Posted on 06/13/2008 9:32:21 AM PDT by Dawnsblood
Rising water from the Cedar River forced the evacuation of a downtown hospital Friday after residents of more than 3,000 homes fled for higher ground. A railroad bridge collapsed, and 100 city blocks were under water.
Cedar Rapids was the hardest-hit city in Iowa, where Gov. Chet Culver declared 83 of the state's 99 counties as state disaster areas and nine rivers were at or above historic flood levels. Elsewhere in the upper Midwest, rivers and streams tipping their banks forced evacuations, closed roads, and even threatened drinking water.
The hospital's 176 patients, including about 30 patients in a nursing home facility at the hospital, were being evacuated to other hospitals in the region. The evacuation started late Thursday night and continued Friday morning in the city of 124,000 residents.
"Some are frail and so it's a very delicate process with them," said Karen Vander Sanden, a hospital spokeswoman.
Water was seeping into the hospital's lower levels, where the emergency generator is located, said Dustin Hinrichs of the Linn County emergency operations center.
(Excerpt) Read more at ap.google.com ...
Obama is the man, the water was supposed to stop rising. Must not have gotten the memo.
CNN reporting voluntary evacs in Des Moines.
You mean CNN isn't screaming at Bush to get down there for photo OPs to show that he cares about white people?
Katrina hospital redux. Where are the looters, abandoned patients and bodies?
When this happenned to a hospital in New Orleans, during the Katrina flooding....they just injected all the elderly, immovable patients with poison. Remember?
I’m sorry...Where did you read that?
Katrina was a race driven tragedy. Iowa is a cracker in comparison.
We should not spend any tax payer money to rebuild Cedar Rapids and should let the river run its course and cover the city.
Lots of minorities in Iowa also.
But it is Iowa. Most people here expect to take care of themselves, and will do so. In NO, most people expect Uncle Sam to do the thinking and working for them.
Not to keep beating a dead horse, but please understand that what was reported in the news is not ALL of NO. The rest of the nation saw a small portion of that city. (Admittedly, a very vocal and visible, thanks to the MSM, portion - but still just a portion.) So please refrain from using words like “most” to cover a city as large as NO (or an entire state, as some have done on this board) - when the statement is only based on what was shown on TV and the statements by racist demagogues like Sharpton and Jackson.
I did use a bit of hyperbole, but I have family in Baton Rouge, and they have little good to say about NO (except the food! I love that the one time I was wandering through).
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