xpost: after the floods, Cedar Rapids still a wreck.

http://counterpunch.com/irelan08142008.html

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=3796650&mesg_id=3796650

Three weeks after the river crested, I drove twenty miles one evening and took an exit ramp off of I-380 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I expected to see flood victims cleaning up their houses. Many of them had been impatient to return to their homes. Maybe some of them wouldn’t mind talking to me.

But as I drove up and down the familiar streets on the west side of the Cedar River through the gathering darkness, I saw that all impatience had vanished and the people had vanished with it. The only humans I saw were two policemen in two separate patrol cars. Neither expressed any interest in me.

Not surprisingly, there was no electricity for anything. The streetlights, stoplights, and lights in the houses were not about to come on. For block after block, I saw nothing but houses with huge piles of debris in front of them. Because Iowa is a farm state, flood waters spread a variety of toxins on everything they touch—pesticides, herbicides, nitrates, manure, and raw sewage. Because of these toxins, everything immersed by the flood water has to go—lath and plaster, wallboard, furniture, appliances, everything.

-snip-

Cedar Rapids is one of the few small cities in the Middle West that still has a vibrant downtown, and when I reached it on the day of my visit, that’s where I saw the first people other than the two police officers seen earlier. Although “vibrant” would have been an inflated word for what I found, I did see some men energetically pumping dry air into a tall office building. Because the streetlights were useless, the workers had set up their own portable streetlight, powered by a gasoline engine. Here, at least, life would one day return to something resembling normal.

But in the residential neighborhoods, the flood had soaked 5400 houses over an area of 9 square miles, making them unfit for immediate occupation. Out of a total population of 120,000, over 18,000 people had been evacuated. In spite of everything, no one got left behind, regardless of race, color, age, or income. And no one died as a result of the flood.

-snip-

On May 27 of this year, shortly before the rain began to fall with record-breaking intensity in the Cedar and Iowa river watersheds in northern Iowa, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Climate Change Science Program released a study called The Effects of Climate Change on Agriculture, Land Resources, Water Resources, and Biodiversity in the United States. Many people worked on this project. The lead authors were Peter Backlund, NCAR; Anthony Janetos, PNNL/Univerity of Maryland; and David Schimel, National Ecological Observatory Network. The study is 193 pages long and is written is the brain-killing style of all federal documents. But I gave it a careful reading, and it has now revealed its secrets.

-secret snip-

I used to have many doubts about the idea that greenhouse-gas emissions would cause changes in the world’s climate. Those doubts have now floated away with the floodwater. I live in an apartment building at the top of a small hill. During the Flood of 2008, I watched as the waters of the Iowa River came up the hill. As the water rose foot after foot, the doubts sank. The water never reached my apartment, but it came close enough. I’m a new believer in the causes and effects of climate change. With our cars and our trucks, we’ve created a hell of a mess, and that mess is not about to go away anytime soon.