It’s like a garage sale gone bad throughout much of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Furniture. Appliances. Mattresses. Knick-knacks. You’ll find all kinds of things set out on sidewalks throughout Iowa’s second largest city, unwanted by their owners. But these discarded items, some of them family keepsakes, are not for sale. Instead, they’re headed for the dump, the material victims if you will, of this month’s historic flooding in Iowa, which ravaged much of this state’s second largest city, with a population of 124,000.

Outside the house of Bonnie Pansegrau, friends and family clothed in white, full-bodied haz-mat suits with hospital masks covering their noses and mouths, toss out soggy piles of putrid smelling garbage. Next to the brown, slime stained washer and dryer sits stacks of National Geographic, which Pansegrau’s husband had collected with great care over the years.

In these piles, ironically, you could learn about natural disasters of generations ago, because Pansegrau had collected every edition of the magazine dating back to the early 1920s. The fact that these treasured, lifelong posessions have now become waste in a wasteland, gnaws at Pansegrau’s son, John

“Yesterday, I was having a really bad time,” Pansegrau told me, his voice cracking and eyes welling with tears as he shared a few minutes of time with me. “I’ve called every friend that I know, and they’re coming. But after a while, what do you do? You can’t just keep asking everyone to kill themselves to help. It’s horrific. It really is.”

Pansegrau’s mother evacuated her house last Wednesday. It was only two days ago, that police permitted her re-entry to launch her clean-up. Yet, many of her neighbors have yet to return.

Just a street away, Iowa National Guardsmen are enforcing an order to keep residents out of their homes. On these streets, puddles of brown, fetid water have yet to go away. And there is an unmistakable mark of muck and grime stained on homes, a vestige of the high water mark of the Cedar River, similar to what I encountered in New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina.

Many Iowans have called this flood their Katrina. John Pansegrau says the TV images cannot convey the enormity of this natural disaster.

“I watched Katrina on t-v. And you’re like, Wow! That’s terrible. But you don’t sit and see what you’ve played with 45 years ago come floating out of a basement. You don’t grab stuff that your father collected all his life. You don’t have all your possessions, all your mother’s Christmas ornaments come floating out of the muck. You don’t understand it. I never did.”

“If somebody told you this was as bad as Katrina, you wouldn’t believe it until you saw it,” stressed Dan Warkel, one of Pansegrau’s neighbors. Warkel and his fiance Christine Knight have lived in their house for 5 years, where the floodwater of the Cedar River filled their basement and pushed a half-foot up into their first floor. Knight says, “We didn’t expect that much water.” They lost scrapbooks and “tons of pictures,” but characterize themselves as emotionally upbeat as opposed to others in this city who seem beat up.

When the Cedar River spilled over it’s banks last week, it submerged 3,900 properties over a 9.2 square mile area of 1,300 blocks in this city.

Warkel says the community response to this tragedy has been incredibly reassuring. He says he’s getting to bond with neighbors, whom he waved to over the years, but said little more.

When the clean-up is all over, he vowed there would be “a big neighborhood block party.” His fiance, chimed in with her own version of what their neighborhood should do. “Throw a garage sale,” she said, where it would free pickings for those Cedar Rapids’ residents who came across something they once owned. “No money. If it’s yours, take it.”