Looking At The Flood Of '29

When Ed Pettus showed me the message on the back of a 1929 postcard he recently purchased, I was amazed at how it read like it could have been written after the 2008 flood except for one notable exception -- The Gazette continued publishing this year. (See my Ramblin' column in today's Gazette.)

The picture on the postcard definitely looks like First Avenue West, with three men in a boat rowing past what appears to be the Salem United Methodist Church. What do you think?

A quick search on the Internet finds other photos from the 1929 Flood, including The Gazette's own John McGlothlen who posted them on his Looking in at Iowa blog which you can also find in the blog listing at www.gazetteonline.com John also has a link to a Flickr slideshow of the pictures.

Here's another Flood of 1929 series of photographs rescued from the poster's grandmother's estate. Some very interesting pictures here really show how bad that flood was, too. Other photos appear to show Kansas City during its flood of 2008 and Cedar Rapids during the winter.

If you search more extensively, maybe you can find more photos of Cedar Rapids during the Flood of 1929 and also the flood of 1961.

What did we learn from those floods and the Flood of 2008? Only time will tell.