Kathy Alter, web content editor for The Gazette Newspaper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, tells her personal story of being evacuated from her home and the resulting problems with going back in to her home (she says there are 12,000 people displaced), dealing with FEMA, her disabled mother (she got stuck in the bathroom in the hotel because it was not handicap accessible), and issues with needing dialysis available only on the other side of the river (Kathy is an end stage renal disease patient). “The stuff that was there was just stuff,” she says, “the important thing is that we both came out of it and we both came out of it relatively healthy.” (8:04)

 

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Ashley Sheda, a resident of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, says that she has been let back into her home and has tried to start cleaning it up. However, all of her children’s things have been ruined, and they cannot actually been able to move back in the house. With her family, she said, they’ve been in a hotel room with three children, and all the things her neighbor had put in her garage to be safe from the flood had been lost. She had renter’s insurance but because the house was not in the “five hundred year plain,” they didn’t buy flood insurance. Upon learning that the house might go under water, she says they tried to call the insurance company to add flood insurance but was told it would take 30 days to activate it. (1:37)

 

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Corn, apparently, is many things. It is animal feed, human food, and ethanol. I spoke with George Chadima in Fairfax, a farm owner near Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Excessive moisture has caused the nitrogen to be leeched from the soil, which is requiring farmers to buy biologically active fertilizer. The corn that was planted already has been “drowned” by water pooling in areas, and much of the rest was also damaged by a recent hailstorm. Crops, he said, would probably yield 75-80% of what they normally do.

I was shown a warehouse that housed large containers of soybeans yet to be planted. The planting schedule is three weeks behind already due to the weather, and hopefully, he said, they’ll be able to plant within the next couple of days. This is happening to many farmers in Iowa, and the result is going to mean higher prices- in everything.

Corn prices, of course, will go up, since using corn for “human food” or exporting it elsewhere, essentially removes corn from the chain of production. Ethanol, surprisingly, does not create that problem, because after the grain alcohol is removed there are still co-products from the corn, such as animal feed, plastics, and oils. The chain of production includes feeding that corn to animals, and then using the byproducts as fertilizer. Because it is costing more to harvest the corn, and there will be less of it, this will cause beef prices to rise.