Guilt that comes with being safe

I am doing right now what more than 24,000 Cedar Rapidians can not do: I am sitting in my own living room, at my own computer drinking a glass of diet soda with my feet kicked up and writing a blog about how good it feels to be safe. I don't live in Cedar Rapids, I live in a small town outside city limits. I am safe from the rising Cedar River, the water shortage (how's that for irony?) and the power outages.

And I feel incredibly guilty.

People I care about can't get into their homes or businesses. They can't shower, or wash their clothes, and there's no real word on when that will change. People forced from their homes are sleeping on cots in school gymnasiums with hundreds of strangers just feet away.

And the city I've come to love as home in the short six years I've been here will never be the same.

One of the wonderful things about being a journalist is that while all the world around you is watching as news unfolds, you participate. You talk to officials who have the answers, you wade through the rising waters of the river as it begins its historic flood, you talk to families who have lost everything.

One of the hardest things about being a journalist is you're also human, with human emotion. It's hard to be sitting here, in my home, after having heard the stories I've been told this week.

One 35-year-old woman told about how angry she is with her father because he stayed in her childhood home too long and had to be rescued -- causing all the familybelongings to be lost.

"Those weren't just his things, they were our things. He shouldn't have made that decision on his own," she said. "I just hope I can find one picture, just one picture that can be cleaned and restored."

There was the 95-year-old man who had to be rescued from the second floor of his home because he refused to evacuate and leave his dog.

Another person, this time a close friend, two years ago acted on her dream and bought a specialty candy store in downtown Cedar Rapids. She took an already successful store and made it thrive. With the threat of flooding more than a dozen people showed up at the store to help her move all of her inventory to the fifth floor of the building into a cooled conference room.

By Thursday, June 12, the water from the Cedar River enveloped her corner store, just as it did dozens of other businesses downtown. Later that day, her son and his family lost their house.

Before the river had even reached its crest, city officials in Cedar Rapids issued a dire warning to all of the city: most of the city's water systems had been breached and the city was operating at 25 percent capacity. Water use had to be limited to washing hands -- only. The entire population was officially impacted by the Cedar River's epic flood.