Most of us rolled into town sometime in the last week or so — so most of us didn’t face the thrill of boiling our water just to make a pitcher of juice, or endure hot and steamy summer days without access to showers.

The university lucked out when the city managed to restore water before freshmen were scheduled to move in, which undoubtedly would have forced delays to move-in and Monday’s class start date.

And a lot of work — on the part of individuals, civic organizations, businesses and city and university staff — went into getting Ames pulled back together. But we’re left wondering how we wound up in such a situation to begin with.

It’s easy to realize that Duff Avenue is the place to be when it comes to running a business in Ames. But the city zones and approves building permits that allow business owners to set up shop in flood plains.

Why?

And how do those decisions affect our neighbors downstream, in the hard-hit farms and small-town community of Colfax?

The football team sprang to action to save the Jacobson Building from the onslaught of floodwaters that overwhelmed the intramural fields to the east and Hilton Coliseum to the north, and the corporate superpower that is Walmart reportedly sprang to action to get the business up and running as soon as possible.

But the small businesses that make Ames unique and memorable, like Happy Joe’s, stand permanently closed or still scraping through the mud on their floors. Who stands behind them?

Over the course of the coming weeks and months, city and university officials will pour over the results of the summer’s rains and subsequent floods.

And we’re just hoping their conversations will focus on what decisions may have been made in the past that could have contributed to the situation we found ourselves in just two weeks ago, and what decisions and plans can be hashed out to better prepare us for the next time we’re faced with rainfalls like these.

We’re sure conversations along these lines have been taking place for as long as Ames and community planners have been around, but we hope the conversation won’t be distracted by anything that hinders a fruitful discussion.

Under the Ames Tribune’s article, “Add your message of thanks,” the Ames and ISU communities have already begun to build a list of thank-yous to the city staff, administrators and officers who carried us through the floodwaters, so to speak. Take a minute, sometime this week, to add a thought yourself.