Friday, August 15, 2008

Iowa in June 2008, Part IV

They have had to evacuate the Riverside RV park and there was a big group of RVers in for a convention.' They were moved to a parking lot at a vacant grocery store.

Bea is still high and dry -- her sump pump works alot, but at least she isn't suffering any water damage. In fact, the entire town, with the exception of water in basements, seems to have lucked out. A few closed roads getting into town and now that water has been going down.

There isn't anything on TV but 24 hour coverage of the flooding. It has been so severe in some places that they have had to evacuate the hospitals -- they are constantly calling for sandbaggers. It would be a good way for me to get a lot of good exercise if the lungs would handle it!

The had a levee breeched in DesMoines and were evacuating people at 3AM. The National Guard and city workers have spent hours building another levee behind the area to hold back the waters. Trucks and trucks of dirt hauled in and earth movers pushing it into place, sand baggers by the hundreds. And after all of that work, they had to evacuate those workers at 8:30AM -- the river was breaking through again. The river in that area had already crested and was going down -- but the pressure on the levees just couldn't hold.

Some of the flooded areas aren't looking for any relief for several days. They have closed a large portion of Interstate 80 due to flooding and the detour adds about 110 miles to the trip. It has been reported that over 36,000 people have been evacuated from their homes. Several smaller rural communities have been evacuated -- the entire community is under water. This will probably be the demise of some of these small towns.

June 15th brought more tornado sirens about 3AM but just ended up being a lot of wind -- no rain or hail -- so the rivers held. By daylight, the sun was shining -- life is good!

Cedar Rapids is allowed to take showers! Many communities were on "water only for drinking" to keep from over loading the sewer systems -- no showers, laundry, etc. Today they started an odd-even policy -- if your address is an odd number, you do laundry and shower on odd dates. If your address is an even number, you do laundry and shower on even dates -- Hey, if it works for snow removal maybe it will work for laundry and showers!

There are 99 counties in Iowa and 83 of them were considered disaster areas due to flooding. Iowa isn't a very big state and there are 9 major river basins (all ripe for floods) -- the rivers flow into theMississippi or into the Missouri Rivers.

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