2024 flood -- our story

 

We considered ourselves veterans. We'd been through four flooding Floyds and really never got taken out of the game, never suffered at all, in point of fact.. Once when the river came up, it left about a foot-and-a-half in the basement, but we were renting then, and the folks who'd lived in the wonderful old place before us had pretty much cleared out the basement as if to offer a swath of the river a place too linger. 

Once upon a time, the river came up when we were out of town. Our new house was not finished then, but the water came nowhere close, we were told, so we dodged a bullet never really fired.

Three times we were home. It's more than a little stupefying to look out your wide northern exposure and see, out there beyond the blue, the lake you've always dreamed of just outside your back door.

We learned some things, like where to go for the very best flood info--the U.S. Weather Service, where pros analyze the data and make predictions that have been pretty much on the money--until the last monster, when they came up five feet (!) shy.

We'd been though all those floods before. We considered ourselves vets. We went to bed, not a nightmare in sight. The USWS says "no sweat." There's been a ton of rain, but we remembered more. The 100-year floods (we'd been through two of them) came lapping up at our stone pile, sixty safe feet out back. Once, we frantically drove to LeMars to buy a sump pump, but we never had enough water on the first floor to dampen a hanky. 

This June, we went to bed, to sleep. like a couple of rag dolls. What?--me worry? The Floyd will come up some, but we're a quarter mile away, almost. "'Night, all."

We considered ourselves veterans, until this time.

At five that morning, I woke up to some obscene sounds coming from the bathroom. What sounded scary looked just as bad. I went to the door to the outside deck, first floor. Trouble in river city, water, lots of it, lapping at the edge of the porch. 

I ran upstairs--after a manner of speaking. (it was June, but I was already gimpy, a cripple). By the time Barbara was awake enough to feel her husband's urgency and follow him down the steps to the same back door, the Floyd was right there. Had she taken a step out, she'd have had a soaker.

She was alone really--can't say that enough. I was no help whatsoever. We both thought immediately of that five-year-old (but never used) sump pump. It's wonderful that Barbara didn't marry me for my handyman skills, or we'd have split up about half a century ago. it was my idea to call our neighbors to make sure our sump pump was working. I did.

As we could have figured, he was there before I could put my phone down, pitched right in to make sure that pump was running, then ran back upstairs to tend his own flooding (he later told me he had no idea what was going on when I woke him,

Meanwhile, Barb called our kids. There was four inches of water right outside our door, a foot by the time they'd all arrived.

What happened after that was a no-holds-barred battle with the river, as our whole Iowa family attempted to haul what they could up the stairs and out of the maw of ever-rising river. Wasn't pretty, but neither was the Floyd just then.

More than anyone else, I could think; I should have guessed what was going to happen--look closely at the shot at the top of the page--but I didn't, and neither did anyone else. It was as if all the world was a lake, and we were alone in an empty fishbowl.

When the water level came up another foot or so, the door simply couldn't hold back the river; it blew out, or blew in actually. Thank the Lord it didn't break, or we'd have had glass all over the floor. What it did was admit a wave of dirty water so strong that my daughter and her three kids--one of  them pregnant--struggled to stay upright.

Lucas, hubby of the granddaughter with child, actually was knocked down and came up snorting from under water. We thought it was hilarious when it happened; now, it sounds terrible.

In no time at all, there was five feet of water throughout the whole first floor. We had considered ourselves veterans, but not for a river that rolled in five feet deeper than ever before.

(More maybe sometime. . .)