Mike Chapman, Director of Dan Gable Museum, Waterloo, Iowa:

We are back up and running as of January 9th and people who come in and see what has transpired and seen the results of the flood are frankly flabbergasted.

The museum is dedicated to preserving the history of wrestling going all the way back five thousand years. Wrestling is man kind's oldest sport. When people walk in the lobby they will see a life size portrait of Abraham Lincoln wrestling at the age of twenty three, back in 1832. Also when they come around the corner then they will see a life size mural of Jacob wrestling the Angel of the Lord. 

We talk about wrestling going back five thousand years. It is man kind's oldest sport. - And then we have a lot of information detailing the Olympic Games. We have an entire pavilion dedicated the Olympic Games. We talk about the history of the Olympics and when they started in 796 b.c. We also have an entire pavilion dedicated to the NCAA championships. The first NCAA championships were held in Ames, Iowa in 1928. 

Then we have three or four halls of fame. We have an entire wing dedicated to the early days of professional wrestling back when it was the real thing and not the theatrics that we associate it with in the last fifty years or so. So we just have a lot of artifacts- A lot of memorabilia- A lot of mementos- A lot of very exciting displays. They are really chronicled the entire history of wrestling as a sport.

The flood of 2008 really was devastating. Its just amazing how fast the waters came up. In the basement we had a lot of storage of our gift shop items and the gift shop is essential to our revenue stream. We lost ten thousand posters, a thousand DVDs, a thousand books all of which it had already been paid for. 

The water came up the steps incredibly fast, and took over the main display area. We have almost sixteen thousand square feet here. It took out everything up to about the three foot mark. We are up and running. So basically ninety five to ninety eight percent is has been restored. The walls have all been put back up. We brought we hired a cleanup crew from Michigan. We spent about sixty five thousand dollars on just the cleanup up. 

They were here for three or four weeks. We even had a t shirt made that wresting teaches you how to get off your back and old man river put us on our back but he couldn't keep us there. 

The funding that we got from the federal and state has just been tremendous;  I have never been in a position where we've had to ask for anything like that before either as a private citizen or as the director of not for profit. But their response I have to say has just been terrific. 

I think the museum has done several great things for the city. The museum I think is sort of a beacon that lets the state and the other areas know that Waterloo is progressive. We have had seven to eight thousand visitors a year. We think once the word gets out that we are back up and running and the summer weather turns. 

We could see us in three to four years getting ten to twelve thousand visitors a year.

Honestly to repeat myself it wasn't for FEMA we couldn't of recovered and we've recovered fairly well. 

For more information, visit www.fema.gov