Floods of '08

It's been all over national news, so I (like many of you) have seen all the pictures and videos of the floods in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, IA. But seeing it in person is an entirely different story.

Jordan's family lives right outside of Cedar Rapids, and Jason & Julia live close to Cedar Rapids as well. The place that Jordan's dad works at ended up in the flood zone, as well as the downtown branch of the bank that Jason works at (Jason's bank in Fairfax was fine, though, thankfully!). The flooding affected everyone in that area to some extent. The devastation is amazing and sobering.

Last weekend for Father's Day we drove over to Cedar Rapids to visit with our families. The day we drove over was the same day that the river crested in Cedar Rapids. Seeing the pictures of the flooding on the news is shocking, but to see it in person completely floored me. How sad to think of how all of this has completely destroyed so many people's lifestyles and livelihoods! Below are some pictures that Julia and I took of the floods.

Julia took this picture of a bridge in downtown Cedar Rapids. Below you can see a picture of Julia's mom taken in the same area (around July 4th a couple years ago) showing how much below the bridges the water usually is.

July 2006

I think Jason was the photographer for this picture. He put in a lot of hours sandbagging and doing other work in downtown Cedar Rapids while the river was on the rise. He took this picture at a convenience store. You can kinda get an idea of the sadness of the situation, and yet the indomitable spirit of the people that the flood affected!

I took this picture on our trip to Cedar Rapids last Friday afternoon. I think this was the flooding by the South Skunk River. As you can see, the water was lapping at the shoulder of the road.

This picture just floors me every time I look at it. This is the courthouse in Cedar Rapids. The water is covering the streets, the steps up to the courthouse, the walkways, and everything.

The people who study these things for a living called this a 500-year flood because they figure that the chance of the rivers getting this high is about 1 in every 500 years! It truly was incredible to get to see it first-hand and to experience the reality of it...these are real people, real businesses, real restaurants and parks where people used to hang out at; and now it is all destroyed. Jason has been helping with some of the clean-up and recovery that has begun in downtown Cedar Rapids, and said that the stench is unbelievable and the filth left behind by the water is awful.

We did have a wonderful weekend visiting our families, and I will post more about that in the next day or so; but I wanted to do a post about the flood because of how it has impacted the communities that we and our families are apart of.