City officials are expected to close Ottumwa's Market Street Bridge in the coming days.

The gates are wide open on the Ottumwa Hydroelectric Dam. The river is expected to crest at 21 feet, one foot less than the record set during the flood of 1993.

Volunteers pitch in to place filled sandbags on pallets so they can be loaded on trucks and taken to areas of town where they are needed.

Some people gathered near the water's edge to get a look at the rising Des Moines River.

Local bow fishermen were taking advantage of the situation, watching for confused fish on the lower side of the hydroelectric dam in Ottumwa.

Factcheck.org, a non-partisan organization that reviews candidate’s claims during public events, pointed to six statements made during Wednesday’s debate that were worth challenging. They include:

McCain’s promise to make the U.S. “oil independent” within five years, a goal experts say can’t be achieved.

“There’s just no way,” Frank Verrastro, director of the Energy and National Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Factcheck.org. “You can’t institute technological change that quickly. Verrastro points out that the U.S. couldn’t ramp up alternative fuels that quickly. “It takes 15 years now to turn over the car fleet,” he says.

Verrastro’s organization and the National Petroleum Council issued a report this summer, commissioned by the secretary of energy, that found the U.S. could reduce its reliance on oil imports by a third by 2030 if it instituted various measures, such as increasing fuel efficiency, domestic sources of oil and non-petroleum fuels.* Romney’s claim that American students score in the bottom quarter among industrial nations.

“Our kids score in the bottom 10 or 25 percent in exams around the world among major industrial nations.” That’s not so. Actually, the U.S. ranked closer to the 50th percentile than the bottom quarter, according to the most recent rankings by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an internationally standardized study administered to 15-year-old schoolchildren in 57 countries.

Students in several nations were tested in 2006. In science, the U.S. ranked 29th out of 57, or at the 49th percentile. And in math, the U.S. ranked 35th out of 57, or at the 39th percentile. The U.S. was not ranked in reading for 2006 because of a testing misprint, but in the previous round of testing in 2003 U.S. students again landed near the middle, scoring 15th out of 29, or at the 48th percentile.

  * Romney’s assertion that federal programs to prevent teen pregnancy are “obviously not working.” In truth, the teenage birth rate declined consistently from 1991 to 2005, dropping 45 percent for 15- to 17-year-olds, 26 percent for 18- to 19-year-olds and 34 percent for 15- to 19-year-olds. Although recent report shows the birth rates for these age groups increased in 2006, but the change was small: a 3 percent increase for 15- to 17-year-olds and for 15- to 19-year-olds, and a 4 percent increase for 18- to 19-year-olds. There was a 14 percent decrease for 10- to 14-year-olds.

* Giuliani’s promise that a big federal tax cut would produce “a major boost in revenues for the government.”

Factcheck.org says most economists agree that lower taxes tend to produce higher economic growth, which does produce additional tax revenue – but not enough to pay for what’s lost. N. Gregory Mankiw, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, published a paper last year in which he calculated that over a number of years, capital gains tax cuts generate enough growth to pay for maybe half of the lost revenue. Cuts in taxes on wages would bring enough revenue to pay for about 17 percent of revenue lost.

*Huckabee’s claim he had the most impressive record on education of any GOP candidate. “I had executive experience longer than anyone on this stage running a government. And I had also the most, I think, impressive education record. …”

A claim truly worthy of debate. Romney pointed out on Wednesday that school children in his state of Massachusetts scored first in the nation in the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, scoring a clean sweep among both fourth-graders and eighth-graders in math and reading. But Massachusetts also had ranked at or near the top before Romney took office, so it’s hard to give him all the credit for the test scores.

Arkansas consistently scored below the national average before Huckabee became governor, and on most tests it still does. But on all four NAEP tests, Arkansas’ scores moved closer to the average during Huckabee’s time in office. In fourth-grade math, Arkansas students were near enough to the national average in 2007 as to be within the statistical margin of error, though for eighth-grade math, as well as reading in both fourth and eighth grades, it was still significantly below average.

Huckabee also substantially increased funding for schools, under a mandate from the Arkansas Supreme Court that called the school funding system unconstitutional. And while the Arkansas General Assembly dragged its feet and funds did not increase as much as originally recommended, the school system was pronounced satisfactory after Huckabee’s changes.

Says Factcheck.org: “Coming from below average to not-so-much-below average, and from “unconstitutionally unfair” to “satisfactory” are both significant. Whether that constitutes the “most impressive” record among GOP candidates, we’ll leave others to judge.”

* Duncan Hunter claimed the cost of administering and complying with the federal income tax is $250 billion a year.

“The tax that we’re all paying that doesn’t help anything … is the $250 billion-plus that we pay each year not to the federal government, to the Treasury, but to prepare our taxes, defend our taxes, and for the massive cost of the IRS. That’s all overhead – 250 billion-plus dollars.”

The President’s Advisory Panel on Tax Reform puts total compliance costs at around $140 billion per year, a figure that includes the value of taxpayer’s time spent filling out forms, which strictly speaking is not money “that we pay.” Add to that the “more than $10 billion” that the government spends to administer the tax system, and the figure comes to $150 billion, not $250 billion, according to Factcheck.org.

Nelson will receive a $250,000 award and be honored at a formal ceremony Oct. 18 at the Iowa Statehouse in Des Moines. Today's announcement was made by World Food Prize Foundation president Ambassador Kenneth M. Quinn at a ceremony at the U.S. State Department.

Nelson was chosen for the prize in recognition of his scientific achievements in food preservation, as noted on the World Food Prize website. He got started early in his studies, growing up in Indiana working for his family's tomato canning business.

At the age of 15, Nelson was named the "Tomato King" after winning a 4-H award at the Indiana State Fair.

Nelson studied at Purdue after graduating from high school and received a bachelor of science degree in general agriculture in 1956. When his family's packing business closed because of increased competition from California, Nelson returned to Purdue and began a long career in horticulture sciences.

Scientific breakthroughs at Nelson's laboratories have transformed fruit and vegetable packing industry, and his "aseptic" storage and transportation systems made possible the distribution of not-from-concentrate juices on a wide scale.

Nelson’s biography states that his discoveries include:
• Refining and perfecting the heat sterilization and cooling methods for preserving vegetable or fruit products
• Developing experimental 100 gallon, sterilized carbon steel tanks coated with an epoxy resin for holding the sterilized product at ambient temperature. Later on, tanks ranging in size from 40,000 to more than 1 million gallons were manufactured using Nelson’s protocols.
• Designing and constructing aseptic valves for the large containers, preventing microorganisms from
moving through the valve stem into the sterile system.
• Refining a system for smaller-scale, in-bag storage (1 gallon to 300 gallons), allowing processors to fill
multilayer, inexpensive sterile flexible packaging material with aseptically processed products.
• Perfecting a special system for the aseptic bags allowing sterile product to be introduced without
recontamination. This system was evaluated by Nelson as a membrane that is ruptured during the fill, then resealed with a sterilized foil cap.
• Increasing the capacity of bulk bag-in-box technology up to 3,000 gallon capacity for cost-effective shipping of processed food.
• Developing, with a Norwegian ship builder, the installation of aseptic bulk storage systems ranging in size
from 1.8 million gallons to 8 million gallons into the hulls of ships for transport of orange juice across the globe.

The World Food Prize ceremony in Des Moines in October will be held during the 2007 Norman E. Borlaug International Symposium, titled "Biofuels & Biofood: The Global Challenges of Emerging Technologies."

Since 1986 the prize has been given in honor of individuals who have contributed to improving the quality, quantity and availability of food around the globe. It was originally envisioned by 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Norman E. Borlaug.

Photos courtesy of the World Food Prize Foundation.