i survived Iowa!!

over all, i haven't even begun to process the trip to Iowa to help rebuild a few houses that were effected by the floods in early June...here are a few You Tube clips to help fill you in. they (whoever They is) predicted that waters would rise 25 feet above normal river level...it rose 32 feet above, a whole 7 feet more than they had prepared for. that's almost another floor in anyone's house.






on this second clip, the bridge the car is driving on is the top of a double bridge. the one underneath it was covered, and the white building was on an island which has been completely covered with water. there are small ripples in the water (it's moving a bit fast and somewhat hard to see) but they were the hand rails from other bridges that people usually drive on all the time. The one bridge with the train on it, they had filled the train with rocks to try to hold the bridge from collapsing from the water current. soon after it fell as well.

these videos don't do this justice though. one good thing is that the town is hilly and so not everyone was effected, (and it wasn't as bad as New Orleans as the water decreased after a few days)and it also makes some things look like the flood wasn't that bad. however, the Czech part of town, which is mostly of low-income people, wasn't in these videos, and it was hit the hardest. there were water lines we could see which varied from a few feet up a wall to 12-15 feet up the side of houses. in both cases, water was in all the basement and completely destroyed everything on the first floor. also, as the one video showed there were a few chemical plants that were flooded, and so, along with a sewage system that was destroyed, people not only had to clean up human waste, but also chemical waste was all through their homes.

i'll write more later, but my computer is running out of battery and i'm in a coffee shop without my power chord.