3rd place, Spot News Reporting, Iowa Associated Press Managing Editors, 2008
OAKVILLE, Iowa — The blackness that covered Tim and Davia Rich’s house when they returned to Oakville Thursday made it look more like hell than home.
Davia Rich, 36, walked tenuously across her kitchen floor, now caked in more than an inch of slippery mud, to a doorway in a wall covered in black mold.
“This is my light at the end of the tunnel,” she said, pointing up a narrow flight of stairs.
Belongings the Richs left upstairs — including two live lizards owned by Davia’s 10-year-old son — were not damaged by floodwaters that rushed through the city of about 400 when its levee failed and the Iowa River topped it on June 14.
But downstairs and outside, the Richs found the destruction that waited for residents who returned to their homes for the first time since they were forced to evacuate.
Urban Search and Rescue, an organization with teams from Iowa, Minnesota and Kansas, had approved about 130 homes for re-entry as of Wednesday night, said Kathy Vance, temporary public information officer for Louisa County.
Vance said residents are being allowed into their homes to assess the damage and collect a single bag of belongings, but had to leave the city by 8:30 p.m.
“There is no power, there is no gas, there is no water,” she said.
Officials closed the city early at 12:30 p.m. Thursday due to the threat of severe weather. About a dozen residents were leaving a staging area at Toolesboro, where they checked in to be shuttled in and out of town.
“Some of these people don’t know what they’re going to see,” Vance said. “We’re talking about a river rushing through their homes.“
Mayor Benita Grooms and her husband Cody returned to a watery version of the neighborhood where they have lived for 55 years, at the intersection of Cedar and Second streets.
Floodwater still filled much of their 7-foot-high basement Thursday, and a line of mold showed where water once sat on the first floor. A thick musty stench filled the house.
When they fled the city, Benita and Cody Grooms each grabbed a few personal items they stuffed into plastic shopping bags.
“We were on the highway within 10 minutes of when we were told (to evacuate),” Benita Grooms said.
They were part of a convoy out of the city on County Road 99 that she estimated was two miles long, and said would have been swept away if the levee had failed any sooner. Floodwater rushed through the city about two hours later, she said.
“Everyone knew the possibility was there that we could flood. But the thought was we were better this year than in ’93. The Mississippi was down and the levee was dry.” But as flooding predictions started to climb, she said, “You just got the impression it wasn’t going to come like ’93. It came so much harder, so much stronger.“
Tim and Davia Rich’s battered house is evidence of the river’s violent force.
“It’s mad. I see it like a rebellion,” Davia Rich said.
Tim Rich, 52, said their garage is “two blocks away and in somebody else’s house.”
Their home’s water-logged doors were swollen shut, and its windows shattered. Debris filled their front porch, and a large desk from one room was swept into another.
“It’s just like the water kept rushing through,” Davia Rich said.
Not far away, floodwater still rushes rapidly over Russell Street.
Davia Rich doesn’t feel the home can be restored to a condition suitable for her 13-year-old son with allergies, even if the family wanted to continue living there. The boy suffered from pneumonia after the flood, she said.
Tim Rich said he feels “numbness,” and does not want to return to the house the couple purchased one year to the day they evacuated.
Wes Shutt, however, said he plans to salvage the childhood home on Second Street where he was living before the flood. He also owns two rental properties in town.
Many of the Oakville residents he's spoken with did not initially want to rebuild, said Shutt, 59. But “as more and more time goes on, more and more of them need to come back.”
Said Vance: “They’re pretty resilient Iowa types.”
Copyright 2008, by the Muscatine Journal
