Flood of '08: A Look at UrRelay

I’m back from my couple hours of sleep. After being up nearly 24 hours thanks to the issues yesterday and today and my job working the overnight yesterday evening, I just had to crash a few hours.

The water levels are still rising in downtown Cedar Rapids and it looks like they expect them to until some time early tomorrow morning. No one really knows for sure as the National Weather Service gauge in Cedar Rapids was wiped away in the middle of the night. However it looks like they were finally able to update it this afternoon on their website. Current river levels are at 29.32 feet in downtown Cedar Rapids. That's five feet over where they expected it to crest last night. The revised predictions look lik the crest isn’t coming until 10 or 11 am tomorrow either, at around 32 feet. That’s over ten past the current record from 1993.

So the situation is far from over.

In related news, I finally have seen a shot of my job downtown. UrRelay is located under a parking garage in downtown Cedar Rapids, or at least it was... This is a shot of the side of the parking garage with both a car and the ramp for reference points.

And here is a shot from a little further away just to give you some idea of the size of all this.

And finally some Youtube video of downtown circa 11 a.m. this morning. You can check it out by clicking on this link. Again thanks to Gazette Online for all these chats.

Flood of '08: One last picture before I go.

Here’s one last shot of downtown Cedar Rapids before I go. This is just a block or so away from where UrRelay normally works downtown. It looks like it will be awhile before we see the downtown office again.



Again thanks to Gazette Online for the pictures.

Flood of '08: Railroad bridge R.I.P.

Yeah, we have one less bridge in the city of Cedar Rapids as of three hours ago. Now we finally have pictures of it, again thanks to the fine folks at Gazette Online.


This is the bridge as of a couple hours ago. More of it has collapsed since then, and all those railroad cars are now underwater. This has created a major rapids situation over downtown and left the southwest side of town under several feet of water.

This will be my last update for a couple hours at least. I am going to attempt to get some sleep finally. I may very well go back to my job later tonight (take that, day off!) as many of my coworkers may not be able to make it though to their job.

Keep praying with everyone in the Cedar Rapids and eastern Iowa area. This is far from over.

Flood of '08: Downtown fading fast

Well, just a couple hours ago I was wondering how well downtoown Cedar Rapids might be hit by the rising water. The local power company, Alliant, is slowly taking on water and it has shut down the power for the city. Levels are covering the steet now as seen in the picture below:

This is about 2 and a half blocks from my job, 3 and a half blocks from the downtown library, 8 or 9 blocks from the now powerless main post office levels.

Now the water services in the city are also becoming strained as the city fights to avoid any sewage backup in to drinking water.

City hall is even gone and the downtown prisoners are being moved to the nearest prison facility as the jail is underwater. My house went without powers for about two hours as energy levels are rerouted to keep dangerous transformer damage.

Reports coming in now say we have already reached the previously predicted crest of 24.5 feet (12.5 feet above flood level) without reaching crest yet.

Below is a look at the bridges in downtown Cedar Rapids. The railroad bridge downtown is already gone, washed away despite several tons of extra weight holding it down. Most likely all downtown bridges will be gone by later today.

Normally these bridges run a good twenty to thirty feet over the Cedar River.

Right now, it can be best described as a damn mess.

Currently we are holding out at my house right off Mt. Vernon Rd about a mle and a half from downtown. These photos send shivers down my side as I look at them and I fear it will only get worse. Thankfully, my daughter is currently visiting the town of Traer where her grandparents, my folks, live. We had planned to go get her just before Father’s Day, and that is looking less and less likely as the water levels continue to rise.

It is terrible out there right now, but the people of Cedar Rapids are fighting as hard as they can to keep the damage from spreading. But with the water levels still rising, it is anyone’s guess as to how long we can hold out.

Flood of '08: Disaster Watch

So I haven’t written much on this blog for the last couple months as I am still considering how to reformat it for my slowly developing revised version of Metahuman Press. None of that really matters right now as I have something more important I thought I would chronicle.

Welcome to the second “500 Year Flood” in Iowa history. Now don’t get me wrong, I am no expert, but I am pretty sure that 500 Year Floods are supposed to occur only every 500 years or so. And unless my math is pretty bad, it's only been fifteen. Yeah, just checked on my computer. Definitely 2008, not 2493.

Anyway, large portions of several cities have already been washed away. Cedar Falls, Waterloo, and smaller towns like New Hartford and Palo are gone. Others like Iowa City, Coralville, and my own Cedar Rapids are just entering the danger zone.

Record rain levels are to blame. We have already surpassed the crest level from 1993 and it is only going to get worse over the next day or two, even as it continues to rain outside.

Downtown, where I work for UrRelay, has been evacuated. Relay call centers cannot shut down without possibly losing their license. So we’ve all went to college. Mt. Mercy College to be exact. Servers, computers, people, extras, everything that we could need have found their way from a full-sized facility downtown and in to a one class room operation at the collge. It’s; cramped, messy, downright insane, but functional nonetheless.

Water levels are only going to keep rising as the rain falls. Pray for all the fine folks in the errors evacuating.