catastrophe
If your job involves some sort of ongoing operational responsibility, and if your brain works anything like mine, you probably worry a bit about any extended absence, such as a long vacation. Something will break, right? And you won’t be there to fix it!
This is how I ended up with 5 weeks of stored-up vacation days, which in turn is how I ended up finally taking a long (2-week) vacation.
Of course, now that I’ve left, a bunch of ridiculous crap is happening at work — I fielded no less that 12 phone calls from work today, mostly about 2 nasty issues, and I know for a fact that 2 more are waiting in the wings.
But that’s not enough, oh no. The universe is playing havoc with my anxiety levels by also providing unprecedented flooding back home during the time we’re out of state.
Yeah, the whole damned town is underwater. If I were at home I would be filling sandbags in between bouts of troubleshooting.
I won’t belabor the point; this is apparently an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime flood situation, much worse than the previous record flood in 1993. Most of the routes I would take to work are closed, actually. My favorite park is entirely underwater, with only tree crowns and the tops of the kiddie rides (e.g. a 15-foot ferris wheel) visible over the churning brown muck.
You can find images on CNN or weather.com or presscitizen.com or kcrg.com (those last two being local news organizations). For context, though, here are some cell-camera snapshots I took before the flood, when there was just an unusually large amount of water, say within the last couple of weeks.
Here Daphne is forlorn as a hiking trail near Coralville Reservoir is partly submerged. We cheated our way around the submerged bit and then continued.
Daphne checks out the churning waters exiting the spillway at the Coralville Dam. The spot in which she stands has become, in the time between the snapshot and this writing, a deadly dangerous place to be as the waves are going right through the fence, and the water is actually up into the parking lot. The water is now well over the top of this particular dam, in case you hadn’t heard.
These next two are both North Dubuque street, my route home from work. Taken while driving through several inches of water, put there entirely by the rain. Again, these are photos from before the flood. This road is now impassable; it’s basically part of the river now.
Finally, these guys are fixing something at the water treatment plant just off the Burlington street bridge. I’m almost certain the platform these dudes are standing on is, by now, completely underwater.
I can’t really add anything else as I am many, many miles away. Go to the Press-Citizen site if you want up-to-date info.
