FEMA has been in the area since the end of last week. There's not much they can do right now because the housings/buildings all need to be inspected before they can decide what to do with them and then homeowners need to meet with their insurance agents (at least that's what I gather from the news reports). With at least 3,500 houses impacted in Cedar Rapids alone, it's going to take some time.

I drove through the downtown area on the way to a minor league baseball game last night and it was just depressing seeing all the furniture and drywall and crap that is being loaded up on the curb for removal and all the houses that were marked uninhabitable. And the smell is horrendous. CR is already known as the city of five smells;this trumps them all.

Bush isn't even smart enough to HAVE a laboratory.....that's that empty space where Obama's basketball court is going.

Some friends and I though we'd be do-gooders after the 1993 floods so that summer we went out for a few days to help with cleanup. The most intense thing I remember is the smell: seriously the worst thing I can remember smelling to the point where at one house I really wasn't a whole lot of use because I kept gagging so much I had to keep running outside to keep from throwing up.

I don't think we were really much use, but it was very educational for us. Our section of the Atlanta suburbs hadn't prepared us for much.

I may regret asking this, but what are the five smells?

Cedar Rapids has five main manufacturing companies that all have very distinct smells:
Quaker Oats
Cargill
Archer Daniels Midland (ADM)
General Mills
Penford

Some days it's not too bad - like when Quaker is making Crunch Berries or Cinnamon Life - others it's just downright nasty and you have to breathe through your mouth.

The actual tourism tagline for the CR is "The City of Five Seasons" (the fifth season is the season to enjoy them all/enjoy life :rolleyes:). There's a gigantic metal sculpture downtown near the river called the Tree of Five Seasons.
http://i31.tinypic.com/2po7bwm.jpg

NOTHING can come close to Tacoma back in the day-Remember:eek:;):D
I have a story about it from the WSJ.

Screwing up royally in Wisconsin. One of the counties here was hit so hard that I-94 is still under water there and that is STILL not a disaster area and FEMA just got there yesterday. Some of the other counties were declared weeks ago.

It floods every year in Wisconsin (although never as bad as Iowa) and these are the worst floods I've seen in my life. I live in the highest town in my county and there were roads under 2-3 feet of water.

Minor Hi-jack.
Heard on news (either CNN or CBS) that FEMA had surplussed 1000's of boxes (ie ready to if not already given away) that had been in warehouse for NO's flood. They thought they were not needed as they never were delivered!!!!
Network Investigative Unit found out and people waiting for years finally received what they were due!

I'm sorry we're hogging FEMA's attention. :( We'll try to be better at sharing.

Two interesting stories from the front pages today about the Midwest flooding.
Call for Change Ignored, Levees Remain Patchy

CANTON, Mo. — The levees along the Mississippi River offer a patchwork of unpredictable protections. Some are tall and earthen, others aging and sandy, and many along its tributaries uncataloged by federal officials.
The levees are owned and maintained by all sorts of towns, agencies, even individual farmers, making the work in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri last week of gaming the flood — calculating where water levels would exceed the capacity of the protective walls — especially agonizing.
After the last devastating flood in the Midwest 15 years ago, a committee of experts commissioned by the Clinton administration issued a 272-page report that recommended a more uniform approach to managing rising waters along the Mississippi and its tributaries, including giving the principal responsibility for many of the levees to the Army Corps of Engineers.
But the committee chairman, Gerald E. Galloway Jr., a former brigadier general with the Corps of Engineers, said in an interview that few broad changes were made once the floodwaters of 1993 receded and were forgotten.......
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/us...er&oref=slogin

Midwest floods' economic fallout uncertain

[COLOR=#333333! important]With thousands of acres submerged, the outlook seems dire, but it's still too early to say how the disaster will affect food prices and other economic gauges.[/COLOR]
[COLOR=#999999! important]By Richard Fausset, P.J. Huffstutter and Stephen Braun, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
June 22, 2008 [/COLOR]
ELSBERRY, MO -- . -- Frayed optimism is the best that flood-weary Midwest residents can cling to after a harrowing month of battering rainstorms and swollen rivers that overtopped sodden levees in Iowa and then in Illinois and Missouri.

The signs of economic fallout seem evident from the stark televised images: thousands of acres of fields submerged, towns isolated by muddy moats, barges and trains stalled, families left homeless.
But the contours of the flood's dislocation are still uncertain, economists and agriculture experts say, and might well be mitigated if the region is spared more high water in the critical coming weeks. A month of dry, balmy weather could spell the difference between a limited disaster and the kind of full-scale crisis that gripped the upper Mississippi River basin for months after the historic floods of 1993.

"The economy's a lot more flexible than we give it credit for," said Richard Mattoon, a senior economist with the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago. "The tough question is how much the flood will change the picture for the Midwest and the national economy -- or will it only reinforce trends that were already going on?"

How deep the misery goes, how long it lasts and how far it spreads to the nation and the world beyond depends on time, weather and a global economy already under stress.

When farmers crowded into their regular tables at Rachel's Restaurant on Friday morning in the Mississippi River town of Elsberry, they shared the few silver linings they could muster -- and commiserated over the grim tidings that seemed to be spreading as inexorably as the river.

After already having lost half of his 1,600 acres of corn and beans to the Mississippi, Steve Gray still held out hope that he will get by. "I'll make it some way," he said.

Market analysts have offered up dire warnings of a paralyzed heartland and record crop prices that could set off inflationary spirals throughout the national and world economy. On Thursday, the Rural Mainstreet Index, a monthly survey of more than 200 bank executives in 10 Midwest states, found that more than 41% said they expected the recent floods to "have a significant impact" on America's heartland economy......
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...0,525636.story

Oh, you need it more than we do - it's just bizarre to me that the county that is the hardest hit is STILL waiting for a FEMA declaration.

Tacoma still smells when the mill is operating.