On Monday, August 21, CNN had a brief segment documenting the extensive storm damage in eastern Iowa, including the city of Cedar Rapids.
As I watched from my home, in a small town adjacent to where the damage was the worst, I thought Damn, CNN, took you long enough.
But it wasn’t just CNN. It was everyone. No major media outlets provided any more than the briefest of mentions of what was happening in Iowa until many days had passed.
The first coverage I saw aired a full week later, a full week after east-central Iowa was devastated by a wind storm that did so much damage to buildings and crops that the path of destruction could be seen from space. Or, perhaps, seen from an airplane as people jet from New York to L.A.
Because that’s what we are to most of this country: just another flyover state.
Around noon on August 10, a storm known as a "derecho" slammed a span of 800 miles with hurricane-force winds, upwards of 140 miles per hour in some places. That would make it a Category 4, if you were wondering.
Unlike your typical Midwestern tornado, the wind speed sustained this force for the better part of an hour. People had very little warning, and it’s insanely lucky that only three deaths were attributed to this weather event. The running joke about Midwesterners is that when the tornado siren goes off, we head outside with a Busch Light and some ranch dressing to watch the storm. In this case, the alerts we heard were only for a severe thunderstorm. A weather alert for a derecho doesn’t exist, because we’ve never had one in recent memory.
People lost their homes. Grain silos buckled, and barns ripped in half. 43% of the corn and soybean crops, the cornerstone of our state’s economy, was ravaged. 170,000 were without electricity in sweltering summer temperatures, and there are some houses that STILL don’t have power. Many local schools also sustained significant damage.
Imagine this agonizing event, this apocalyptic devastation. Imagine the downed power lines, the smashed cars, the dwellings ripped open like doll houses. Imagine the church down the street from my house, with its historical stained glass windows smashed in by debris, bisected by a centuries-old tree.
Our one comfort for many nights was looking at the stars. With half of the state pitch black after sunset, the Milky Way was astonishingly beautiful. In the morning, though, there would be rotten food in the fridge and freezer, missing pets, and a cell service dead zone that left us cut off from everyone whose house we couldn’t walk to.
Hold all of that in your mind, and then remember another key element to this tragedy — all of this happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, when our hospitals were full. Schools in the state were gearing up to start, with students, parents, and teachers on edge about face coverings, exposure, sanitization plans, etc. Now those students can’t even attend, as their school buildings are not habitable yet.
As with any disaster, our vulnerable people are displaced, some living in tents outside the ruins of their apartment buildings, others moving in with relatives in other cities and enrolling their students in new schools just a few days (or even hours) before they started the new school year.
Right now we live in a loud, scary, complicated world. I suppose it’s pretty easy for people who live on either coast to put the Midwest out of their minds. With wildfires in California and hurricanes headed for Florida and the East Coast, a bunch of destroyed corn and farm equipment seems pretty insignificant. However, the slow response to alert the nation to this natural disaster and the ease with which people seem to be able to shrug it off is simply unfair.
The Midwest matters. Iowa matters, even if all you do is fly over it.
We’re hurting, and we still need your help.
