This morning, when Joey flipped the radio on as he munched on his delicious breakfast of yogurt and granola, he was surprised to hear someone in good old Cedar Rapids being interviewed for a story.

“JENNA,” he yelled. “CEDAR RAPIDS IS ON NPR AGAIN.”

“It’s probably because tomorrow’s June 13,” I hollered back from the bathroom where I was just starting to brush my teeth.

“Oh,” said Joey.  “Well, they’re doing a bigger story on it tonight.”

Sure enough, there was the reporter, standing down on 6th Avenue talking about how much trouble people are having with rebuilding their homes.  And I thought, if NPR can flashback…then I can do, darn it.  The following things highlighted in yellow are links to old posts, pictures, and basically whatever I felt like linking to.

(Sorry, Cedar Rapids people.  This is all very old news to you.  You can skip this one.)

June 11 – Andrew and Laura rode their bikes downtown to watch the flood waters rise. They took pictures and emailed them to me…I was pretty shocked.

June 12 – Dad and the boys went downtown to try to sandbag his office and carry important things up to the 2nd floor.  Shortly thereafter, it was swamped under with water, along with 1,000 business and 5,000 homes.

June 13 – The flood waters crested at a record 31.12 feet, which is like 20 feet higher than the river is ever supposed to get.

June 16 – The waters receded enough for Dad got to go back downtown to survey the damage to his office.  He took some pictures which, incidentally, got Dad interviewed and then wound up on CNN because I posted them on iReport.

November 27 – On Thanksgiving Day, when I FINALLY got to go home, Dad took us Iowa expats on a flood tour.  It was super sobering.

I’m glad a year has gone by, and I’m glad Cedar Rapids is rebuilding.  I heart Cedar Rapids, always have, and even before we moved to Texas I remember telling Joey that I’d love to live there someday.  They may not have a Williams-Sonoma, but what they lack in shopping, they make up for in droves by having awesome people, my favorite church, familiar places, and that “I’m home now” feeling.

Too bad I have to wait all the way until Thanksgiving again to go back home.  An annual trip is just not enough Iowa for this Iowa girl.

I had seen the pictures, I had streamed KGAN on Friday, June 13, and I had heard Pops tell the stories…but it’s not quite the same to hear it as it is to see it.

This is my dad’s old office on 3rd Avenue, three blocks off the river.  See that 122 above the door?  The water line was right above the 122.  That’s some serious water.

The Paramount had just undergone a several million dollar remodel, and it’s now boarded up…just like half of downtown.

Dumpsters and sandbags litter the streets, six months after the crest.

Dad had this property listed before the flooding.  You can see the water damage on the bottom of the sign, but Dad says the water line was much higher than the top of the sign.  In any case, it was surreal to see one of dad’s signs hanging in a mucky building in an area of town that used to be bustling.

The most heartbreaking loss, to me, was the Cedar Rapids Public Library.  It was one block off the river, and the water surged and swirled through it, destroying the books and computers and magazines and microfilm and reference materials…but not the memories of afternoons spent there when we homeschooled.

This is the main floor now.  Empty.

For me, the library was the most upsetting thing to lose.

Across the street from the library was the Great Furniture Mart, an old-timey building that, well, sold furniture.

It was absolutely destroyed.  The water had battered it almost beyond recognition; all the windows on the first floor and a half were blown out (still) and bricks and mortar litter the sidewalks.

Joey walked in the front door (which was easy, the glass was still blown out) and took this picture.  Then we realized that someone was actually in the building (and there were signs posted to keep out) so we cleared out.

The sidewalk on both sides of the building looks like this – covered in random junk…some of it looks like it was from this building, some of it not so much.

After we toured the downtown destruction, Dad drove us to the most heartbreaking losses.  The ten square miles of destroyed homes, water damaged beyond livability.  Half of them were twisted off their foundations (and we have basements here in Iowa) and many had boards over their windows.

The water line on this home was up to the eaves.  Can you imagine?

Another home that had 8-11 feet of water in it.

Block after block of this…it makes me thankful for my home.

In the middle of the destroyed houses sat the old A&W.  We kids had loved this A&W because Mom and Dad had somehow convinced us that it was “really far away from our house” and we probably only went there once a year.  (It was kind of far away, maybe 15 minutes…)

The A&W will never reopen, Dad said they’re just going to tear it down.

You wanna eat there?

It still smells awful…six months later.  We had the windows up and everything and the icky flood smell snuck in the car.

Dad said the sidewalks were lined like this for months after the flood.  Now there are only certain neighborhoods that looks like this, mostly because people aren’t even trying to rebuild the homes anymore.  They’re so destroyed…it’s kind of futile.

Home after home had “unsafe” spray-painted on them.  (That and “You loot and I’ll shoot”.)

We enjoyed this one…somebody spray-painted a political statement on a house in an abandoned neighborhood.

It’s kind of hard to tell, but this is two houses.  The one on the right stayed in its place and the one in the middle got ripped off its foundation and floated into the house on the right.

We aren’t sure why this house has “snowman” painted on it on the bottom right…but it does.  I totally believe that it’s “unsafe” though.

I’m not sure what the water line was on these houses…but it kind of looks like it was above the first story.  This neighborhood will probably wind up being entirely torn down, the utility pipes were too ruined by the flood water and so the power company decided to not turn them back on again.

This bridge washed out.  It was weighed down with hopper cars full of gravel (which worked during ’93) but sometime Thursday or Friday in June the bridge just washed away…

Just to compare, this is the water level today.  The next picture is how high the water was on Wednesday night, a day and a half before the river crested.

The water eventually crested a lot higher than it is in the bottom picture; it was high enough to completely cover the bridges and swamp the entire downtown.  I’m not sure how high it got on that parking garage…but probably pretty darn high.

So…to give the Cedar River the what’s for…I ripped this piece of concrete off the parking garage and threw it at the river.

Just to kick it in the butt.

I felt better.

Last night I had two voicemails.  One from Dad, one from Grams.  The one from dad was entirely confusing, but it told me to call Grams, so I did.

Grandma had quite the little story.

Yesterday she was waiting in the lobby of a building waiting for a pouring rainstorm to let up.  She stood there by the door with a gentleman, a salesman of some sort, and struck up a conversation with him.  They started with rain and moved to the flooding in Iowa.  Cedar Rapids, specifically.

“My son’s office was destroyed by the flooding,” Grandma said.

“Oh, that’s terrible,” said the salesman.

“Yes, he took some pictures of his office after the flood waters abated, and then my granddaughter (that’s me, folks) put them on CNN‘s website.”

The salesman paused.  “iReport?” he asked

“Yes…” Grandma said.

“OH!”  He cried, “I look at those pictures every day!  I sit there and I feel so sorry for that man who lost his office, and I wonder how he’s doing!”

Grandma was shocked.

“And now I can go back to my office and tell all my co-workers that I met his mother!” He gushed.

Wow.  Wonders never cease.  They seriously never do.

Anyway, Grandma was able to assure the strangely fixated salesman that Pops was OK.  I’m not sure if he’ll continue to look at the pictures every day now or not, but it seems kind of odd to me.

I promised you that this post was related, though.

So in the flood, Dad lost this photo collage that we kids made for him several years ago.  We ran around Des Moines, the kids ran around their respective towns, and we all took pictures of signs which had the word “Douglas” on them.  Joey photo-shopped them all together and we gave it to Dad for either Father’s Day or his birthday, I forget which.

The “Douglas” got left on the wall in Dad’s office because original estimates said there would be 2 feet of water, max, that got inside the building.  When he woke up the next morning to find 5 or 6 feet of water, it was too late for the “Douglas”.

Immediately, we sibs went into action.  We knew we’d have to recreate the “Douglas”.

Joey and I had deleted all of our pics from the first “Douglas” last month, of course, and we frantically searched our backup hard drive.  Fortunately, they were there.

Andrew had the great idea to assign each of us kids a letter of Dad’s name (since there are seven of us now!) and to somehow figure out how to make that letter with our bodies.

Joey and I went to Michael’s and found photo cubes that we thought would work perfectly for the new and improved D.O.U.G.L.A.S.  We bought seven.

The front face of each cube would be the letter made by us kids.

(Joey & I, Laura, Stephen, Joey & I, The Kid, Sister & Stephen, Brother)

Seven signs with “Douglas” on them.  (OK, the Pepsi one was a photo-shop special done by Andrew.)

One side had a picture of each of us couples.

(Joey & I, Andrew & Laura, AshleyNicole & Stephen, Me & Joey, The Kid & Caitlin, AshleyNicole & Stephen and Andrew & Laura)

Another side had (mostly) individual shots of us kids.

(Joey, Laura, Stephen, Me, The Kid, Sister, and Brother…with The Kid looking snidely on.)

More Douglas signs to boost Dad’s self-image.

And more pictures of his monsters.

(Joey, Laura, Stephen, Me, The Kid, Sister and Brother)

The package arrived last night.  Mom hid it until the evening, at which time Pops tore the wrapping paper off and discovered his new and improved D.O.U.G.L.A.S.

Poor Dad still doesn’t have much of an office, so nowhere really to put his new D.O.U.G.L.A.S., but someday he will.  And when he does, he has something for his wall.

Take that, Great and Evil Flood of 2008!

Here’s today’s reading:

In case it’s too small for you to read, the river is at 9.55 feet, as observed at 10:00 a.m. today.  That puts the Cedar River 21.57 feet lower than it was on June 13 when it swamped downtown.  Yowza.

I just wanna see it hit 6 feet again.

Seriously, growing up I had no idea how shallow that river normally is.  I thought it was very deep and very, very scary (but then I am petrified of water and heights and normally would have been standing on a bridge over the river looking down into it.)

Has anyone seen the Tree since the water went down?  How’d that thing survive all the water?  Maybe it fell down…

Here I am in Texas, dry feet, dry home, dry office…and my friends and family back home have been sandbagging (an exercise in futility, turns out), conserving water, salvaging flood-damaged items, and helping in recovery efforts.

I’ve done nothing.  Nothing.

I am so thankful that my family’s homes are OK, I’m thankful that most of my friends’ homes are OK, and I’m grateful that no one was hurt.  But, oddly, every time I see a picture of my destroyed hometown (and trust me, I see lots of them…it’s all I can look at over my lunch break) the image is burned into my mind and I can’t shake it.  Maybe if I was there it wouldn’t be so traumatizing.

Having the library destroyed, the Science Station gone, the Paramount in shambles…it feels like childhood memories are washed away too. I know they’re really not, but it still feels like that for some strange reason.

We homeschooled, so one afternoon a week Mom would take us to the library and we’d grab books and read for hours in the enormous baseball glove bean-bag chair in the children’s section, or look at microfilm from 1912 to find articles about the Titanic sinking, or snitch a copy of Seventeen magazine off the rack when Mom wasn’t looking.  (It’s true, Mom, I did that sometimes.)

And the Science Station?  Sisterly and I used to go to the static electricity ball and put our hands on it and laugh as we watched each other’s hair stand on end.  I usually got real annoyed at Brother at the Science Station because he could answer all the questions right, or make exhibits work that I couldn’t figure out.  Srsly.  (I have no memories of The Kid from the Science Station.)

The Paramount Theater?  I recall standing for hours on those risers up behind the symphony, waiting and waiting for our cues to sing, and then at the very end of the dress rehearsal Dr. Phillips would finally admit that we had done it right.  Sometimes in those long sections between our songs, the trumpet players would tease us and show us how their spit valves worked…which was disgusting but hilariously funny at the same time.  I’m surprised we never got busted.

I also recall at the Paramount several years back when all my sibs were home for the weekend…we all dressed up to the nines (formal dresses, suits, tuxes – you name it!) and Mom and Dad took us to the symphony.  So much fun!  No one, of course, really dresses like that to hear the symphony in Cedar Rapids, which was precisely why we did it.

And Dad’s office on Third Avenue…the best office ever.  Last year when Joey and I were home for The Kid’s graduation, Pops took me with him on Saturday to check Williams Plaza and do some paperwork at the office.  I got Pepsis for us out of the fridge in the kitchen, which is no longer there – they gutted the place yesterday, and probably forgot to put change in the cup for them.  Then Dad sent me across the street to Brueggers Bagels (the second best Bagel shop in the world, next to CJs in Ankeny) and I brought back a delicious bagel, which we split while Dad finished his work.  (His work always takes longer than he says it will, but I just ate candy and watched people walk by while I waited.)

Aside: as I recall how much food I consumed in the 45 minutes I was at Dad’s office downtown, it causes me to wonder just how, exactly, I didn’t get overwhelmingly sick by noon.

It has absolutely stunk to be down here in Texas this past week.

On Wednesday the 11th, I wanted to help Dad sandbag.  I wanted to help them move their files to safety.

On Thursday the 12th, I wanted to stand on the skywalks and watch the water rage, glare at it and chew it out.

On Friday the 13th I wanted to be there for the crest, handing out water bottles and helping sandbag Mercy Hospital.

On Saturday the 14th I wanted to see the waters recede in downtown.

On Sunday the 15th I wanted so badly to be at Faith Bible Church.  On Monday the 16th I wanted to see the office after the flood waters.

On Tuesday the 17th I wanted to help get the files out of the office before looters got to them.

On Wednesday, I wanted to go get Sister from Chicago and see with my eyes how devastated downtown is.  And yesterday I wanted to help salvage floodwater-soaked paperwork with Sister and Mom.

So if a picture’s worth a thousand words, and I’ve looked at hundreds of horrible flooding pictures over the last week, why can I still not fully believe it happened?

Five minutes later, I got an email.  From CNN.

Hi,

My name is David William and I am a producer at CNN in Atlanta.

I just finished looking at the photos you sent to iReport.com and I would like to ask you a few questions…

“GAAAH!” I squealed.  I panicked.  I asked my advisors, Andrew and Joey, what to do.

“Call the man back,” they said.

So I did.

“Did you take these pictures?” He asked me.

“No, my dad did,” I said.

“Can I have his number,” the CNN reporter asked me.

“Um…I think I’ll give yours to him.  He’s really busy right now and I’m not sure what he’ll want to do,” I hedged.

“Please, please do,” the CNN reporter begged.  “We haven’t been able to see many pictures of what the flood water has done to the buildings since people aren’t being letting people in yet…these pictures are really valuable, I’d love to talk to your dad.”

So I called Dad.  He didn’t answer.  I left an, “Um, Dad, I’m sorry but I made CNN want to talk to you…” message on his voicemail and then called Mom.  I explained myself.  (She laughed — I’m not sure if it was out of disbelief, shock, or amazement.)

And so that’s how I got Dad to be a wanted man by CNN.  I’m sorry Daddy.  I didn’t mean to do it…

Mom’s desk is behind this window.  Normally you can see her cute little face when you walk past, but not so much after all that water.  I cannot believe how high it got…I cannot believe it.

The conference room’s window, broken out from the force of the water.

This is the inside of Dad’s conference room.  The mud left creative swirlies on the walls which, in all honesty, it would have been nicer not to have.  There’s strange brown sludge and goo from who knows where all over the floor.

There definitely used to be wall where you can see through to that large open space.  The flood waters broke out the windows in that suite next to Dad’s office and came charging through with such force that they busted the wall.  Jerks.

That’s Dad’s office…his credenza usually sits on top of his desk, and he’s never messy.

Ten bucks says this fan doesn’t work anymore.  It’s kind of amazing that it’s still sitting on Dad’s desk after everything.  (Oh, and that’s a thick layer of mud that you see coating everything.  Dad’s desk is cream/white on top.)

Mom’s desk…and can you see that water line?  Amazing.  And horrible.

What a muddy mess…

The kitchen area

This used to be a computer monitor.  Now I just think it is trash.

The good news is that all of Dad’s files stayed dry, the water never reached the mezzanine.  (WHEW!)  So that’s one good thing.  I wish I could be there to help clean up…too bad Texas is so far away from Iowa.