Fifteen years ago I had just ended my junior year of college and had decided to stay in town for the summer rather than go home to my parents’. My sister was getting married in August and I had just gotten a job on campus so it just made sense. I was expecting a Midwestern summer full of insane heat and humidity. Instead we lived through the most devastating flood in US history. I was living in a college apartment – an apartment that felt so delicate they might have been made from cardboard – on the ground floor. Luckily we never had any flooding, just loss of power periodically. I vividly remember answering the door one night to find a friend of mine, drenched from the mid-thigh down, whose car had gotten stuck in a flash flood nearby so she trudged through the water to my place. (Note that this was well before everyone and their grandmother had cell phones.) Having grown up in Hawaii, and in one of the rainier and wetter spots in Hawaii, you’d think I wouldn’t have been so shocked by the whole thing, but I was. We dealt with flash floods and monsoon-like rain where I grew up, but I guess when water can just flow down the island toward the ocean the problem kind of takes care of itself. Not so much when you’re landlocked and dealing with rivers cresting at 20 feet.

But it looks like 2008 is kicking 1993’s ass. I read somewhere that the river was at 30 feet and still expecting to rise. Approximately 9,000 people have already been evacuated. The downtown currently has one usable bridge.

And of course it’s not just my old city of Cedar Rapids – the entire state of Iowa as well as some of Minnesota and Wisconsin are dealing with this too. My sister and her family, and my best friend’s entire family, though, are all right there in the heart of it. They and their homes are all safe, thankfully. It’s just heartbreaking to be so far away and so utterly helpless.

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Just got a link to this picture of our college gym.