Flagpole installation acrossIowa

Flagpoles in Iowa

Capitol and insurance work in Des Moines, two university towns, river cities on both borders and open farm ground between them. The pole, the foundation, the flag and the labour go on one quote.

Wind here. Iowa hardly moves on the wind map. From the Mississippi bluffs at Dubuque to Keokuk in the far southeast to the Big Sioux corner above Sioux City, the design wind speed rounds to the same 110 mph, which is a moderate figure. So the map is not what decides an Iowa pole. Exposure is the first thing that does: row crop covers most of the state, so a site with nothing upwind of it is the ordinary case here rather than the exception, and that sets the shaft. Straight-line wind is the second. On 10 August 2020 a derecho crossed the state, and the gusts the National Weather Service estimated through Benton and Linn counties, 130 to 140 mph, were well past anything on the map and all out of one direction. The third thing is the paperwork. Iowa has no single building code for private work: the state code covers buildings the state owns, anywhere a city or county has adopted it by ordinance, and any city above fifteen thousand people that has not taken on a recognized code of its own. Everywhere else it is whatever the town or the county has adopted, so we establish which rule book an address sits under before anything is quoted.

• The Mississippi counties and the Driftless northeast — 110 mph, as everywhere in Iowa, over the most sheltered ground the state has: river bluffs, wooded valleys and the caves and sinkholes of the Driftless corner, which the last glaciers went round. A standard wall covers most of it. Where the limestone underneath is hollow, the hole gets looked at before it gets priced.
• Central Iowa and the Des Moines Lobe — The same 110 over flat glacial till, ground so young and so badly drained that it grew nothing until tile went under it. The shaft here is ordinary and the footing is not: the water table can sit high in spring, and there is old tile running under a great deal of ground that now looks like lawn.
• The northern tier and the Iowa Great Lakes — Still 110, over the flattest ground in the state, and Spirit Lake and the Okobojis put open water upwind of a good many sites. Winter is the other half of it. This is freezing-rain country, and ice loads the rope and the truck pulley long before it troubles the shaft, so stainless fittings and a rope run inside the pole earn their money up here.
• Western Iowa and the Loess Hills — Open ground where the nearest shelter is usually the next farmstead, so we start from open exposure here instead of arriving at it. Underneath is loess, a wind-blown silt that behaves like rock until it gets wet. The footing is drawn for that soil, and it is where the extra cost lands rather than in the shaft.

Flying the Iowa flag? We sell it, sewn to the state's own design specification and sized to sit under the national flag on your pole. See the Iowa flag →