Iowa Floods

It's just been unbelievable what has been happening here in eastern Iowa.  Cedar Rapids, the 2nd largest city in Iowa, is 20% underwater. 25,000 people have had to be evacuated. North of there, the city of Waterloo sustained significant damage. Downriver, the Iowa City/Coralville area is just now starting to flood and the river is not even supposed to crest there until Tuesday or so. The University of Iowa campus is already partly underwater, despite valiant efforts to protect some of the historic buildings with sandbags.  Parts of Des Moines, the capitol city, are now being evacuated as well. Numerous small towns have been flooded out as well. ALL NINE of Iowa's interior rivers are above record flood-levels.

I-80, the major interstate going through Iowa, has been closed east of Iowa City. I-380, a major road connecting northeastern Iowa with central Iowa, has also been closed, just south of Cedar Rapids. The traffic is being routed through Dubuque (where I live), which is extraordinary considering that Dubuque is about an hour and twenty minutes' drive north of I-80. That's one hell of a detour. But they have to do it, because the rivers are all flooded and most of the bridges are closed.

To make matters worse, a couple of evenings ago, a tornado touched down in western Iowa in the middle of a Boy Scout camp, killing four boys and wounding 48 others. These kids were only 13-14 years old. It's heartbreaking, although the stories coming out about how the other Boy Scouts took charge of things and started doing first-aid on the wounded and cutting through fallen trees to open the road to the isolated camp are very inspirational. People who bitch about bad kids today certainly haven't met these boys.

We're still okay, and so is Bob's family, who lives in the Des Moines area. One of his brothers has a house only blocks away from the evacuation area, but he, himself, is off doing Army service. The rest of Bob's family lives well away from the rivers there. Dubuque has seen a couple of landslides and some roads have been closed due to flooding in the northern part of the county, but on the whole, the most people have to complain about around here are perpetually wet basements. The Mississippi has flooded a bit, but it looks like the cities and town downstream are going to have more to worry about than we will. The biggest inconvenience is the traffic being re-routed from I-80, much of it involving huge trucks, since I-80 is one of the major roads that go through the center of America. The roads in Dubuque just aren't set up to handle that much traffic.

Iowa is normally such a dull place, but this year we've had a record-breaking snowfalls, killer tornadoes and now record-breaking floods. WTF? I'm not sure how much the national media is covering the story, because we've had non-stop flood coverage on the network channels for the past few days, but this is a huge, historic disaster. We've familiar with the areas affected, and it just hurts to see the damage the floods have caused.

A song for the moment: Iowa by Dar Williams