Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler So two Axiomites come together yet miss each other

So far, the report this morning is "just minor street flooding," but I also know that the city is more focused on the east side where they put all of their main efforts into projecting with the large and expensive cubes filled with sand to make a wall(there is a political joke in there somewhere about building a wall and someone paying for it, but that horse has been beaten to death).

The west side is where the houses are, and were a number of historical business districts are, so who knows if the mayor's report this morning includes both sides of the river, or just the one that the city wants to protect more (expensive businesses vs. low occupancy, low income housing)... I'm a bit snarky about it all this morning, but working on the west side this weekend and hearing the frustrations of people that live there has taken hold in my thoughts.

I live well away from this area, but work somewhat close to the northern flooding areas. No issues getting to work, and traffic is pretty light as all of the Cedar Rapids schools are closed. I know that the ground my by home is fairly saturated with water as my neighbor behind me has his sump pump running about 25% (on 1 minute for every time that it is off 4 minutes) getting water before it gets into his basement. Lucky for me that I sit on higher ground, so water doesn't flow into my yard.

We were supposed to get rain Sunday and yesterday, but didn't which is helping all around.

The flood waters are expected to crest at just over 23 feet still by about noon today. Then it will start going down, but will be above flood stage for almost a week. So while the peak is coming soon, and then will start getting better, the structures put in place will still need to hold back massive amounts of additional water for a while.

How goes the battle Nick?

Things are on the up and up around here. All of the hard work has paid off. Well, for most homes and businesses. So many stories of people coming together that it has been great. Like the one business (a "Pub and Grub" place) that was in the wrong place for receiving any real emergency flood protections, and had to rely on just sandbags and plastic, getting a few extra sump pumps from a local heating/cooling company, delivered by inflatable raft, so that they could pump out the water as fast as it was seeping through the sandbags.

Nobody asked them to do it, it was just something that was shown on the local news during a drone video, where the TV anchor was doing a voice-over to the recent video, and it showed the owners of the business frantically trying to keep water out. It was something like an hour later in which the sump pumps were gathered from the heating and cooling place, driven, with an inflatable raft in tow, as close as they could get, and then boated over to them. When every minute counts, they wasted no time.

Again, we were blessed with living a few miles away from any of the flooding, so we were safe. There is a lot of cleanup going on, and still a lot of forced evacuation zones still in effect for a few more days yet, but the waters are going down, and the worst is well behind us.

Thanks for asking.

Sounds like things worked out as well as they could.

People are really good at heart. That is so easy to lose sight of in the current political/news climate.