are flooding and tonados weeds? and who put them here?

Downtown Cedar Rapids had somthing like 32 feet of water. All the government offices and disaster centers had to be relocated. There were empty spaces in the Mall. Here's what it looks like with the County Treasurer next door to the Gap... and so on. Pretty ingenious. Anything touched by the water was considered contaminated. The water was toxic because of all the stuff that gets into it as it rushes around town. Sewage, gas & oil, fertilizers, chemicals, etc. So the first step of four in the flood clean up is hauling the muddy contents of thousands of basements (and some entire houses) out to the curb to be collected by the contracted trash removers, needless to say, working overtime. You have to ask yourself when you see the streets lined with 25,000 people stored atricles, "where has our consumerism gotten us today?" Sort of a poetic human statement here. You think? This is the house next to the one we worked in the first day. As you can see, the water washed away the entire block foundation, right out from under the house. But here is the same house. Curious how those pretty little delicate flowers managed to survive, with gusto, what the block foundation could not.