Flood

Yesterday I went with a couple of co-workers to Missouri Valley, IA to help clean with the flooding that occurred a couple of weeks ago. The neighborhood that we were working was a rather poor place to begin with, before everything was swamped with three to four feet of water. Most of the houses were single story homes, built on concrete slabs. The owners of these had no where to put their valuables even had they known the water was coming.

In the morning I helped out with the salvage of one of these homes. This old woman lost nearly everything. The stove, fridge, washer and dryer. All of the furnishings of the house creating a pile in the front yard. The carpet that we were pulling up was a drab brown, except for a single two foot by four foot rectangle of white where something had protected it. We cut the carpet into blocks, pulled it and the padding up and added it to the growing detritus. From the pile it would go into the bucket of a giant end loader donated by the local Case Implement dealer to be taken Zeus knows where. Nasty, ugly, smelly work. It made me thankful Woodmen provided free tetanus shots for us.

It's saddening to see those that have so little, lose nearly everything. It makes me thankful for what I have, and that I don't have to live on a flood plane. It has to be disheartening to see all of the possessions that have taken you years to accumulate and many of them that must have some sentimental value, being ruined and thrown away like the garbage that they now are. How do you start over?

After lunch I helped at a vet clinic. Most of the clinic had been emptied by the time my team got there. We were helping to clear out a storage room in the back. The vet had seven or eight book shelves back there filled with books. The bottom half of all of them sat in water for a week. It felt sacrilegious to be throwing so many books into plastic bags and added to growing pile of junk in his horse trailer. Thousands if dollars of books being added to the thousands and thousands of dollars of other stuff. The vet was in a better situation than most, financially, to deal with the disaster, but he too was hurting. Especially because during the cleanup he hasn't got any income coming in.

I had to leave early to pick up Anke at work and Corwin in daycare. The relief effort was being organized at the local pool, which was convenient, allowing me to shower and change clothes before having to climb into the car and meet civilization again. But that may have been the coldest shower I have ever taken. I suppose swimming pools don't feel the need to hook their showers up to hot water heaters.