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I know that I normally write about social media, and I will a little later, but I want to spend most of this column talking about the floods in east central Iowa last week. I live in Marion, Iowa, a small city of about 20,000. Marion (where I have lived for all but about 5 years of my life) is a suburb of Cedar Rapids, IA (home to about 160,000 and the second largest city in Iowa). The flooding hit Cedar Rapids the hardest, displacing roughly 30,000 people, destroying thousands of houses and hundreds of businesses.

Flood

Eastern Iowa experienced one of the worst winters in recent memory this past year, with mountains of snow piled up on every street, ice storms and brutally cold weather. When spring finally showed up, the rain started, and as we approach the official beginning of summer, it hasn’t let up much. Culminating with the rains we received last week, the Cedar River was running at an all time high depth of nearly 32 feet (flood stage is 12 feet). The previous high water mark of 20 ft. was set in 1929. Unprecedented doesn’t even begin to describe it.

The flooding was surreal for me for a couple of reasons. The majority of the areas that were affected were within 10-12 blocks from the river (0ver 1,350 city blocks were flooded), an area that is roughly ten miles from my home, and aside from some seepage, my home and family were completely unaffected. I watched most of it on tv, like it was happening somewhere else. But what I saw the community do was amazing. Thousands of volunteers sandbagged for countless hours, showing up in droves whenever the call for assistance was issued. People from all the surrounding areas immediately cut their water usage and bought case after case of bottled water to help save the municipal water system. My neighbors and I were all carrying 5 gallon buckets of rain water in and out during a pretty heavy rainstorm to use in our toilets. Everyone I encountered was doing everything they could to get through this, long before FEMA showed up.

Although the flood waters have receded, the devastation is palpable. It’s in everyone’s eyes, and shows on everyone’s face. They may play it off well, but this has hit everyone hard, everyone has lost something to this flood. I spent a good chunk of Wednesday in the downtown area with my good friend Dan Patterson (a correspondent for the Talk Radio News service) taking pictures, shooting video and interviewing residents who were just beginning the cleanup process. Simply going into the downtown area was one of the most enervating experiences of my life. However, it was amazing to see our community in action, with or without any kind of government aid.

Enter The Web

This is where social media comes in to the story. Being able to go into these areas, shoot video, take pictures and interview people is something that every major news source in the area has already done. But what we were able to do was bring something more personal to the table, and that led to a lot of people really opening up to us. More importantly, it allowed Dan and I (Dan grew up in Cedar Rapids) to relate our own impressions in a pointed manner that someone who came from somewhere else could not. We shot video right outside the Paramount Theater, a Cedar Rapids landmark where we had both performed in High School, we recorded a podcast in a park where we had both watched fireworks as kids, and we talked to people that we knew personally, and they responded with painfully personal and inspiring stories.

Now I am not trying to imply that social media caused us to be able to do these things, most certainly not, but what it does do is give us (as citizens and at least for Dan as a journalist) a voice and a venue to share these stories. The social web has given a voice to any one who wants to be heard and an avenue for some of us to get their stories off the street and into the public discourse. We were able to record multiple interviews, take copious numbers of pictures, record a bunch of video and have it online and available within hours, and while it was coverage mostly of the aftermath, it was more important to me than watching the water of the Cedar River flow by with the force of the Mississippi River not 6 days prior.

With all the time I spent in the flood ravaged areas, one thing was more prevalent than anything else, and that was the strength and the will of the people that we met. Everyone we talked to, business owner, volunteer, observer, etc… all echoed the same sentiment, that we will rebuild and this city will be better than ever, and we’ll do it with or without the government. This sentiment is what truly amazed me (although it was far from unexpected, that’s just how we mid-westerners are), but it would have been so easy to take one look at a business that was entirely destroyed and say, well, guess I’ll have to open up somewhere else, very few of them have done that, most say that they will recover, they will rebuild and they will make it better than it ever was before.

We can debate all we want about which social media tool is better, be it Plurk v. Twitter, MySpace v. Facebook or del.icio.us v. Twine, what it comes down to is community. These sites mean nothing in all reality; it is the people within them that mean everything. I don’t care about Twitter, I care about the Twitter community. Social media is a tool that gives us access to a wider community than we would have deemed possible ten years ago, and that is what is truly important. The flood of 2008 will never be forgotten by the residents of the Greater Cedar Rapids area; it has galvanized a city and become a rallying point for everyone in the region. No single event has ever made me more proud to say that I am from Iowa, and it is due entirely to the community that I am so proud to be a part of.

If you would like to help support victims of the flooding in Iowa you can contact the Grant Wood Area Chapter Red Cross or the United Way of East Central Iowa.

Visit Talk Radio News Service for more coverage of the recovery process in Cedar Rapids.

Greg Hollingsworth is a marketer and blogger who also writes about politics on Devil’s In The Details.

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