If you catch even a glimpse of anything remotely related to national news, you'll see that in recent days the midwest has been pummelled with a variety of storms. Most have been in the form of flooding rains and tornadoes. Minnesota hasn't been missed by any of these storms.
Hardest hit, once again, has been southern and southeastern Minnesota and that hits home to me because the city where I grew up (near) is once again being hit hard by flood waters. Especially close to home is this story which happened exactly a mile from the farm where I grew up. To sum things up, a large drainage ditch apparently overflowed its banks, washed out the paved county road and claimed the life of a man who was unfortunate enough to attempt crossing the washout and being swept under the rushing water.
Six inches of rain falling fast on top of already saturated ground from Saturday's flooding rains tends to have what experts refer to as a "negative effect". I prefer to call it a curse, though.
I can't even begin to count how many times flooding (of lesser extent) has hit the farm where I spent many years playing with a stick as my only toy. We were a poor family and that stick, as well as my imagination, was all I had. Well, those two things and the fact that I could, on occasion, help my dad set up barricades in the neighborhood when floods happened. It was exciting to ride along to the township garage and help him load the piles of barricades into the back of that rusty 1977 red Ford F-150. It was also fearful because there was the outside chance that rust had eaten away the last remnants of bolts anchoring the box to the frame but it's still together.
Anyhow, I can imagine today that my dad is tooling around setting up barricades and watching a few acres of his corn and soybean crop drift its way toward Iowa and eventually into the nearby Cedar River. At least we won't run the risk of setting anything on fire with our annual fireworks extravaganza.
UPDATE:
The Minneapolis Star Tribune has a great video from Austin and with the aerial shots interspersed I can clearly see an apartment building where I once lived that is very much surrounded by water and many businesses I used to frequent which yesterday were fighting back the rising flood waters. Today begins the cleanup.
9 comments:
I fear this year will be horrible weather wise. We live one block from the Des Plaines river which is on flood watch. :o(
It reminds me of the movie "The River". I've had only one incident here where water was coming into the house. We were out in pouring rain with buckets (futile) and electric pumps (a little less futile) trying to keep the water out of the house.
I hope everything goes well for your family but we've been having some weird weather.
In talking with my parents, they were telling how they stayed up through the night making sure that their basement's sump pump motor didn't burn out as it never shut off for over 6 hours.
I am sending positive thoughts your family's way. I can totally understand how scary that is. Here in Sacramento, we are a town surrounded by rivers and have had more of our share of flooding when the melt off comes down the valley from Lake Tahoe. As a child, my mother's business was horribly flooded and we lost so much...it was just so sad.
Again, my thoughts are with you!!!
rain is knocking here in india too with few occasional visits already made.
I hear the Cedar is going down... True?
The Cedar River is going down in Austin but that only menas the water is flowing south and likely to make things worse in Cedar Rapids, IA.
I been keeping my eye on that...looks totally awful.
Hope your parents stay safe. I ahven't seen anything this bad sive the mississipi jumped it's banks a dozen years ago.
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