ghost city

Today I was driven around the residential portions of Cedar Rapids that were most severely flooded during 2008. There are blocks and blocks of abandoned houses.

The story is unfortunate. Due to faulty gauges of some sort, the city authorities were too confident that the water would not breach the embankments along the Cedar River, or at least not as quickly as it did.

Once they realized the magnitude of their error, there was no time to lose. Police went through the neighborhood at 3 A.M., knocking on doors and telling people they had 15 minutes (!) to evacuate. Most of the area is not at all wealthy, and I would guess that many of these people lost pretty much everything they owned, given that 15-minute evacuation shock.

Some of the houses have already been torn down, while others still stand for now, and serve as nests for rats and a burgeoning feral cat population.

My maternal grandparents are buried in Czech National Cemetery above that area (it’s a city of heavily Czech ancestry), but luckily the cemetery is very high on a hill and was left unharmed even by this thousand-year flood.

Normally, this is a street with cars being driven on it: