10 million acres
Iowa got clobbered a few days ago. Really clobbered. Nobody is paying attention.
On Monday, Iowa was leveled by what amounted to a level-two hurricane. But you wouldn’t know that from reading, listening to or watching the news.
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Gusts of 112 mph were recorded in Linn County. As I drove through the town of Cedar Rapids on Monday, I saw billboards bent in half, whole buildings collapsed, trees smashed through roofs and windows. The scope and breadth of the disaster is still being calculated, but by some estimates, more than 10 million acres, or 43 percent, of the state’s soybean and corn crops have been damaged.
A quarter of a million Iowans are still without power. In Linn County, where I live, 79 percent of people are without power, still, three days after the disaster. Cell service is spotty, where it exists. The few gas stations and grocery stores with power only take cash. And good luck getting cash from your bank, which is most likely closed. Even if you have the money, lines snake around the gas stations, two hours long or more, and the grocery stores are chaos. A citywide curfew exists. You can see the Milky Way from the darkened downtown.
You know what all those days without power mean, right? A whole lot of spoiled food, and not much other food available.
My friend Ben Kaplan, a local photographer and videographer, described the situation this way: “There is no trash pickup. There are one hundred thousand fridges of rotting food. There are raccoons. There is no escape from the heat, except to run out of town to look for basic supplies in an air-conditioned car. Downtown, bricks and glass litter the sidewalks. Plate glass windows shattered during the storm. Many businesses have been physically destroyed. All restaurants lost all of their perishables. Factories are closed. Offices are closed. The economy — the whole thing — is stopped.” All of the destruction is compounded by complications from the pandemic, which make cleanup, charging stations and distributing meals all the more difficult.
And yet, unless you were living here, you wouldn’t know.
But hey, football.
Weird, no reports of that here at all. Something I would expect to see reported here.
Have not heard a thing about this from local TV news (though we are currently in AZ) or national programs. Even the online places seem to have nothing about it. Will be interesting to see if the actual newspaper will have anything about it Monday morning.
I don’t know what it is about derechos. Memphis had a massive one out of nowhere in 2K3 that did damage across the entire county. Nationally, nobody seemed to report on it. It was in late July, and some people didn’t have power for weeks.
The reasoning at the time was that it happened the day Uday and Qusay were killed, so no one covered anything else. Seemed a bit flimsy then and seems flimsy now.
There are many people in the USA who will do whatever they can to help when they hear about events like this. They can’t if they don’t hear.
I hadn’t heard a thing about it. Then shortly after reading this post I saw an NPR article. A friend shared a LinkedIn article that claimed the story was sidelined in part by the Kamala Harris announcement, and media outlets have trouble focusing on more than one thing. But there were lots of stories, and lots of news outlets, so the lack of coverage is surprising.
I hadn’t heard about this either. After reading this post I did a search on the topic and the top story that came up was about the locals wondering why they haven’t gotten any federal help yet. Trump probably doesn’t know about the storm since he gets all his information from watching TV. Somebody ought to tell him. Maybe he can go out there and have a photo op throwing paper towels to people.
The NPR article mentioned that Trump tweeted about the disaster on Tuesday, so it must have been in the news available to him. No disaster declaration yet. I’m not expecting one. I haven’t seen comments from the Biden camp, but that may just be that I haven’t come across them.
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/16/902868884/the-devastation-is-widespread-iowans-continue-to-struggle-in-aftermath-of-storm
We had heard it. It was in our local newspaper. Of course, it did run from Omaha, but our paper is perfectly capable of ignoring Omaha, in fact, they usually do.
I don’t know why derechos would be so poorly covered. I think they’re fascinating…and so destructive they should be interesting.
I’m usually wary of these “nobody is covering it” announcements, so I searched a bit. Pence campaigned in Des Moines a day or two after the storm and promised assistance, but didn’t provide specifics. There were a number of stories in USA Today, as well as many local outlets. Biden tweeted about the disaster a couple of days after. WaPo had a story about the lack of coverage about the same time that coverage appeared in national outlets beyond USA Today. The news was there, it just wasn’t as prominent as it might have been.
I’d never even heard of a derecho until one hit us a few years ago. We were protected from damage by the ridge just to the west of us, but there were trees down all around and most of the surrounding area lost power for up to a week.
I only knew because my cousin lives there.