Joseph L. Murphy, Photographer/Writer, Iowa Farm Bureau Federation

The hand-painted, faded sign outside the town’s water and sewer department screams of irony. It reads, “This little town is like heaven to us. Don’t drive like hell through it.”

In Oakville, Iowa, there’s no one driving fast these days. Even driving itself isn’t possible in many places with buckled roads filling the landscape and water logged streets in other stretches.

On June 14th, the historic flood of 2008, swamped Oakville with water as high as 5 to 7 feet rushing through the downtown. The sheer force of the swollen Iowa River, caused the levee outside of town to burst open, unleashing torrents of water into this low-lying farming community with a population of about 400.

Joseph L. Murphy, Photographer/Writer, Iowa Farm Bureau Federation

Three weeks later, the Iowa River has yet to fully recede in Oakville. The dank smell of mildew permeates the air. And swarms of mosquitoes and mayflies have taken over some blocks.

Homeowner Kerry Hale is ready to pack up and leave…forever. “To rebuild a place like this….it’s not worth the hassle.” Hale is one of dozens of residents who signed a petition to encourage a federal buyout of the homes here.

Many of the petitioners say they’re living in limbo. Their homes are wrecks, but they say they can’t afford to leave unless their property is deemed to be in the flood plain. “To have it known that you are definitely in the flood plain, why would you want to spend so much money to have it happen again” questioned Hale.

Joseph L. Murphy, Photographer/Writer, Iowa Farm Bureau Federation

But others aren’t ready to give up just yet on a town that’s been around since the early 1800’s. “I’m staying. This is home. Nowhere to go but here,” stressed homeonwer Kirk Swanson.

As determined as Swanson is to rebuild, even if the federal government doesn’t buy out Oakvile, starting over will not be easy, given all the mold stained homes and crop land lost. Mind you, if too many residents here leave, the tax base could dry up. But Swanson is undettered. “It doesn’t matter if I have to put in a septic system or a well, or whatever, I am staying.”

At this point, there’s no guarantee the town won’t flood again. And yet, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is spending more than 800,000 dollars for a temporary fix for Oakville, on the levee that broke just west of town.

With some of our stories, you’re asked to dig deep and scrape up some “dirt” on someone or something.

Then, there are the times, when you’re asked to get dirt-y.

Today, is one of those dirty days. The location: Green Bay, Wisconsin. The place: a dairy barn. The story: cows that sleep on waterbeds.

Now, before you city slickers laugh out loud, this is serious stuff for the dairy farmer.

A content cow produces more milk, Alan Tauscher tells me. “Happy, healthy cows are where we make our money,” stresses Tauscher, who runs this second generation dairy farm with two of his brothers. “A cow that is not at peak health is stressed and is not gonna produce as much milk as a cow that is a comfortable relaxed animal.”

About 6 years ago, Tauscher introduced water beds to the 250 cows which comprise his heard. He estimates that his cows have been producing about 500 extra gallons of milk annually since the installation of these beds.

The beds themselves first started showing up in the U-S in the late nineties…the technology borrowed and modified from dairy farmers in Europe. The mattress, with its thick rubber skin, is able to accommodate the weight of a cow, which in some cases, tops 15 hundred pounds.

Most bosses frown on idleness, but the Tauschers seem to get giddy when their herd is laying down. The reason: more blood circulates through the udder when a cow is at rest. And the greater the circulation….down there…the more milk a cow produces.

Two of the many reasons I flat out love my profession: we get to meet some of the kindest and most interesting people (like the Tauschers), and I’m always learning fascinating things.

Here’s something else I betcha you may not have known. The next time someone tells you they went cow tipping, don’t believe them. “They were up to something else,” Mark Tasucher, Alan’s brother tells me with a wide grin. Mark says cows are so heavy, and so stable, that there is no way one teenager, or even ten, could take down a cow. He says the only way to get a cow down is to pull her to the ground with a rope. Would love to hear you weigh in on that one! Gotta head back now to the manure piles.

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.”

Kids experience all kinds of new things during college. But how many students can say they’ve lived through a flood the National Weather Service says happens once every 500 years?

Some of the coeds at the University of Iowa can now say so. The President of the University, located in Iowa City, Iowa has called this historic flooding the greatest threat in the 161 year history of the University.

The Iowa River, which crested at 31.5 feet over the weekend damaged 16 buildings on campus, some with 8 feet of water inside.

“It’s really hard to see this,” Reginia Bailey told me. Bailey is the mayor of this beautiful, progressive city, where the Iowa River customarily runs through it in picturesque fashion. Not anymore. “We saw this 15 years ago. It’s hard to see it again.”

One of the misconceptions about this bout of flooding is that when you hear a river has crested, or hit its high water mark, it doesn’t mean the water is quickly going away. In the case of Iowa City, Mayor Bailey says it could be another 7 to 10 days before the Iowa River drops to a level below the river’s previous high mark, which was set during the then-record flood of 1993. Meantime, many cities along the Mississippi River in southeastern Iowa are expecting to see record crests of the Mississippi later this week.

The ubiquity of water in Iowa is expected to cost the state billions of dollars. Lives have been lost. Buildings have been ruined, but the resolve of so many in Iowa remains strong, such as pastor Jeff Gilmore.

For the last 17 years, Gilmore has been with the Parkview Evangelical Free Church in Iowa City, which has been swallowed by the Iowa River, with water at least 10 feet high surrounding the building. (I know this because there was water in the church’s parking lot right up to the bottom of a basketball rim. And basketball rims are typically 10 feet high). The church is one of the largest in the city with 1800 members.

To say that Gilmore is attached to his church might be an understatement. He’s raised 6 kids in this church and officiated the wedding of his mother and step-father at this church. But his ties appear to transcend material bonds. I asked him whether he is depressed about the fate which has befallen his church. He responded, “”A church is about its people. Not the building.” He went on to say, “The building just houses memories, which are not going away.”

For the foreseeable future, Gilmore’s congregation will be “a mobile church.” He’s holding services at a nearby high school.

This past weekend, his Sunday sermon focused on this historic flood. He called it, “How to Face Trials and Tribulations and Emerge Victorious”

It took generations to build Parkersburg, Iowa. It took only seconds to obliterate it.

Sunday afternoon, one of the deadlier tornadoes in Iowa history chewed up much of the this proud, farming community, killing four people in Parkersburg and two in nearby New Hartford. “This town is not just torn up. It’s gone,” stressed Butler County Sheriff Jason Johnson.

Johnson’s home was one of more than 400 damaged here. Another 220 buildings were destroyed including the town’s high school, its sole grocery store and its only gas station. “It’s catastrophic,” Johnson told me as he reflected on the damage. “It’s amazing how much energy this storm had.”

The National Weather Service has completed its preliminary damage survey of this tornado, and its data is staggering. It estimates that this twister spun on the ground for more than a hour, leaving behind a swath of damage 43 miles long. At one point, the tornado swelled to 1.2 miles wide and packed winds greater than 165 miles per hour. The assessment of the wind speed, however, may increase significantly when weather officials release their final report on this tornado.

Perry Bernard says the twister tried to suck him out of his home as he huddled in his basement with his family. “I was on top of my wife and kids with the pillows, trying to hold them down. And I could feel it start to pull me out. So, I just braced on to whatever I could.”

The tornado stripped Bernard’s home to its foundation. His family lost nearly everything. Yet the family was able to find some family photos, which his wife, Adriene tightly clutched as she talked to me about surviving this storm. “We’ve got our wedding pictures, our baby pictures, and those are the most important things. They’re irreplaceable.” “And, we’ve got our lives,” Perry Bernard interjected with a slight smile.

Coincidentally, the town installed an additional early warning tornado siren in Parkersburg less than two weeks ago. Firefighter Lean Thorne told me federal funding happened to be available, and there was a concern in this town, that as it grew in population, some parts of the community might be out of range to hear the existing tornado siren. “This community has a lot of pride. It will rebuild,” Thorne told me.

When covering natural disasters over the years, it is mind-boggling to imagine how victims can think long term as they struggle to live just a day at a time. And yet, shredded American flags have been put up on stripped trees throughout Parkersburg. The fortitude is admirable…the symbolism unmistakeable.