Word: flooded
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There's only so much one state can take. As the flood waters crest and begin to recede in hard-hit cities like Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, Iowans' initial can-do, stoic response to the slow swamping of our state's homes, businesses and crops - about 36,000 people have been left homeless, according to the governor's estimate - is giving way, understandably, to physical and emotional exhaustion...
...Cedar Rapids, some residents and business owners have reacted with anger and frustration when denied access to their flooded neighborhoods, which officials say remain unsafe. Flood waters that have already ravaged many cities are moving downriver toward the already swollen Mississippi, threatening still more communities. For eastern Iowans like Dave Metzler, who was evacuated late Thursday night from the bowling alley he owns and lives above in Coralville, near Iowa City, life is now an anxious waiting game to learn the full extent of the damage. "I not only lost my business, I lost my home - I got the double...
...that was formerly one of the area's busiest streets to find waist-high water in his establishment, Coral Lanes. "That's a disaster, a goner," he says of the 56-year-old bowling alley on First Avenue that he's owned since just after Iowa's devastating 1993 flood. (There is debate about whether Iowa's 2008 flood has been even more devastating...
...Rinderspacher, a friend Metzler has stayed with, worked for two days to move items out of his irrigation and landscaping business. Flood water came within a foot of his building, then stopped. "It's kind of surreal," he says. "Physically, you're exhausted from doing all this stuff and emotionally you're exhausted from thinking about it and wondering what...
...Here in Des Moines, we've had flooding in pockets but have fared relatively well so far, compared to eastern Iowa (and to the 1993 flood). There's relief that the downtown area has largely been spared major damage, thanks to bolstered flood protection post-1993. But feverish attempts to bolster a levee near a neighborhood north of downtown ultimately failed. Watching televised scenes of water rushing over destroyed sandbags into streets where people live and work was not what my teenage son and I, among hundreds of volunteer sandbaggers in Des Moines, had hoped to see. But like many...