Archive for June, 2008 Page 2 of 2
June 18, 2008 9:09PM
By Robert Ray
5:25pm
Today I write from Iowa City. Home of the University of Iowa and if I remember correctly one hell of a party school. That’s just what I heard.
The campus smells like a pig farm.
Seriously, I am not kidding with you. Anyone who has ever been to a pig farm will understand. But, for those of you wondering, let me explain.
You see, a pig farm is usually in a rural, less traveled region with lots of green pastures or corn stalks, cows and small kittens running around. A pig farm looks like that except it smells like pigs. Pigs smell like a towel that has been wet and soaking in the sun for about three weeks. Now, the wet substance on that towel is likely not water but rather…well…you get the point.
In college I had a friend who grew up on a pig farm.
I really liked hanging out with this guy, he was chuckler. One weekend he asked me to visit his farm. I am from Chicago and the farm intrigued me. Long story short, we ended up riding his fathers’ pigs for two days, yeah, riding them. I sat on top of the pig and the pig would run and I would go flying off it into the pig mud and the pig smell. Look, I’m neither proud nor ashamed, I’m just saying.
When I arrived on campus today I had a pig riding flashback. So, in case you are wondering what all this means then I hope you now get it. Thanks.
The Iowa River overflowed its banks with a more unwanted substance than maybe it should have. So when the temperature is 80 degrees and the sun is baking and the water is sitting and the mud is muddy and the clean up trucks are loud and the sandbags are festering and the….ok……I digress.
Flooding smells.
My assumption that the people of Iowa City are as tested and strong as the folks up in Cedar Rapids was correct. Amazing spirit and just plain old NICE.
Yup, NICE, Iowa is NICE.
Every story is important to me, but it’s those that I can put a face or a SMELL with that I never forget.
5:40pm
June 17, 2008 9:45PM
By Jeff Flock
I’ve covered most of the big floods and every major hurricane of the past 25 years and my experience is that despite our best efforts, the coverage never fully conveys how bad it is.
We can give you the numbers, like the 9 square miles and 1300 blocks of Cedar Rapids under water. We can broadcast a live tour of a flood victim’s house as we did today. Or, like we did earlier this week along the Mississippi, we can walk in chest deep water and describe the scene.
But nothing is like being here and drinking in the 360 degree all sensory experience…surrounded by block after block of flood debris…the smell of what amounts to rottiing water….the “eerie” feeling you get driving into a downtown Cedar Rapids, Iowa and not seeing a single light in any building.
Still, We Try
Today, downtown Cedar Rapids, bisected by the still swollen Cedar River, is a hive of activity. Trucks with “Floodmasters” and other disaster recovery firm logos…yellow-booted men with white helmets and t shirts with the words “Catastrophy Team” on the back are laboring to dry downtown Cedar Rapids.
Today we were outside Joe McGrath’s house as he drove up for his first look since the flood. I helped him pry open the front door, swelled from the water. He may wish it was still closed. A solid brick house, the inside is a total loss. One of the 3900 harmed in some way.
Later in the downtown I met Steve Emerson. He owns 10 buildings in the Cedar Rapids downtown which, I joked, makes him the Donald Trump of Iowa. But this Donald wears a t-shirt and shorts and stacks his own sandbags. And he may have a better relationship with his bankers than Trump. They are suspending his loan payments for three months because of the flood. If only Wall Street operated like Iowa.
Our work may not be able to convey exactly what it’s like to be in what I suspect will one day be called “The great flood of 2008. But we’ll keep trying.
June 17, 2008 9:23PM
By Robert Ray
6:48 p.m.
I am standing at the front of my vehicle, laptop on the hood of the car; mosquitoes are swarming me as I swat them away and the sound of clean up in downtown Cedar Rapids is deafening. There are three guys about twenty feet away tossing drenched sandbags into the back of a pick-up truck as a generator pumps water out of their business. They own a gift card shop, looked like it was nice about a week ago, now it’s destroyed. The shop is covered in debris, now one of the guys is drinking a bottle of beer, good for him, he deserves that. They have no flood insurance as most of the shops and business’s in Cedar Rapids. Rough times are here for middle America.
It’s been a hell of a decade in America thus far.
The American economy is by far the biggest story in the world, hands down, the biggest. The extreme weather in the Midwest is only part of this continuing saga. This has and will have implications on the price of food, volatility in the commodities markets, shipping, exporting over the oceans and of course on people’s personal lives. This is serious BUSINESS out here and I can’t say that enough, these are not easy elements and visuals for all these people to cope with.
Human spirit is hardcore and the people in Iowa should be commended for their efforts to keep a good spin on their situation.
Tomorrow we will report from Iowa City on the clean-up efforts there. I imagine those folks will have a similar strength. But I have to be honest, if I lost my home, small business, farm crop and maybe even all my memories I am not sure I would be as positive as these Hawkeye’s are.
That guy to my right just opened his second beer, he deserves that again.
My right ear was just bitten by a lousy mosquito.
Actually, that guy just offered me a beer……Jeff Flock just came over and told me “no.” Yeah, I know, I am still working. But this town does have a great spirit indeed.
7:02pm
Robert Ray
June 16, 2008 6:38PM
By FOXBusiness.com
This is my first blog.
Blog, who came up with that name, blog, blogging, blogger.
Anyway, natural disasters are tough stories. Hard to navigate, hard to be fully accurate and extremely easy to blow out of proportion. The weather events in the Midwest may have real influence on the price of food, American exporting, railroad shipping and not to mention truck shipping because virtually all the roads in the region west are impassable. Oh, yeah, and if the trucker has to go 300 miles out of his way then he pays about $1,400 more than he normally would have. Not good.
Television is in every sense the micro of the macro, so the lens shows only what the photographer wants to give. My point is that I am trying to make sure that our viewers understand the micro…that not every town in Iowa and Illinois is devastated by flood waters or have been hammered by winds and hail. Of course, many of them have and there are plenty of people who have worked there whole dog gone lives only to see it washed away by a storm. I mean, that’s bad luck, right? No, no luck in natural disasters, just being near one is a catastrophe for anyone involved.
All disasters ring of a certain tone, they have character traits inherent to tough times:
-Suffering
-Anxiety
-Despair
-Laughter
-Hope
-Anger
Really, a roller coaster on the human emotions. All Natural Disasters also share another similar trait, people seem to forget about them once they are done gawking at the television and telling their friends and family things like, “how bad it must be to be that guy who lost his house in the flood waters,” or “we should really do something to help those people out on the television.”
So, allow me to finally make my point. Journalists need to be careful and accurate about what they say, show and infer. And one last thought, all natural disasters affect local, regional and national economies in some fashion. Next week, the Taco shells you buy at the grocer may be up by 5-10%, are you going to notice and if you do, will you think that the inflation came from the flooding in the Midwest? Look into it.
-Robert Ray
June 16, 2008 6:06PM
By FOXBusiness.com
They’re calling this a 500 year flood. I also covered the 1993 Mississippi flooding, which was also called the 500 year flood.
My understanding of a 500 year flood is that it comes once every 500 years. Not sure who is doing the arithmetic but something does not compute. I talked to the mayor of Muscatine, Iowa, Dick O’Briden, about this today as I stood hip deep in floodwater in downtown Muscatine and he agrees that something is off.
Muscatine is just south of the Quad Cities, right on the Mississippi River. Both river barges and train lines pass through town and right now there is no action on either. Barge traffic has been shut since last week with the locks running wide open because of the increased flow. Several loaded barges are visible from the shore…stranded when the water got too high. Dick O”Brien was born and raised in Muscatine but left for about 40 years to work for GM and BMW. He tells me he moved back to retire and play golf but ended up getting elected mayor 13 years ago. “Not a lucky year,” I suggested.
O’Brien says when he sees pictures of Cedar Rapids and Iowa City he thinks Muscatine IS lucky.
Business History
One of the highlights of covering floods on the river towns is drinking in (pardon pun) their history…and they all have a rich business history. Frank Kelly runs an organization called the Downtown Action Alliance aimed at revitalizing Muscatine’s downtown. He tells me Muscatine was once dubbed the “Pearl Button Capital of the World,” thanks to fresh water clam beds nearby in the river. Weber and Sons Button Company was in 1915 the world’s foremost producer of fancy pearl buttons and the company exists in town to this day. It is not threatened by the floodwaters, though the town’s two biggest businesses are.
Office Furniture Capital
If you’ve sat in office chairs over the years chances are pretty good one was made by HNI Corp. The fortune 1000 company is the maker of HON office furniture and several other brands. It is the world’s second largest office furniture maker. HNI trades under that symbol on the NYSE. Muscatine constructs temporary concrete and steel levees to protect HNI’s riverfront complex. So far it’s holding and the plant that makes oak laminate for office desks is humming along oblivious to the water 50 feet from its doors.
The other big employer in town is Muscatine Food Corporation. A smaller version of Archer Daniels Midland, Muscatine Food processes literally millions of bushels of corn into sweetners, animal feed and various other food products. The levee protecting its operations (unlike the one at HNI) is made of earth. I talked to some locals today who say there is a lot of water bubbling up on the wrong side of that levee. The longer water stays up on an earthen berm, the more saturated it gets and the more likely it will give way. Right now the Mississippi isn’t supposed to crest here until at least Tuesday. The crests will come much later downriver. That means several more days of high water on levees up and down the Mississippi that may not be able to hold.
Maybe this is a 1000-year flood.
-Jeff Flock
