, including under lawns that were fields sixty years ago, so we locate it before we dig, because cutting a line is expensive and it is not ours to cut. Above ground there is very little to slow the wind down — campus lawns, research farms, section road frontage — and a pole on the edge of a research farm gets sized for that rather than for the sheltered quad a mile away.

Most of the people who call us from Ames are university and research buildings, laboratory and federal facilities, state agency offices, public schools, churches, medical offices, community and HOA entrances and Main Street commercial.