Pictures of History

Here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure...or horror
They're off the internet, so I cannot take credit.

1. A picture of the courthouse and 2nd avenue bridge at normal water levels.



This next picture is of the same courthouse as the first...and the same bridge, except you can't see the bridge because it's under water. This is what it looks like today. Literally, today.



Here are some pictures from downtown





This is a pic. of downtown. If you look in almost the dead center of the picture, you can see a car in the water. And the tops of parking meters.



The main building in the back of the picture is the county jail. They had to evacuate it and send all the inmates to state prisons for now.



Here is the Quaker Oats factory. Maybe oatmeal prices will go up? ha ha. And the road is I-380--the only way to cross the river in CR.



Flooding in a residential area.


The intersection of Ellis blvd and Edgewood Rd. Obviously, both are impassable. Oh, and watch out for those deer...



And here is an aerial view of downtown. The banks of the river are beyond the bottom of this picture. This is the area West of Downtown.



That's the worst flood in Cedar Rapids in history. Oh, update on river crest height. It's now estimated to reach 32'. That's almost 14 feet higher than '93. We're getting into the 1000 year flood plain. We're definitely past the 500 year plain.

Theatre Cedar Rapids, where I'm interning this summer, had four feet of water in the basement last time I knew. The problem is that the pit, green room, and seating on the main floor are below street level, which is flooded. That means the possibility for water in the main theatre. Very bad. And props and costumes are stored in the basement. So that's not a good situation.

This morning/afternoon, Mom and I went to Loyola-Gibson Elementary school and helped set up cots and carry things in for some people who had to evacuate. And we made snack bags for some kids. It has to be so hard for so many people. They have to move from one shelter to the next, because the other one lost power or flooded, and they have to sleep on hard cots in a gym with hundreds of other people. It's like I went back in time to last summer to Midnight Mission, except that these people had homes, they just couldn't get to them.

Please keep praying. There are a lot of people without their own homes tonight. Thank you.