FLOODZ!
I slept soo long. I actually went to bed pretty early last night, especially considering it was a Friday. I was so exhausted from the ordeal we had to deal with today that all I wanted to do was pass out.
Officials were getting ready to close the last bridge in Iowa City that crossed the Iowa River yesterday, so Colin had to leave work early in order to be able to pick me up (I work in a suburb of Iowa City... Coralville, on the other side of the Iowa River), so I had to leave early on my first day of training at my new job. Hopefully, they should be understanding about the whole situation and won't penalize me.
The way that we had taken into work in the morning was now closed due to flooding. We decided to try to take the interstate all the way home, but we were turned around by the state highway patrol, because part of the interstate was underwater. They told us the only way to get home was to go up to Waterloo (over 2 hours northwest) and hit hwy 20 to Dubuque (hour and a half north) and then follow the Mississippi south on hwy 61, but who knows if 61 is open or not... So, we fished the atlas out of Colin's trunk, and we navigated our way home.
We ended up having to backtrack through Iowa City on I-80, and then up to Cedar Rapids on the I-380. Traffic was backed up for several miles on I-380 due to people merging off of Hwy US 30 which was also backed up on the Westbound due to evacuations. Eastbound was closed. It took us approximately 2+ hours to drive about 12 miles through part of Cedar Rapids (including downtown, which is the most heavily affected area. It's completely flooded). We finally were able to take our exit off and get gas. Then we caught US100-US151-US64-US38-US30-US38 all the way home.
All in all, from the time Colin left his work to come pick me up, it took us 7 hours to get home from work yesterday.
Here's a map of our journey.
Point A is where we started. B is where we were turned around by Hwy Patrol and we had to backtrack to C, and you can figure out the rest. Oh, and D is where we had to drive through some water from the Wapsipinicon River in the town of Olin. That was very exciting. :P
I tried to take some on Colin's phone while we were stuck in traffic in downtown Cedar Rapids. There are some fucked up videos of the flooding here, if anyone's interested at all!
The building in this first picture here... Is on an island. That's the court house, and it sits on Municipal Island surrounded by the Cedar. The entire island is submerged.
Officials were getting ready to close the last bridge in Iowa City that crossed the Iowa River yesterday, so Colin had to leave work early in order to be able to pick me up (I work in a suburb of Iowa City... Coralville, on the other side of the Iowa River), so I had to leave early on my first day of training at my new job. Hopefully, they should be understanding about the whole situation and won't penalize me.
The way that we had taken into work in the morning was now closed due to flooding. We decided to try to take the interstate all the way home, but we were turned around by the state highway patrol, because part of the interstate was underwater. They told us the only way to get home was to go up to Waterloo (over 2 hours northwest) and hit hwy 20 to Dubuque (hour and a half north) and then follow the Mississippi south on hwy 61, but who knows if 61 is open or not... So, we fished the atlas out of Colin's trunk, and we navigated our way home.
We ended up having to backtrack through Iowa City on I-80, and then up to Cedar Rapids on the I-380. Traffic was backed up for several miles on I-380 due to people merging off of Hwy US 30 which was also backed up on the Westbound due to evacuations. Eastbound was closed. It took us approximately 2+ hours to drive about 12 miles through part of Cedar Rapids (including downtown, which is the most heavily affected area. It's completely flooded). We finally were able to take our exit off and get gas. Then we caught US100-US151-US64-US38-US30-US38 all the way home.
All in all, from the time Colin left his work to come pick me up, it took us 7 hours to get home from work yesterday.
Here's a map of our journey.
Point A is where we started. B is where we were turned around by Hwy Patrol and we had to backtrack to C, and you can figure out the rest. Oh, and D is where we had to drive through some water from the Wapsipinicon River in the town of Olin. That was very exciting. :P
I tried to take some on Colin's phone while we were stuck in traffic in downtown Cedar Rapids. There are some fucked up videos of the flooding here, if anyone's interested at all!
The building in this first picture here... Is on an island. That's the court house, and it sits on Municipal Island surrounded by the Cedar. The entire island is submerged.