Liz & Nate

In case you hadn’t heard, Ames has had a pretty rough week. Between Sunday and Tuesday we had a few storms that dumped well over 10 inches of rain on our town. The Skunk River flooded. Squaw Creek flooded. The storm drains couldn’t keep up and 8 water mains broke. All this has left us with flooding that has rivaled, and in some spots surpassed, flooding from 1993.

Nate and I are fine. Our house stayed perfectly dry (including all the wedding decorations piled on the basement floor). But, like the rest of the city, we’re conserving water so they can have enough to flush the system and hopefully have things back to normal sometime next week. Until then, the water is not safe to drink, cook with, or clean dishes. Luckily, Nate and I just bought a bunch of bottled water for the wedding, so we haven’t had to run all over town, dodging the barricades and closed roads looking for water. We’re set.

Now for some flood pictures:

(Picture courtesy of J.P.)

Welcome to Ames! This is my coworker, John.  Both he and my boss, Chuck, spent Wednesday riding around taking pictures of the flood.

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(Picture courtesy of C.F.)

This is the corner of Lincoln Way and University (formerly Elwood), one of the busiest intersections in Ames. You can see the Maple-Willow-Larch Dorms in the background.

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(C.F.)

University and Lincoln Way

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(C.F.)

Welcome signs for the ISU students – move in day is tomorrow.

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(J.P.)

On the left is the Scheman Building (home of the Brunnier Art Museum) and Stephens Auditorium is on the right. In the background you can see the Jack Trice football stadium.

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(J.P)

Here’s the Scheman Building from opposite side with Maple-Willow-Larch in the background. You can see from the muddy grass that the water had already gone down quite a bit at the time this picture was taken.

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(J.P.)

It almost looks intentional, right? What a nice reflecting pool in front of Hilton Coliseum. The baskeball court floor was floating.

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(J.P.)

Way back there, you can see the football team’s practice field. This parking lot fills with tailgaiting motorhomes on game days.

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(J.P.)

On the North side of town now, here’s 13th Street near the softball fields.

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(J.P.)

“City of Ames Bulk Water Sales”  Love the irony.

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(J.P.)

Here’s the 13th Street bridge over Squaw Creek heading towards Frederickson Court, where I lived for two years.

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(J.P.)

Across the street from the previous photo, this is the brand new aquatic center.

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(C.F.)

This picture is taken from Stange looking south towards Freddy Court and ISU. To the right was the golf course. Notice the big logs in the road? Earlier this summer, we had a big storm that took out a bunch of trees. The city is still cleaning up from that storm. At least it made for a good natural barricade.

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(J.P.)

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

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(J.P.)

(J.P.)

Just a couple more gratuitous water photos.

They didn’t get any photos of Duff, HW 30 or I-35 but those were closed too. Here’s some proof:

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This is Duff Ave. The two large buildings on the left are Target and Walmart.

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source

Highlight from the Ames Police scanner as posted on FB by a fomer co-worker:

“We have a jet ski in the Target parking lot pulling a wakeboard, can we get rid of that? Copy.”

Apparently later he was spotted pulling an intertube behind the Meadow Lane Trailer Park.

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This is HW 30 near Dayton Ave. But don’t worry, you probably wouldn’t have recognized this part of Ames even without the water.

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The good news is, the water is receding. They predicted storms last night, today, and tomorrow, but we’ve managed to escape all that.  Now its just time to start cleaning up and getting things back to normal.

(J.P.)

Worms!

Filed under:
Bad Ideas, Local News by Liz