Alright Fam, I will do my best to update you on what I've been doing here in Cedar Rapids for the past month. I'm doing this at work so if it stops suddenly it's because we caught a run and I had to log off. If I don't, someone will come in and send out an embarassing department-wide email under my name.

It all started about August 8th. I pumped my first fire which was suspicious in nature, I will come back to that later. On the 9th we used our boats to give people rides up at the Ellis boat harbor so they could get their boats out of the water at the very last moment (See picture above, Im towards the front). At the end of the day it was starting to sprinkle and lighting out so we tried to get back to the boat dock quickly. We were yelled and cussed at by the houseboat people because we "were causing too much of a wake" and it was going to damage their 'houses'. We actually had to call the police because they were getting so angry with us. I guess their houses smashing into that railway bridge wasn't nearly as bad as our 'wake'. I smile everytime I see that picture of their houses against the bridge. Assholes.

When I worked June 11th, the day before the flood really hit. I was out at Station 6 so I had no idea what was going on down at Central station. They were sandbagging and putting things up on tables so they wouldn't get wet. At this point we were supposed to get one foot of water in the station. We actually got 12 feet. A fridge was lodged up in the celing.

On the 12th, I sat at home and watched everything on TV. Errily similar to what I was doing when Katrina was happening, only now it was happening in my backyard. (Not literally, our place was not touched). On the 13th I was on a boat all day in the Czech Villiage. We pulled a couple people out of their second story windows and about 25 pets throughout the day. I had one cat by it's neck and it swung around and scratched my arm with it's hind legs. I thought about throwing it in the water but we were pretty close to shore (I had an audience) and that would probably be too mean. This is also when Channel 2 wanted to take a tour of the area and the news guy tricked me into doing an interview. I never got to see it. Usually this would be a big deal but when other guys have their picture on the front page of the New York Times, the LA Times and on the news in Germany, Channel 2 isn't that big of a deal.

The rest of the month is a blur of being at work, doing my laundry at the station, eating peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, and sleeping about 3 hours at night. Since Central is totally lost, the trucks had to be moved to stations all over the city. All of our reserve equipment and special operations trailers are sitting outside in a parking lot. For a while we lost all of our station phones and radio contact. Texas Roadhouse was donating lunch and dinner everyday, we had 16 guys sleeping at a station designed for 3, we had to run lights and sirens just to get through town; it was just weird. There is really no good way to describe how different things were and how much the term 'fly by the seat of your pants' became our department mantra.

Since June 8th, I have worked 22 out of33 days. I worked 165 hours straight with a 12 hour break at one point, and then came back 3 days later and worked another 120 hours.

The days in red are all the days I worked from June 8th till today (July 10th).

It sounds like they are going to tear down Central station. No one knows yet if they are going to build a new station in the same spot (with first floor being only apparatus parking and administration/living quarters on the second floor) or if they are going to look for a new spot. To think of everything we lost at the station, all those little things that can't be replaced, is very sad. That place was a second home to me. I was able to walk through it the other day and it has been totally stripped down to the cinder block walls and metal studs. Weird stuff.

Someone from FEMA said that their list of disasters goes 1) Katrina 2) 9-11 3) Iowa Floods, and our chief said recently that this flood is in the top 5 for American natural disasters. It sounds like when people realize how little they are going to get from FEMA, we could average one or two house fires every day.

That's all I can really think of at the moment but I will update again soon when I think of more stories and stuff to write about.

Dicky