It is easy to forget what happened last summer. It has been 16 months since we were flooded. But the recovery is still going on downtown. One of the little known consequences of the flood was that many of the downtown buildings have been without heat. Most of the old buildings downtown relied upon Alliant to supply the steam to heat our stores. Unfortunately Alliant lost their steam generating facility in the flood. They were great last winter to bring in a temporary generator to provide steam for the downtown buildings but they just couldn’t afford to continue that as a long term solution.
That meant that all of us had to install our own boilers to heat the buildings. Well folks, that isn’t an easy thing to do. We had to cut a hole in the floor of the back dock and the heating engineers had to lower the boiler into the basement. Those things are way too heavy to use even our sturdy service elevator. Now they are working in the basement, assembling the system. I was told we are not alone – that 36 buildings are going through the same process this fall. Hopefully we will have everything online before the snow flies.
The next time one of your friends asks how the recovery is going – just tell them that it is a work in progress but progress is being made.
It’s Haloween tonight and the Hawkeyes won today. Life is good.
Enjoy.
