Nasty Iowa Weather

A post from Kelli–

If you have been watching the weather lately, you may have heard that there has been some funky weather going on here in Northeast Iowa.  Over the past few days, we have gotten 8+ inches of rain since Monday and it continues to rain.

This morning when I was talking to Mom, she mentioned that she had gotten an email from our favorite quilt shop, Forest Mills.  They mentioned that they would be closed for the day as they were experiencing some flooding.  I immediately called my mother-in-law who is friends with the ladies that run the shop and asked if they had heard anything.  She mentioned that she tried calling, but wasn’t able to reach either of the ladies.  She said that the road that they are on is prone to flooding so she thought that we should go down and check it out.

Before we even got there, we knew it would be bad.  On our way there, every small creek and usually dry waterway was a raging river and had outgrown its banks many times over.  At first, we didn’t know how close we would be able to get as they had road closed signs on the road.  We slowly made our way down the road and met up with Carolyn and Dianne.  What we saw next just gave me the shivers.

This picture was taken standing along the road, looking towards the quilt shop.  Normally, this water isn’t there and there is grass and a driveway there.

This is looking towards where the river is supposed to be from the driveway.  The river is normally close to the far row of trees and the lake that is present is completely covering a corn field.This picture is also taken from the driveway.  Where the trees start is usually where the river runs….but not today!

Here is the opposite side of the road.  You can see how bad the washout is.  A larger chuck of dirt had been washed out from underneath the road.  Later on in the morning, the county came in with many loads of gravel and started to dump it on the side of the road where the shoulder would have been and then pushed underneath the road with a back loader to firm up the road.

When we got in the garage, we could see that the basement was nearly full of water.  With the help of neighbors, friends and relatives, we got about 4 sump pumps working to try and pump all of the water out of the basement.  We also worked to clean up in the garage.  Everything was covered with a nasty layer of mud and so a lot of the items were unable to be saved.  We took a little break for lunch when it started raining again and then returned to cleaning.  After sandbagging the basement windows, we had about as much cleaned up as we could do.  The river was coming up again, all we could do was watch it.

After a bit, we decided to pack up and head home to get another pump to work on pumping out Dianne’s basement as it had accumulated about 4 feet during the day while we were working at the shop.  Hopefully, it continues to go down, but with more rain in the forecast for tonight, I don’t know how it will turn out.  Hopefully it won’t get any worse!