Tracy Ullman got a call in June 2008 from her best friend’s mother, who lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “She said, ‘It’s raining horribly out here—you should come out and make a documentary,’” says Ullman, a Chicagoan and documentary film producer.
But her view of the city evolved during the eight months she was shooting City Under Water. “I admired how these people banded together and would never accept defeat,” she says. “I have no idea what it’s like to lose every possession you ever had in you life and still find strength in that kind of chaos.”
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The BBC anthropology series Under the Sun sent Ullman back to Iowa for a show that was her idea, and her first as lead producer: “Rush,” a study of the Alpha Chi Omega sorority at her alma mater. “The film posited that this was your first big job interview,” she says, “your chance to join corporate America and establish a class system in the U.S., even though we say there is no class system.”
Focusing on a handful of victims who’d lost their homes, businesses, or jobs, Ullman traveled back and forth to Cedar Rapids through February to capture the traumatized city as it inched toward recovery. Larson attributes the relatively low levels of outside aid and media attention that Cedar Rapids got after the flood to “our good old midwestern mentality that we can do it ourselves.” When the river returned to its banks, she says, “you’d hear hammering and sawing, people doing anything, even if it was sweeping a sidewalk in front of a house that was never going to be lived in again. It turned around and bit us. When we say we can do it on our own, the world says, ‘Go ahead.’ We don’t make enough noise. We’re too proud, I think.”
Two 2002 studies published in the journal Nature predicted that the incidence of so-called 100-year floods—ones of a severity experienced about once a century—would increase by a factor of three to six in this century due to global warming. And the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration is studying the possible role of global warming not only in last year’s record floods but also its unusually violent tornado season.
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