2008 flood: the lucky move on

I happened past a demolition crew on Normandy Drive last week as they were scraping up and hauling away the last splinters of somebody's home.

As I did, I caught the unmistakable smell of floodwater, that same dark, swampy stink we all got so used to two years ago.

It squished up from soaked carpeting in Coralville office buildings and lingered over piles of soggy drywall at River Front Estates. The same stench in Time Check and Idyllwild and too many neighborhoods to mention, many still knocked sideways, more than 700 days after the disaster.

What's the longest word in the English language? Ask anyone in Czech Village: It's “recovery.”

But I'd almost forgot that mushroomy smell which weighed heavy in the air during the summer of 2008, so thick you could taste it - almost feel it - in neighborhoods throughout Linn and Johnson counties.

I've had the luxury of forgetting, a lot of us have. Not everyone, of course.

Two years later, there still are homeowners in limbo. Demolition crews are tearing down homes in Cedar Rapids neighborhoods. Down around Normandy Drive, it's like a dreamscape with little island households going about their lives - watching television, mowing the lawn, having a few friends for dinner between vacant houses.

There still are a couple “For Sale” signs in the Parkview Terrace neighborhood, but more and more, there are leveled lots where houses once stood - like the missing teeth of a neighborhood socked square in the jaw.

A lot of people say a flood's the worst kind of natural disaster. The water just keeps on coming.

Even now, two years after the flood water slinked back into the area's rivers and creeks, it isn't really gone. It will be with us for a long time.

But for most of us, its presence will be punctuated. We'll think of it when the skies cloud over and the rivers lick their banks, or in winter, looking anxiously over a pile of snow and wondering how fast it might melt. Or walking past a demolition crew as they tear and scrape and load up the wreckage of somebody else's home.

For the first few weeks after the water hit back in 2008, I'd roam flooded neighborhoods with no particular story assignment - just to see what was going on. I always found more stories than I could write. I don't look for those stories anymore, not like I used to. Not many of us do. We've moved on. We're lucky.

But those stories are still there, whether we're reading them or not.

The stench of floodwater lingers.

Comments: (319) 339-3154; jennifer.hemmingsen@gazcomm.com