Abbie's Real Life Blog

Crazy flooding going on this year in the Midwest.  I have a friend in Cedar Rapids, which has been all over the news since the Cedar River is out of its banks.  I have another friend who farms in north Missouri, and I think he just finally started planting for this year.  And I saw a request for help with sandbagging efforts in Clarksville, Missouri, where the river is much higher than flood stage already and the Mississippi hasn’t crested there yet.

Columbia is near the Missouri River, but it’s on a plateau and is not really terribly affected by the flooding.  Many of the small communities nearby are affected, and some of the people who commute to Columbia for work at the University are affected by it.  Some come from Boonville, and pass through the river bottoms and over the river on their way to work every day.  But Columbia itself is several miles away from the river itself (unusual, I think, for a mid-sized Midwestern town that was settled in the 1800s, but it’s all about the location of the land-grant university).

I remember the Great Flood of 1993 (referred to as such, with the capital letters, in this part of the world).  I had had my driver’s license for several months, and since we lived in a very rural area, I took in a lot of territory in my car.  I’m not sure I had permission to be in Chillicothe on the evening that they closed the bridges on Highway 36 between Chillicothe and Brookfield, but I was in Chillicothe and I was one of the last over the bridge on my way home.  After that, traffic had to be diverted about an hour out of the way to get through.  I think my parents were on a school bus that was coming back from Kansas City that night, and they didn’t make it.  They had to take the detour.

Anyway, I had an ex-boyfriend who lived in St. Louis at the time, and he spent lots of weekends sandbagging in St. Charles and around the river areas at the time.  Very intense efforts.

There’s been a lot of talk about the floods this year and the similarities to the floods of 1993, but I certainly hope it doesn’t end up being like that.  That was quite a year.