1993 flood

a survivors tale by Brenda Axsom
letter dated August 5th

well, i survived "The Flood" so if i ever have grandchildren i'll be able to tell htem how i lived through the worst flood of the midwest in the history of the united states in 1993. i finally got water back thursday july 22 after 1 1/2 weeks of pure hell. those sponge baths just don't cut it for reviving and waking you up before work when you're used to taking a shower every morning. even though we have an altoona address, we're on the des moines/berwick water system so i had to suffer right along wtih everyone else and even though my office was without running water too i still had to report to work every day which was a real bummer. we lost ours on a monday am and i toughed it out until weds. night when i decided i had endured enough of the uncivilized life so i had 2 days vacation from work & went down to moms on thursday and didn't come back up here until monday am and had to go another 3 days w/o running water until thursday evening when it finally came back on. i still have to buy bottled water though for drinking until they declare it safe but at least now i can shower., wash clothes, and clean house again. i'm grateful though that my trailer park and office complex were not hit by any of the flooding since they weren't close enough to any of the rivers. it was flooded really bad in the river bottoms along interstate I-80 that i had to take to get to work and the sight was undescribable-it looked like a giant lake on either side for a 10 mile stretch because all you could see as far as the eye could go was water and the very tops of the roofs of houses and buildings. somehow it managed to keep from going over the interstate since it's built up higher but the water still came real close to spilling over there for awhile and they even sandbagged along the shoulders in several areas along the road. at least we've had several dry days recently so a lot of the water is receding now in places. right now jason and i are looking for an acerage to buy so we can move the trailer on it and live there. we're wanting to get between 40-80 acres so we can have privacy and room to "play". hopefully we can find a place south of des moines by october and get away from here. we're sick of living "in town" with nosy neighbors, no privacy, etc. and both want to get back in the country setting.