I have had a bunch of concerned calls and e-mails about the flooding situation here in Iowa and at our university so I thought I would let everyone know what the situation is. Unfortunately our boathouse is under water, but we are all safe. The building our boathouse is in was not made for that purpose and was not made to flood. In fact...it has no drains or outlets for the water once the river goes down and it is about 6 to 12 inches lower than the cement right outside the door. So the clean up will be pretty messy and lengthy, but we had plenty of time to get everything either above 6 feet on racks and shelves or we moved it out. We also utilized our launches as floating bins for tools and boathouse stuff. So we are fortunate to have been able to prepare for about a week before the river came over the levies that thousands of people built. We are also fortunate that only one of our athletes was displaced by the water. It will take a long time for our university to clean up and get back to normal because the river level is actually 20 feet high than it normally is and unfortunately got into almost every building along the river, which is most of campus. Our dock got two large trees caught on it, so it looks sort of like a cork screw, but hopefully it will hold and we will be able to rescue that. Fortunatley the topography here is such that half of campus is on river level and the other half on both sides of the river are up steep hills and cliffs. But again we are all safe and most of our equipment is as well.
Thanks for all your calls and e-mails. It is nice to hear from all of you and to hear all of your concern.
Chuck Rodosky
Novice Coach & Recruiting Coordinator
University of Iowa, Women's Rowing
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