Water, water, everywhere

This has certainly been "our year." By "our" I mean those of us in northeast Iowa, in Iowa in general and in the midwest in general. We've had the kind of weather that we usually only see on TV. Everything from major snow and ice throughout the winter and early spring, severe thunderstorms, killer tornadoes... and now major flooding.

For those of us in Waterloo, Iowa (where I live) and our neighbors in Cedar Falls, we're up to here in water, literally. I really am too tired to take the time to tell all about it. I'll just say that not only have people been talking about this being a "100-year flood," but some have been using the term "500-year flood." It's that bad. As I was listening to the radio two or three hours ago, they said the Cedar River's record was about 21 feet, and now it was at 24 feet and rising. It's expected to crest tonight or tomorrow morning at 26 feet.

The levy in Cedar Falls broke earlier today, and they have been evacuating part of the population. 15 miles to the north of Cedar Falls, in Waverly (where I lived during my teen years and early 20's), they've also been evacuating people. The house that I used to live in, next door to my dad's old church, is right across the street from the river. I was in Waverly today as part of my job, and it appeared to me that the flooding had reached at least 7 blocks from the river.

One of my coworkers has pretty much lost her house in the flood. Actually she's one of many of my coworkers affected by the flood, but she's one of my closer coworkers who I see daily. When they show helicopter flyovers on the news and you see miles of houses under water - hers is one of those. Another one of my coworkers, the hospital mechanic, had to be rescued by a boat. He moonlights at home, working on cars in his garage. Guess who has a car at his house waiting to be worked on? I'll have to find out in the next day or two if my car is ok.

Right now our county (and many surrounding counties) is in a flood warning. We live about a mile or two from the Cedar River, and less than that from the levy. If the water level should rise too high, we'll be on the move. We've got some things packed and ready to go just in case. Hopefully that won't happen. Too many houses have already been flooded. As I said, I'm pretty tired. I've really only hit the tip of the iceberg in describing all that's going on here.

It took me over an hour today just to get out of town for my job to head north to Waverly, as I kept running into road blocks and water over the roads. After all that, I then had to get back into town in order to go to a couple of towns to the south. It was quite a day, to say the least. All my words here don't even begin to describe what's really happening here in northeast Iowa.

Just about an hour or two ago, my wife's parents were in a tornado warning. They live about an hour north of us. The tornado was barely to the northeast of their house and they are ok. My nephew and his wife were driving home during this time and they spotted the tornado and took pics. I'll see if I can have them send them to me. Here's one link to the story.

Here are some links to a few pics from today in Waterloo:
Downtown Waterloo 1
Downtown Waterloo 2 - 4th Street bridge
Downtown Waterloo 3 - We go under this overpass on the way to daycare. We obviously couldn't do that today and I ended up bringing my kids to my wife's work.
Flood gate in Waterloo - Just over 1 mile from our house.

Unrelated:
Tomato warning
Jars of Clay - Flood