A Country Gay Can Survive

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The morning of August 10th a massive storm called a derecho plowed through the midwest, devastating Southern Wisconsin, Northern Illinois, and the entire state of Iowa, which is where I live. Iowa was hit the worst. A derecho is basically the equivalent of a hurricane. Our highest recorded wind speed was 112mph.

1/3 of the state lost power, and almost 3 days later, roughly 400,000 people still don't have power. We have approximately 23 million acres of farmland, and approximately 10 million were destroyed by the storm. That's not good at all. Our crops are one of the state's main sources of economic development, and we lost so much.

The light green area inside the circle is all of our damaged crops. We lost a lot of silos and grain bins as well

Outside of our local news stations, there's barely any national media coverage on this. Ive only seen a couple, and the only ones I have seen weren't even that in that depth.

The above screenshot was from today(Aug. 12th, 2020) at 9pm CST. 2 days had passed before either of them wrote anything about it.

We have some cities that are either partly out of power or entirely out of power. One of the worst hit cities was even still recovering somewhat from a F4 tornado that went through it 2 years ago.

Iowa is a disaster zone. I’m missing parts of my roof, probably need a new garage, new windows, new siding. My patio door was literally blown off its hinges.

My small town has no power, because the electrical poles were snapped in half like toothpicks. My parents live in Cedar Rapids, and they are completely cut off from the modern world at this point. They can’t make any phone calls because the cell towers were destroyed.

We are running out of fuel. There are still hundreds of thousands of us without power. Everyone has rancid food sitting in their freezers. People on wells literally have no access to running water. Generators and tarps are almost impossible to find. Banks are closed, and businesses aren’t taking debit/credit cards. The only way for most of us to charge our phones is to sit in our vehicles with the engine running.

We NEED aid.

This is still going on. It’s 8/15 and about 150,000 households are still without power, including almost 60% of Linn County which has the 2nd biggest city in the state. See those big streaks on the satellite image? Two of them pass directly through major cities.

Out by Cedar Rapids, at least 75% of the county still doesn’t have power. They’ve pulled in electrical line workers from as far as New York, Texas, and California, and we used up (checks notes) all of the spare electric poles in Texas to replace fallen or damaged ones. They’re scrambling to ship in more from California and Canada now, as well as wire and transformers. 

Oh and yeah, a third of the crop people depend on is destroyed. 

People have lost fridges and freezers full of food, and it was just after most folks stocked up because their EBT cards got refilled for the month. Some renters and home insurance is replacing it, but that’s only if folks have it. 

Carhops in Dallas, Texas 1940