It’s been a busy summer for natural disasters in the Upper Miss – flash floods, near record crests along the Miss herself from Davenport to Winfield, freak thunderstorms that darkened much of the Quad Cities and flung a trampoline into a helpless Prius, and cascading technology failures that stranded a certain travel writer in St. Louis for three weeks during the prime summer travel season.
Throughout it all, I’ve been roaming with camera in hand, ready to get the next great dramatic shot of townspeople frantically sandbagging to save their modest possessions, sobbing families devastated after the latest levee break, or the helpless TV journalist waist deep in a swirling mess of mocha-tinged floodwater. If only. I’m just not into disaster journalism. Don’t get me wrong. I love a natural disaster as much as the next person. I’m just not comfortable forcing myself into an on-going disaster and displaying other people’s tragedies for my own personal gain. At least not this year. Maybe when we have a REALLY big flood…
I managed to be in the right place at the wrong time several times this summer, so below are a few pictures from those occasions when I could safely and without intrusion shoot high water, sandbags, and what it all looks like after the water has left. Major flooding along the Mississippi was concentrated between the Quad Cities and just north of St. Louis. Most of my pictures, however, are from Davenport, Iowa (one of the Quads) and St. Louis, with a few pics from southeast Iowa after the water retreated.
© Dean Klinkenberg, 2008
sobering pictures…somehow that much more for the lack of people in them.
(but why, pray tell, is it necessary – and I know it is — to spray paint ‘Keep Out’ on a building about to fall in on itself. People!)