Neighbor: ‘I don’t know if the town can come back’

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By Barb Ickes | Saturday, June 28, 2008 |

Oakville, Iowa, firefighters Anthony Newsome, left, who also owns the Oakville Tap, and Allen Gugeler tour the streets of Oakville on Friday, surveying the damage that floodwaters wrought. Buy this Photo

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OAKVILLE, Iowa — Ed Lanz stood in the middle of Linn Street on Friday, watching his son, Kenny, use a shovel to feel his way home.

The senior Lanz, 75, hasn’t seen the inside of his house since the Iowa River moved into it two weeks ago.

“That light pole saved my house,” he said, pointing to the garage-sized storage shed that was headed like a missile toward his house until a street light stopped it.

But the street lights in Oakville couldn’t stop much.

When the mighty current of the swollen Iowa River tore its way through the levee, it didn’t stop until it had poured itself into every house in town. About 70 miles southwest of the Quad-Cities, only one thing is certain about Oakville: It never will be the same.

Drying out won’t do it.

Lanz grew up in the town of 439 people and was born in a house just a few doors down on Linn Street. Another of his sons lives there now. The Iowa River filled the basement of that house before inviting itself upstairs to saturate a few feet of the first floor.

“Oakville’s never had water before,” Lanz said, still watching Kenny cross the flooded neighbors’ yards in his camouflage waders. “It was a pretty town — nice lawns and flowers.”

Most of the lawns and flowers are gone, along with streets, fences, sheds, power, drinking water, above-ground swimming pools and even a few houses.

“Some people don’t know where their houses are,” Lanz said of the homes that were carried downriver.

Lanz was holding his cell phone when it rang a couple minutes later. He didn’t ask many questions, lowering his chin to his chest, listening to the damage report from inside his house.

He hung up his cell phone in time to talk to neighbors Anthony Newsome and Allen Gugeler as they waded up to the high ground on the little stretch of Linn Street.

“What are you going to do?” Gugeler asked.

“We’ll go ahead and fix it up,” Lanz said without hesitating.

And that is the question for all 439 residents: Stay and fix it, or walk away.

“I’d been thinking about building a house on the lot where our trailer was, anyway,” said Newsome, an Oakville firefighter and owner of Oakville Tap. “The trailer’s gone. The floors are buckled. I’m afraid it’s going to be the same thing at the tavern.”

It was.

Newsome and Gugeler started walking, turning off Linn Street to Russell, the main drag. The town looked abandoned because it was. Everyone evacuated before the Iowa River came to town, leaving couch cushions on Elm Street and a chair in a tree on Cedar.

On Friday afternoon, birds chirped in the soggy ghost town, competing with an oddly familiar screech.

“That’s a smoke detector,” Newsome said. “Mine was going off, too.”

The water was deeper in the low spots on Russell Street as they headed for the tavern door.

“We came down here a few days ago when you could only get into the town by boat,” Gugeler said. “We had the smoothest streets in Iowa that day.”

They peered inside the Oakville Tap, and Newsome shouted over his shoulder, “Forget about a cold one. The walk-in cooler’s floating.”

The men stayed near the front door, saying there was still too much water on the buckled tavern floor to risk an entry.

It was like that all over town as the people of Oakville returned, many of them for the first time, to see what the Iowa River had left them. For most, what is left is not worth keeping. Some things simply cannot recover from a two-week exposure to polluted floodwater.

Larry Moser, 47, and his son, Chase, 16, heard a day’s worth of horror stories as they stood watch at a makeshift staging area in the parking lot of the Toolesboro Mounds, a few miles up the bluff from Oakville. The father/son volunteers were asking residents to sign in before boarding the school district-owned shuttle vans that were the only vehicles authorized to enter Oakville.

“We’re making sure everyone who goes in comes out,” Chase explained.

The Mosers know many of the townspeople — either from their church, Solid Rock Baptist, or from Chase’s school.

“We’re hoping most of them move to Wapello so we can keep them,” Chase said.

Besides keeping track of their neighbors, the Mosers were there to listen.

“Almost everyone we’ve talked to today said the same thing: ‘We knew it would be awful, but we had no idea how bad it really is,’” Larry Moser said. “I don’t know if the town can come back.”

Barb Ickes can be contacted at (563) 383-2316 or bickes@qctimes.com.