Instead, the group wears chainsaws to help neighbors and people they don’t even know have destroyed trees nearly two weeks after a massive windstorm devastated across Iowa.
“We just cut down trees from people in their garden because the insurance will not cover that and we took care of it and we went on like a swarm of locusts taking all these trees down,” Hecker told CNN .
The derecho covered an area nearly 800 miles wide in the Midwest with hurricane-force winds reaching 100 miles per hour.
It took 14 hours to destroy or severely damage or severely damage thousands of homes, schools and businesses, while uplifting countless trees that had stood for more than a century, and helping to take streamlines with them.
Some residents of the area say it will probably still not be enough to help everyone with the renovation.
“We were trying to get coordinated in the afternoon, but were exhausted at 5 o’clock,” Hecker said. “We can not do it 13 hours a day and then we are just tired and then we go home to a house without power, without air conditioning. Without hot water. I had no shower for seven days. You get sunshine.”
The storm affected more than 1 million people in the Midwest. While most of the power has been restored, Cedar Rapids was one of the cities hardest hit.
Storm ‘just hammered and hammered’
Nikki Wims works at a bar in Cedar Rapids and says she’s never seen a storm like this before.
“It was like the whole storm that ran 70 miles was a tornado. The whole thing,” she said. “And it just hammered and hammered and hammered.”
Wims says that although the emergency sirens hit about 20 minutes before the storm, they believe there was not enough preparation for a storm of this magnitude.
“I was sitting in my car. I came down under my floor table and covered my head … this is real, this is crazy. We just rebuilt from the ’08 flood and now we’ll do it all over again.”
Wims says she was looking forward to taking her 5-year-old son to his first kindergarten, but is unsure if his school has regained its power itself. The stress has taken its toll, she said.
“This has honestly been the hardest year of my life. I feel like we have just become comfortable where we have been restored and our city is just flourishing again and we are absolutely decimated.”
Waiting short to welcome a familiar face into the bar, Wims says the combination of Covid-19, the storm and the loss of power have all taken their toll on residents.
“It’s getting to the point where it’s unbearable. We just had the shutdown. We were shut down for 13 weeks, we were home and I mean I work here and we were completely shut down. We were maybe a month and a year back half and now this? Now we distribute food for free and people can not work because they have no power. They have no phones, zero service, they have no hot water. “
A ‘land hurricane’
Cedar Rapids Mayor Brad Hart said the storm and the damage left in the alarm clock were unusual for the city.
“I lived in Houston and I lived through some hurricanes, so some describe this as a land hurricane where we had this persistent wind for 45 minutes. It just didn’t stop,” he said. “And that’s not happening in Iowa. We have tornadoes, and the path of tornadoes … is much narrower.”
Hart said the destruction was made less by the breadth of the derecho.
“This has devastated our entire province,” he said. “There was no power in the city and a lot of the province, people had no mobile service. The streets were impossible. It was terrible.”
With utilities working around the clock to restore electricity to about 12,000 customers who are still without power, hot water and air conditioning should hopefully be available to everyone soon.
But because Hecker tells the day that the storm hit, efforts will rebuild and the memories of the so-called land hurricane that hit Cedar Rapids will certainly last much longer.
“We saw it from the basement, we had a window and we saw our power lines just blowing through,” she said. “I purposely (for a storm) never went into the basement since I was a kid and my mom made me.”
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