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We Are Suffering Terribly Here in Southern Illinois From these Floods
And flooding has wiped out three major groceries in Harrisburg, a town of 9,000:
I'm having trouble uploading images these days, but you can kind of get the scope of things by looking at these photos at the Harrisburg paper's website: http://www.harrisburg-il.com/storm/aerial_views_of_harrisburg/
TO SEE THE SLIDE SHOW OF MORE PHOTOS CLICK ON: www.harrisburg-il.com/storm/aerial_views_of_harrisburg/
We are on very high ground at both our house and our farm, and so far so good (a little roof leaking, but we'll take that when looking out the office window to the massive overflow our little local creek is still experiencing.) However, when we went to Harrisburg yesterday to deliver papers, we thought we weren't going to be able to make it at a couple of points on Illinois state highway 1 through Gallatin and Saline counties. The water was lapping at both sides of the road. I didn't have a camera with me. It was one of those things where you just hold your breath and hope the road isn't giving way up ahead of you like the spot you saw three feet to the right of the passenger side of the jeep that you just rolled past.
We got down to Harrisburg and found one of our vendors under water, about three feet in the store and five in the parking lot. A car, three SUVs and a tow-behind trailer were floating in the lot. We don't know where our vendor is...we left messages for her. She has four other locations, three in Kentucky so she may be down there. It was a devastating sight to see. We didn't drive into H'burg proper because we'd heard they were underwater. I had no idea it was as bad as it was until we looked at the website featured above.
Folks, these people in Saline County are hurtin for certain. There are no ark jokes here...I don't know how a lot of people are going to get by without their grocery stores; having lived in lower Alabama for many years and seeing hurricane damage, I know it'll be quite some time before these Illinois folks are able to get this cleaned up and things back to normal. And Farm Fresh isn't that big a place; I don't know about the other market, we've never been in it. Farm Fresh is just a little bigger than your average convenience store. The media are (hopefully) reporting the truth about the loss of food and supplies in town. H'burg is just too big for this sort of thing, and it's a little bit of a drive to get to another grocery or pharmacy. I don't think they've had flooding this bad in the lifetimes of most of the residents there.
So when you watch all the coverage on TV and don't see anything about "the other Illinois," know that there are people without homes, without places to get supplies, and quite without a lot of options. There but for the grace of God go we. Our prayers are with Saline and Gallatin countians.