More Decorah flooding…

A swingset near Riverview.

Another view of the Upper Iowa looking east.

The water has spread across farmland – this is Northwest of Decorah.

(All photos copyright Aryn Henning Nichols/Inspire(d) Media)

I know Benji usually takes care of this, but I’ve run out of ways to be useful so I thought I’d get some info out.

National news is talking about the record floods in the Midwest. Temporary dikes, sandbag walls and cement barricades are being put in position in efforts to divert future flooding as storms loom. Paul Harvey tells me that water is lapping at Illinois resident’s roofs and my sister has called to report she’s been working 16 hour nights – from 6 pm to 10 am – redirecting traffic in the Waterloo area away from completely flooded roads to…well… less flooded roads.

That familiar honking of a weather alert has sounded on KDEC FM 100.5 to inform most of the listening area that we are under a flash flood watch from Wednesday morning until late Thursday night.

My heart sinks. This will be at the very least a big setback and at worst, one of the biggest disasters we’ve seen here in Decorah.

The past days have been high-strung and totally charged. It seems surreal to me to watch as people have returned to semi-normal life today, pruning gardens and going for jogs, when there’s six feet of water in some neighbor’s basement and pumping, moving, and carpet ripping to be done. But that’s what people do and I certainly wish I could figure out how to do it myself so we can get the July/August Inspire(d) Magazine out in the world in less than three weeks.

We started this fine day at Benji’s grandma’s house, where there has been anywhere from a few inches to a few feet of water. The pump ran all night and got the level down to about six inches so we could get in there and get stuff out – I don’t know why none of us had the sanity of mind to move everything out before the several feet of water moved in yesterday, but I can only say we were physically exhausted from the earlier sandbagging and mentally exhausted from the reality of all of this. After accessing grandma’s, it was on to grandpa’s, who lives right next to the river on the aptly named Riverview Drive. There the water level has dropped from probably seven feet in the basement to about five. No one had the brilliant idea to get stuff out of there, either, and this basement was fairly finished. I don’t know what we were thinking. We got three pumps going, knowing fully well that it could flood again, but heck, you gotta try. Grandpa looked pretty upset about the whole ordeal, although he’d never let you know it.

Above is grandpa’s house…

From there, it was to my brother’s, who lives across the river from grandpa. Not a finished basement so a better situation, but still a couple of feet. They just moved into the house on Saturday from a second story apartment.

Public Health is doing a fine job administering tetanus shots – Benji and I dutifully got ours and headed back out to help friends and family clean up or at least keep up with the water still seeping into basements. The workers there, the volunteers all over town, the neighbors – everyone has been so kind, hard working and giving. While this is a strain on the community as a whole, it also strengthens the community’s relationships.

We’ll update more later. Flash flood watch starts tomorrow morning. We dodged some weather here tonight – I don’t know how it missed us, but it thankfully did. Phew.

To bed. Keep thinking dry.

-Aryn

I’ll also post more photos soon, hold tight.