CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — Just because the pandemic was happening didn't mean that mother nature took a break.
Last year on this day, the most costly thunderstorm in U.S. history tore through several states, and a derecho – a long-lived, straight-line windstorm – devastated our neighbors to the south in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
One year later, the city remains under repair.
Visuals of the aftermath of the 2020 derecho are not easy to forget. Farms and residential areas were torn through by winds that reached up to 140 miles per hour, sparing no resident of Cedar Rapids.
"My wife called me from home and asked me where I was, and I said I was at the law firm," Cedar Rapids Mayor Brad Hart recalled. "And she said a tree came through the house and it's raining in the house, please come home."
Hart said he, just like hundreds of others, navigated around downed trees to get home, only to find his family's house had been crushed.
"Much of the city didn't have power for seven to twelve days," Hart said. "Our street lights, all our traffic signals, were damaged, some destroyed, so it was really critical to try to deal with the trees and get some of the access to the hospitals."
During this time, The Gazette reporter Marissa Payne had been on the job only two months.
"You don't expect an inland hurricane in the middle of Iowa," Payne said. "And Linn County and several other counties were devastated as well. Cedar Rapids took the brunt of the damage. You can't find a homeowner here who isn't dealing with some sort of derecho recovery even still, a year later."
Payne said just like the pandemic, the shadow of the derecho is always looming.
"The derecho is kind of something that gets referenced in almost every story," Payne said. "Just like the pandemic, we've had two ongoing disasters here for the last year."
"The problem now is that some people are uninsured or some people are underinsured, and the cost of materials skyrocketed for a while because of the pandemic around the country," Mayor Hart said.
"There was the disaster in Texas with the winter storm problems there, so contractors who were here went to other areas with disasters," Payne said. "Iowa couldn't be the sole focus point for forever."
As a local journalist, Payne said it was frustrating to see the derecho slip through the cracks of national media coverage.
"People in Iowa just were wanting to shout from the mountaintops, 'hey, we are experiencing so much devastation here in Cedar Rapids,' and of course the situation in Texas was devastating as well but it felt like here in Iowa we just don't get the same attention," Payne added.
One year later, in terms of whether people are struggling to talk about it, Payne said that's not necessarily the case.
"Everyone went through it, I feel like it's a collective thing that might make it easier for people to speak about since no one in Cedar Rapids was untouched by the storm, so we're all going through it together," she said.
You can read The Gazette's extensive derecho anniversary coverage here.