Hagenow for Iowa House

Early last Friday morning, a powerful thunderstorm rolled through Black Hawk County, hitting the city of Cedar Falls especially hard.  The National Weather Service has so far been unable to say how powerful the winds were, because the measuring equipment at the Waterloo airport was unable to get an accurate reading.  The NWS has said it is possible that there was a microburst over the city of Cedar Falls, which could result in wind speeds of up to 160 MPH (Link).  Some estimates I heard discussed was that the winds reached 100 mph.  The end result was a large number of damaged trees, downed power lines and structure damage.

On Saturday morning, I drive up to Cedar Falls to help my dad out with some fallen trees, one of which had fallen on to the roof of a rental property that my parents own in the Greenbrier neighborhood of Waterloo, a mile or two east of the Waterloo airport.

My first impression is that this was probably the worst wind damage that I’ve ever seen not caused my a tornado.  There were many large trees that were simply uprooted from the ground, and many others snapped off at the base.  Even a full day after the storm first hit, many city streets were still impassable, and the power was out to a large part of the west side of town.  From my perspective, the worst of the damage was around the UNI campus, Price lab School (possible future site of the proposed Research and Development Training School) and west toward Main Street.

After a long day of cutting down a few fallen trees, Amanda, my Mother and I took another drive through town.  It was remarkable to see how much progress had been made toward clearing up the debris.  We had several neighbors come and help us out, and we saw the same thing happening across town.  At the Lab School, we saw a lot of younger people out working to clean the limbs and carry it out to the curb for pickup.  They obviously had spent a good portion of the day helping out when they could have enjoyed their Saturday doing anything else.

Obviously, this storm was nothing like what had happened in Parkersburg a year before, but it was my own chance to see Iowans roll up their sleeves and get to work to clean up their community.  Just like during last year’s disasters, the people of Cedar Falls and Waterloo simply got up, dusted themselves off and got to work.  This is a prime example of what is great about Iowa.

Here are a few more of the pictures I took from Saturday. This one was a car parked on the corner of Olive and College:

This garage on 18th Street (near Tremont?) was blown across the alley into the garage on the right that is still standing, albeit leaning over.

1900 block of Clay Street.