iowa floods: forget the field of dreams

Posted on June 12, 2008 by Teresa

In Iowa in these days, we’re far from the Field-of-Dreams. You couldn’t mistake this place for Heaven. Hell seems to have opened for business.

Cedar Rapids Quaker Oats from www.kcrg.com/younews/Parkersburg was destroyed a couple of weeks ago by an F5 tornado. Two people died. Yesterday, four Scouts died in Sioux City from another tornado. Before hearing about the destruction, I recall seeing that line of storms entering the state and was appalled at the fact that eleven counties had tornado warnings at the same time.Cedar Rapids Mays Island Courthouse and bridges flooded from www.kcrg.com/younews

Meanwhile, floods never seen before have obliterated crops, towns, and brought business to a standstill in the eastern counties. Because of the flooding of the Cedar River and Iowa River, whole towns have been evacuated, like Vinton and Palo, and thousands of people from Cedar Falls, Cedar Rapids, Coraville and Iowa City. Sheriff’s offices, police departments, jails, courts, and factories that routinely operate through ice storms and blizzards have closed or moved operations. Water and electricity are reduced in capacity or shut-off completely.

Cedar Rapids 3rd Ave SE from www.kcrg.com/younews/Five bridges link one side of Cedar Rapids to the other. They’re all closed, except for one lane on one bridge for emergency traffic. The hospitals have water at their doors, are on emergency power, cancelled procedures and surgeries, and are moving certain patients to University of Iowa Hospitals.

The DNR, police, fire, and National Guard troops are patrolling and rescuing people who wouldn’t leave until it was too late. Curfews start at 9pm and go to 5am. A lot of commuters come to the University of Iowa from Cedar Rapids, and I don’t know how they’ll get home if they started out this morning.

Film has shown manhole covers blowing off from the pressure. A train bridge collapsed taking a rubble-laden train with it. Two low-lying bridges may be dynamited if they threaten to collapse, in order to avoid damming and rising the river into downtown even more.

It’s hard to believe nature’s power until you see motor boats roaming the streets you’ve ridden your bicycle on for forty years. It’s easy to believe this community’s goodness when the Public Works is telling people to go away because they have more than enough people volunteering.

Water has reached the roof of landmarks like the National Czech and Slovak Museum, near the 12th Avenue bridge SW. Quaker Oats, where they make your Captain Crunch, is closed, and nothing is closer to Heaven than the smells on a day when they’re producing Crunchberries! The Paramount Theater on 3rd Avenue SE, far from the river, has water in the basement. Mays Island, where the Courthouse and jail sits, has been evacuated. The bridges connecting it to shore are under water. Even the U.S. Postal Service has canceled mail delivery and pickup in Cedar Rapids! (You can see these and many other photos at http://www.kcrg.com/younews/)

From google mapHere in Coraville and Iowa City, we won’t see the Iowa River crest until next week, and already they’re evacuating many areas. The University of Iowa will have severe damage by this time next week if the projections are correct — at least four feet higher than the Flood of 1993. The cresting in Cedar Rapids is expected tomorrow, with four feet more than it is now.

My mother’s house is near the Czech Museum, so when all is said and done, all her geneology research, family photos, books, etc will be destroyed. May even have to bull-doze the house. She lives in the 500-year flood plain (every year a 1/500 chance or .2% chance of a flood here).

A 93-year-old woman was evacuated from her house in Czech Village (around 16th Ave and C Street) where she had been born and lived her whole life, not even having left for the 1929 flood or the 1993 flood.

The rest of the nation can expect rising food and ethanol prices. We’ll be cleaning feces from the walls.

My posts on the flood in Cedar Rapids:

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