The Illinois-Iowa Railfan

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) -- A railroad bridge over the flooded Cedar River in Cedar Rapids has collapsed.

The Cedar Rapids and Iowa City Railway Co. bridge fell into the river Thursday morning. About 20 hopper cars loaded with rock that was placed on the bridge in hopes of weighing it down fell into the flood waters.

Officials with the railroad say no one was injured.

Video can be found on Weather.com

I went downtown today to take photos of the collapsed CRANDIC RR bridge. I walked west across the 8th Ave. street bridge and took one photo from the top of each of the railing newel posts at wide angle (37 shots) and then set the zoom to 4X and walked back taking another 37 shots. I then created a movie from the individual shots and posted it to YouTube.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_qll8ulQMw [/youtube]

If that Embed doesn't work, here is the URL:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_qll8ulQMw


The first shot is of the 8th Ave bridge railing to show the posts I took the photos from. At the bottom of each shot you can see the top of the post the camera is on.

It is my understanding that the bridge will probably NOT be replaced. I don't know when the clean up might start.

Fantastic photo slideshow, thank you for making it and posting it here! I embeded the video for you. Thanks again for the video and the information. I know you're from Cedar Rapids, I hope you made it through the storm and flooding!

For me, and a large part of the population around here, this "slow motion disaster" was just a great big "inconvenience"... short power losses, lots of detours, don't flush so often... and oh yeah, I lost internet access for a couple of hours! Horrors!

A smaller section of the residents are presently out of work due to the loss of businesses in the flooded areas, even if they did not live in the affected areas.

But there are a lot of folk that have lost everything that they owned... home/property, furniture and appliances, clothing, mementos/keepsakes, family photos, documents... look around your house and imagine not having any of it ever again.

Other effects will hit us ALL for some time in the future... the loss of jobs, even temporarily, has an ecconomic effect that will take a while to remedy. The loss of the businesses will have a long term effect. The loss of farm land will be noticed in food prices sooner than the business losses will. And YOU will see that, even if you live in another country.

Time will moderate all of this, but right now there are a lot of folk hurting pretty badly. We are trying to help each other as best we can. The number of volunteers and the amount of work they are doing is astounding!, and the fact that looting and violence (however mild) is almost non-existant is evidence that the "Midwest Work Ethic" is real.

There is a lot of work ahead for us, but with God's help, we will make it.