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He pointed to the spot past the woods, where sandbags sat on mounds of earth, where the levy hadn’t been able to keep back the swollen Des Moines River. The air smelled like sewage. Garbage and muck covered the grass.
“It’s unbelievable,” he said.
When the flood came, the water covered North High School’s football field, filled the locker room, moved across the street and surrounded the school and then headed toward Second Avenue.
For the past month, tornadoes and floods have battered Iowa. Homes were flooded. Businesses wrecked. Lives set back. And its sporting touchstones tarnished.
The very fabric of what it means to be an Iowan seemed cast aside.
This is the place where they built a ballpark in a cornfield because they believed people would come. This is where Zack Johnson learned how to defeat Tiger Woods and claim his own green jacket. It’s where a guy named Kurt Warner worked at a grocery store before becoming the 1999 NFL MVP and leading the St. Louis Rams to the Super Bowl.
Yes, this is Iowa, a place without a major professional franchise, where the sports may not be flashy or famous or nationally known. Which is why they matter so much.
• • •
PARKERSBURG, Iowa | The weather turned on Parkersburg first.
It was May 25, and from the north you could see a long trail of darkness cut you off from whatever was to the south. That’s where an EF-5 tornado dropped from the sky.
“It’s been since before Thanksgiving — horrible snows, rain, a flood earlier in the year where we had to call school off, the roads closed down,” said Michael Irvin, who teaches math and coaches wrestling, football and track at Aplington-Parkersburg High School.
He took a breath.
“Then the tornado.”
It’s a memory he’s lucky to have survived. Irvin stood on his porch and watched the thing come toward him. At first it was difficult to tell if the mass of darkness and wind was a twister.
Then he saw the thing for what it was. Pure power. He turned and ran for his basement.
“It got really wild, like a train going through your living room, just like they say,” he said.
Ten seconds later, after just enough time to reach shelter, he knew the thing had moved past him.
“I went right back upstairs and watched it go over town,” he said. “I watched it destroy my town. You could see things getting sucked up, parts of buildings getting sucked up, trees being snapped out.”
Even then, he didn’t know how bad it was. He left his home, following the tornado’s path. He went over the crest of a hill. He looked and could barely breathe.
“I’ll never forget. A bomb had gone off. Everything was destroyed.”
Homes, people, the buildings that made up this small town of 1,900. Six dead. Two more would be killed by the same tornado up the road in New Hartford, and many more were injured. The high school was gone. The football field, the one that had produced NFL players Casey Wiegmann, Aaron Kampman, Jared DeVries and Brad Meester, lay in shambles.
Then something beautiful happened.
Other teams — teams that had been roughed up and beaten by this perennial power, by those men who now make their living in the NFL — they came to what remained of the town.
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