We were on the patio a couple days before, kicking back, having our salsa and chips, and drinking lemonade, watching the birds and animals in our tranquil little world. That’s exactly what we were doing, even though we knew there was the potential for floods. But we didn’t see any real challenges. We were relaxed. It was like we were just so content. We had our world, our life.
—TROY SIMON, FLOOD VICTIM1
About four months after the Cedar River crested, I met Troy and Beverly Simon for the first time at their flooded bungalow on Ellis Road NW at the edge of town. It was a cloudless, blue-sky October day, similar to the weather the day of the crest in June. The Simons had agreed that I could follow them through their recovery over the next year.
Here the houses sat on either side of the road that followed the curve of the river. The lots were bigger than those in town, and the Simons owned just over an acre. The area felt peaceful. The only noise was birdsong and the whirling buzz of cicadas. The Simons’ house—or what was left of the circa 1924, 1,000-square-foot bungalow—was across the road from what appeared to be a small levee along the river. They had bought the house for $67,000 in 1995 and recently remodeled it from top to bottom, sometimes staying up until three and four in the morning hand-sanding the floors.
A large tree stuck out of the living room window. Later I would learn it was not from the property itself but had probably floated down from upriver and came to rest—roots first—in the Simons’ living room.
On the front door hung an unnecessary purple placard that said UNSAFE. Although the roof looked fairly undamaged, a back section of the house had torn away and the entire basement was visible. The foundation was nonexistent, as though the water had knocked the legs out from under the structure. I peered in through what I thought was a dining room window and could see many of the Simons’ possessions thrown around the room—furniture, dishes, a wall clock, a banner that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY.
The garage had collapsed and sat on its side. Most of what was scattered at my feet was indiscernible. But I did identify pieces of drywall, half-filled bird feeders, an old camera, a blue WELCOME sign embedded in gravel, and the remnants of solar yard lights. A basketball hoop stood upright and intact. This had been home to the Simons for thirteen years, almost the entirety of their sixteen years of marriage.
Only later, when I saw pre-flood photos of the house and talked to the Simons, would I realize what had truly been lost.
Earlier in the day I had been at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art to view its free exhibition “The Year of the River: Flood photography from the Gazette” photographers from the local newspaper had taken some of the most heart-wrenching photos of the flood—”from palo to Cedar Rapids, and from Coralville to Iowa City”—easily rivaling anything the national media offered. After looking over the photos, I sat on a bench and just listened to residents as they filed past. Although there was a solemnity to the viewing, there was no shortage of cathartic moments. Signs asked patrons not to touch the photographs, but the request was often ignored.
“There’s Grandpa’s house,” one woman said excitedly, almost pounding her finger directly on the photo. Men explained to their wives and children what had happened: “You can see how the houseboats got hung up on the railroad bridge.” Some residents wept quietly, their hands at their mouths as if gasping.
The most compelling photo—sent around the world and later published in the Gazette’s book Epic Surge: Eastern Iowa’s Unstoppable Flood of 2008—was of Vince Fiala and his daughter, Diane Stanek, taken on June 15, two days after the crest. Stanek is clutching her father’s left arm—both holding on to him and holding him back—and he is pointing with his right hand at the police manning a roadblock. “It’s a terrible mess and we need to be there cleaning it up,” Fiala is yelling.2
A carpenter by trade, Fiala had been waiting for hours in the hot summer sun, desperate to return to his flooded home in Czech Village. The police finally told Fiala and the crowd to go home, but there was no home to return to. You cannot look at this extraordinary photo of father and daughter and not fail to see every form of anguish that results from a natural disaster.
Fiala’s eyes are closed in agony, his mouth opened in an unheard sob. But there is anger too. His face and neck are red, his short hair bristling, his short-sleeved shirt barely containing his discomfort. He looked like the men my grandfather knew and drank with—vigorous, skilled tradesmen who worked relentlessly their entire life; useful men who might not be able to quote Shakespeare but could rebuild your car’s engine or construct porches and decks without blueprints. Fiala’s hands would probably mirror Grandpa’s—nicks and fissures, permanently stained with grease, and at least one fingernail blue-black from an errant hammer stroke. This is what must have driven Fiala to that point in the photo: There was this huge mess waiting for him behind those police barricades, and he wanted to get to it and fix it.
Stanek is looking up and past her father, almost pleading for the authorities to let them back into the neighborhood. She is on the verge of crying, but there is strength in her face—a look of such tenderness and concern for her father that is almost unbearable to look at and almost impossible not to.
A year later Stanek said, “He can’t look at the photo for more than a few seconds. He says he was never this emotional before. When you take everything you own and throw it out front, it does a number on you.”3
Other homeowners told me they snuck around police lines to check on their homes. Just a week after the flood, when waters had receded, some 25,000 people had been evacuated. Rick Blazek returned twice to his home; both times he was caught and removed by authorities. “Once I’m in there, I’m not coming out unless they have handcuffs and leg shackles,” he vowed. Then he tried to run a checkpoint in his pickup. police drew their firearms, smashed his window, and dragged him out to be arrested.4
The distrust of local residents during disasters and the almost frantic rush to restore “order” by business leaders, government officials, and law enforcement lie at the heart of Rebecca Solnit’s argument in her book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. She studied several disasters, including the New Orleans flood of 2005. She found in every instance that residents almost always act selflessly, yet authorities expect them to act savagely and go to extraordinary measures to “maintain order.” Would the Cedar Rapids police have killed Blazek or Fiala for crossing their arbitrary line?
Solnit writes:
In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors are as friends and loved ones. The image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it. Decades of meticulous sociological research on behavior in disasters, from the bombings of World War II to floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and storms across the continent and around the world, have demonstrated this. But belief lags behind, and often the worse behavior in the wake of calamity is on the part of those who believe that others will behave savagely and that they themselves are taking defensive measures against barbarism. From earthquake-shattered San Francisco in 1906 to flooded New Orleans in 2005, innocents have been killed by people who believed or asserted that their victims were the criminals and they themselves were the protectors of the shaken order. Beliefs matter.5
As already noted, the 2008 floods saw the largest deployment of Iowa National Guard units since the Civil War: 9,400 total. The initial deployment was 4,000.6
Time Check resident Linda Seger recalled that the area looked like a war zone.
Here was our own National Guard preventing us from walking to our homes. Wonderful young men and women, many who had served our country in Iraq, now became the enforcers of the “law” we had to obey. Suddenly freedom seemed more precious than ever before.
This was just a temporary restriction, yet it was still scary to see how quickly our ability to do what we want can be taken from us. At times the members of the National Guard expressed how sorry they were that they could not let us beyond the checkpoints. Some even walked or drove to the addresses we supplied them to use cell phones to capture a photo of the residence. Here we were in the middle of America and our own troops between us and our land. They seemed uncomfortable in this role of preventing other Americans from freely accessing their own property.
Many neighbors told me they began to find ways to “sneak” around the checkpoints and often under cover of darkness slipped into their homes, risking danger and violation of the martial law to be sure their homes were safe. With a curfew in force, most of us followed the rules despite growing frustration with the city not allowing us back to our homes.7
Linda and her husband, Gary, were finally so fed up with waiting for the authorities to permit them back into their flooded home that they were willing to defy the Iowa National Guard.
“That was the day we decided that if the National Guard had not moved away, I was calling CNN and was telling them, ‘I’m a great-grandmother. I’m walking to my house against martial law because I’ve been sitting here for days, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be on our street other than someone doesn’t want us in our houses.’ And frankly, at a certain point all of us said, ‘Fine, can’t catch all of us. We’re going down.’”
Solnit writes, “We are entering an era of heightened disaster, thanks to climate change. Being prepared for a disaster will mean being prepared to sift truth from rumor and being prepared to adjust our worldview.”8
The truth is, people are mostly benevolent and law-abiding during a crisis.
Across the road from the Simons’ home, a woman called, “Are you from FEMA?” Her house was even closer to the river and was also a total loss. She was camping out while she rebuilt. Her daughter had just come over and planted a rhubarb plant. “All those memories,” the woman sighed.
“My contractor said, ‘Now you can build new memories.’” She shook her head and went back to her work.
Beverly Simon pulls up first in a 2002 Honda. A hair stylist, she is slender and pretty, with a quiet, graceful manner. She is also painfully shy around me. I tell her how sorry I am for the loss of their home. She thanks me and looks over at the house.
We are both relieved when Troy pulls up in a 2007 Toyota and takes charge. He is dressed impeccably in a sports jacket and slacks, his hair perfectly trimmed, thanks to Beverly. Sunglasses rest on top of his head, and there is more than a hint of cologne. He has a confident presentation and a strong build, the result of being an ex-boxer and former Marine. I had been in touch with Troy by e-mail and noted that he always signed his e-mails with “These times will make us stronger by looking to God for our Strength! Life may not be the party we hoped for . . . But while we are here we might as well dance! Have an Awesome Day!!!”
The three of us walk the perimeter of the ruined house, and Troy describes watching the destruction from the stand of pine trees on a small hillside behind the house while the rain came pouring down.
With the road underwater, the hillside was their only access point. They hiked down through the trees, negotiating three sets of barbed wire. At night Troy carried a tiki torch and Beverly a flashlight. Troy said they felt like they were crawling through a cave.
“We knew we didn’t stand a chance. The whole time we were sitting there on edge hearing a crack or some loud noise of different things snapping or trees or power lines or different houses down the road or . . . we just knew that was our house being torn down. And it was pouring down rain like crazy. I’m not sure how many inches of rain we were getting at that point, but it wouldn’t quit.”9
On June 12, 2008, while the Simons were desperately trying to save their possessions, Cedar Rapids received 1.73 inches of rainfall. Four days previous, on June 8, 2.41 inches of rain fell. In between those four days another approximately 0.75 inch of rain fell. The day of the crest (June 13) was a beautiful, clear 76-degree day, but over the next two days another 1.09 inches of rain fell. The total rainfall for the month ofJune was 8.95 inches.10
Troy remembers gathering what family treasures he could rescue in a small pile in the back of the lot near the trees, including that infamous game of Clue. While the rain poured down in torrents, he finally got on his knees and cried out, “Please stop!” “When he looked out at Ellis Road, he could see entire garages and sections of houses floating by.
In a letter to relatives and friends, Beverly recalls that moment: “As I was thinking about our situation and standing by our things, I asked and pleaded with God saying, ‘Please, God, this is all we have left!’ His reply was, ‘No, that’s not all you have left.’”11
Within hours, water rose to the eaves of the house, and soon all their possessions were gone. To make matters worse, Troy had a kidney stone attack that required two trips to the emergency room and hospitalization. Troy is forty-seven and Beverly is forty-one. Neither has health insurance.
Troy wants me to see some photos on his laptop, so we drive in our three separate cars to a nearby McDonald’s in the northeast quadrant of Cedar Rapids, just off Edgewood Road in a newer part of this city of 124,000. Not far from here are located some of the city’s largest corporate neighbors, such as AEGON and Rockwell Collins and the executive communities that house their employees.
I ask Troy what sort of warning they had about the flood. Troy mentions heavy snowfall the winter before and standing on the riverbank and witnessing massive ice jams on the Cedar River that led to some early, minor flooding on the road. The ice jams were foreboding, Troy says. “Now that you bring it up, it was obvious that we were going to have possible floodwaters. But we didn’t imagine something like this.”
Ten days earlier I had interviewed Illinois state climatologist Jim Angel, who said the winter snows were a precursor of the June floods. “We actually set the stage for all this back in the December, January, February time frame, when we had an extraordinary amount of snowfall in the central part of the United States. There was a fairly active storm track through basically Missouri, Iowa, northern Illinois, and southern Wisconsin that just kept dumping snowfall after snowfall.”12
In Illinois, the storms of the winter of 2007-08 were not only heavy, they were historic in intensity. There were eighteen winter storms (the average is seven) between December 2007 and March 2008, tying a record set in the winter of 1977-78.13
In the Illinois State Water Survey’s publication Winter 2007-2008: Record-Setting Storms Caused Major Damage in Illinois, the authors said the “winter weather was different than any other winter weather in the prior 110 years.” Chicago had sixty inches of snow, twenty inches above normal and “the seventh largest amount on record since 1890.
“There was also every other form of severe weather that can occur in the Midwest. These storms resulted in 28 weather-related deaths, double the normal number, and excessive damages to vehicles, residences, and businesses in the state.” The cost to Illinois was $3.5 billion, $960 million in property damages.
On top of the cold, ice, and snow came what would usually be considered warm-weather storms. “There were also five warm-season type convective storms with thunderstorms, hail, and high winds, setting a new record high for a winter season . . . Past cold seasons having numerous winter storms did not also have warm-season type storms, as occurred during the 2007-2008 cold season.”
The excessive snowpack led to flooding in Illinois and the Midwest as early as January 2008. Rivers at or above flood stage during that month included the Pecatonica, Rock, Fox, Kankakee, Iroquois, Vermilion, Mackinaw, Salt Fork, and the Sangamon (no stranger to flooding), which runs through Monticello in central Illinois, where I am writing this. The towns of Pontiac, Havana, and Watseka experienced the worst of the floods that winter. Four hundred and thirty homes in Watseka were damaged, and residents were evacuated.
All these rivers eventually drain into the Mississippi. It was little surprise that by late February, the Big Muddy was above flood stage from Dubuque, Iowa, to Cairo, Illinois—where it remained through April until the next round of flooding that summer. In fact, from Grafton, a frequent flood town at the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers, south, the Mississippi remained at two to eight feet above flood stage into late March. Cairo, at the confluence of the Illinois and Ohio Rivers, rested at fourteen feet above flood stage. Everything was in place for a summer of misery.
Because the 1993 flood—called a 500-year occurrence— had not reached their house and because they were technically in the 500-year floodplain, Troy said they felt safe.
“We were on the patio a couple days before, kicking back, having our salsa and chips, and drinking lemonade, watching the birds and animals in our tranquil little world. That’s exactly what we were doing, even though we knew there was the potential for floods. But we didn’t see any real challenges. We were relaxed. It was like we were just so content. We had our world, our life.”
That life included watching deer, raccoons, turkeys, and ducks from a front porch that gave them a panoramic view of the river. Troy’s dad would visit from Missouri and comment that the Simons’ home was an extension of Ellis Park farther downstream.
Those first few surreal days after they were flooded out of their home, the Simons lived with Troy’s sister Natalie in her small apartment. But then Troy suffered the kidney stone attack and Beverly was trying to cope on her own. Back at McDonald’s, Troy says, “So the whole time she’s trying to deal with me and deal with the flood thing. I felt pretty bad for her. Normally we are a good team and we pull together and strengthen each other. She was on her own, but she was very strong.”
“I am a strong woman,” Beverly says,14 looking at Troy, who has the last word on this subject:
“You know what [the kidney stone attack] did? Listen to what God did. He pulled Bev up. She’s a strong woman, but He made her step up in a sense, in a capacity that she wouldn’t have had if I had been there. Because I would have been the ringleader. I would have been taking charge of everything. It wasn’t me. It was a real bad deal for me but it was for her too, and it really put her in a situation where I felt like it did strengthen and make her stronger and better.”
They are putting on a brave face, but I can see they were struggling with some major life decisions. They had moved in with fellow parishioners from the River of Life Church— Christian and Jenelle Fong and their three children, Luther, Ty Anders, and Elsa—but Troy says they missed their peaceful river home. “We are in this little corner, which we’re blessed by, but, and I don’t want to be negative, it’s just different than in your own place. We sit out on their patio, but it is just different. There’s this block of trees, and we’re used to a wide-open view.”
I ask Beverly what it means as a woman not to have a home. She answers that she misses nesting. “At the same point I am very thankful to have a place to go to. So I can’t disregard that. It is nice. It makes me feel good to try to set up a kitchen. You try to still be domesticated and that sort of thing.”
She had overruled Troy on purchasing dishes. He wanted to wait until they went on sale, but she said she needed them now, even though they didn’t have a place to store them. Troy says, “I saw the urgency [in Bev’s eyes]. I need this for comfort. She needs to build that part of her life again, and I understand. When I saw her heart almost drop, when I saw the importance of it, I just knew we needed to do this regardless.”
Beverly would continue to style hair at a local salon, but Troy’s work situation was in flux. When the flood hit he was in the midst of beginning a home business. (Troy laments not having a college degree. Bev attended Iowa State University in Ames but did not finish.) He now had worked six months as a software trainer—without benefits. The work involved lots of travel, something that neither of them looked forward to. The previous month Troy went to New York for five days, and it was difficult for Bev. “I’m like, I’ll go out there for five days, and then I came back and she was a nervous wreck. Any other time she would have been fine, but due to the [flood] and all. It hit me in the stomach because I was trying to be observant [of her needs]. I thought it was fine.”
They were also in touch with creditors to try and negotiate down their debt load on items that were lost in the flood. Troy called them “dead horses.”
“We don’t own any of it, so why would we want to pay thousands of dollars on that stuff? We’re going to try to get with a debt company and write a letter to these guys and say, ‘Look, this is the money we have. We’ll divide it equally and proportionately on how much we owe you. Will you accept the offer?’ We don’t know if it will work.”
They didn’t know it that day, but not one creditor would forgive or lower their debts. But the Simons would not miss one mortgage payment on the house they would never live in again.