Residents in communities like Spencer are now in recovery mode since flooding caused major damage in the last two weeks.
Brock Storm lives in Everly, but has a business along the banks of the Little Sioux River in Spencer. Storm, who has relatives in the broadcast area, tells Radio on the Go News the heavy rain caused the river to rise very rapidly on the night of June 21st.
“When I showed up, it was still on the road. I have a motorcycle in there that I had restored and painted. I got that out of there, went back, and it was up to the sidewalk. And then within, I’d say, 20 minutes, it was up to the windows. And we were inside, and it was just to the bottoms of my shoes. But outside the windows, it was about a foot deep. So we were carrying, there’s a lot of art in there. We’re carrying artwork out of there. And it got to the point where the pressure from the river pushing on the doors was getting to be so much that I was like we’re either going to have to break a window to get out of here if we stick around and keep putting stuff up or we just need to leave and cut our losses.”
Storm says the foundations of some of the homes in Spencer collapsed as water was being pumped out of their basements.
“Everybody’s first instinct when they’re getting water in their basement, because they’re used to getting a little bit of water. They’re like, yeah, pump it out. It’s a couple inches, pump it out. But when it gets that high and the water tables are that high, it feels that empty cavity is looking for a way in. It blows your walls out. My grandma’s basement, for example, had water up to the rafters. She had like seven, eight feet of water in her basement. And we just have had to slowly chip away out to get it out of there. And then now that we’ve gotten it low, we go through and tear everything out that the water’s been on.”
At least 40 percent of the homes in Spencer received some level of flood damage.
