AV News: Fall Floods in Cedar Rapids

The flooding in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has garnered national attention. As AirVūz News found out, aerial perspectives are not only moving, but they are a new technology that can really help out.
"We’ll start moving back some of the barriers and everything else, start picking up outside, and start letting people get some of their life back."
One of the largest cities in Iowa sits on the banks of the Cedar River. This year’s flooding was due to heavy rains upstream. Because they had warning Captain Long said local authorities started preparing for the flood two days before it hit. The city of around 130,000 residents pitched in to help protect their homes and businesses over the following weekend.
“There’s 6-9 miles of these barriers that were put up in 2 days so that’s this whole area down by the river. So this hole area and up about 10 blocks has all been evacuated. My job is in charge of this downtown area and when they were doing their sandbagging and stuff in different areas there were little kids there, there were people that weren’t going to be impacted by this. They were in the middle of these sand piles and a dump truck would come in and they’d have that pile done in 10 minutes. So when you talk about the people that did the good thing it’s the citizens that did it. I mean this is our job we’re expected to do it but these people weren’t and they did it, they just reached out and did it.”
Captain Long said this is the second highest flood to hit Cedar Rapids, cresting at 22 feet. This time around, drones have helped authorities see the damage from a new perspective.
“You’re giving us and the citizens a different aspect about what’s coming from the air. Where is it really at? Because when you’re driving around you don’t really anticipate what’s going on on the other side of town because you might not have any problems but the other side of town has a ton of water. So it’s helped us a lot, the TV stations and everyone is doing it so it’s helped us say ‘Ok, we’re good here we’re not good here,’ and we can move our people around.”

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