I went down the river in the evening again. I didn’t meet anyone this time and really didn’t want to. I spent most of the time asking myself questions that popped into my head during the day. One of the biggest was “Why are we doing this?” I believe it’s the same reason Chad spends his time cleaning up the rivers every day. No one else is going to do it. Living Lands & Waters cares about the rivers and the environment. It is such a small percentage of the population that sees the rivers like Chad or our industry does. I know people of this community are busy trying to live, not just survive. Their houses, businesses, and livelihood are higher priorities than the river, and rightly so. This is a great way to give back to something that is a lifeline of our society.
—ROBB OSBORNE,AEP RIVER OPERATIONS1
About the time Troy began to realize he could not save his house, 215 miles to the south at Grafton, Illinois, where the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers merge and where flooding is not uncommon, Chad pregracke noticed the waters rising around him. Chad is the founder and president of Living Lands & Waters, a nonprofit environmental organization he began in 1998 based in East Moline, Illinois. Chad and his crew travel up and down the Mississippi and other waterways in a 135-foot ranch-style house barge with solar panels, organizing river cleanups and educational workshops.
The ecological significance of the world’s second-largest drainage basin is one of the major messages Chad’s group delivers. The conservation group American Rivers estimates that 40 percent of all birds in North America use the Mississippi as a major flyway. “The Mississippi River is the Yellowstone of the Midwest,” Pregracke says, “a last stand for wildlife, and [it] needs to be treated like the Yellowstone.”2
Yet often the Mississippi Basin is treated like a garbage dump. Chad grew up ten feet from the Mississippi River in East Moline. By the age of fifteen, he was diving with his brother eight to ten hours a day for three-ridge and big washboard mussels for the cultured pearl industry. During the next six years, Pregracke got a firsthand look at the accumulation of debris underwater and on the islands and was disgusted.
“We had to live next to refrigerators. I finally said, ‘I’m going to take it upon myself to do something about this whole deal.’”
In 1997, after “getting the runaround” from the State of Illinois, Pregracke went on a fund-raising frenzy that produced a $10,000 grant from the aluminum producer Alcoa. With little more than that start-up money, the Mississippi River Beautification & Restoration Project was born. That summer he singlehandedly picked up 45,000 pounds of trash in a hundred-mile stretch. His success led to more donations and the creation of the nonprofit Living Lands & Waters.
Chad is a persuasive fundraiser. “I keep talking until they can’t say no.”
In 2002 Pregracke was honored at a ceremony held at the U.S. Supreme Court with the national Jefferson Award, America’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize for public service. Also receiving the award that year were Bill and Melinda Gates and Rudolph Giuliani.
Floods cause more trash to spill into waterways, and that means more trips for Chad and his crew. According to the LL&W Web site, “When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in late August 2005, Chad . . . canceled the fall schedule and loaded the barges with people, supplies, and building materials for a trip south on the Mississippi River. The hurricane relief project stretched over nine weeks. The crew of eighteen helped clean and repair roughly seventy houses in New Orleans and Mississippi.”
Chad keeps a running list of garbage he finds. Items include messages in bottles (48), propane tanks (1,098), bags of police riot gear (120), washing machines (179), refrigerators (775), barge rope (14,882 feet), one-inch–thick Styrofoam (enough to cover eleven football fields), 1970 Ford Econoline van (1), and Hot Wheels (32). Not on the list was a horse head his crew once found wrapped in plastic in a cooler and two prosthetic legs (found separately).3
In the summer of 2009 he found a grenade in the Cedar River (“How cool is that!”) and a body in Illinois’s Des Plaines River that authorities at first thought might be that of missing Chicago woman Stacey Peterson. “It turned out not even to be a woman,” Chad said.4
I first met Chad in the fall of 2003 in the old Mississippi River town of Quincy, Illinois. I was on assignment from a now defunct magazine called Hope, and I spent the day running around in a thirty-foot flat-bottom johnboat wrestling barrels and other junk onto the boats from nearby islands and thinking about snakes the entire time. It was one of the best days of my life. Chad is one of those rare, charismatic individuals you immediately want to do anything you can for—like fetch him a cup of coffee or run through walls.
The work was strenuous but rewarding. To my surprise, the river water was as warm as a freshly poured bath, and I thought of that famous saying about the Mississippi: “too thick to drink and too thin to plow.” Afterward we gathered on a beat-up houseboat in a hidden cove for sandwiches and drinks. The stereo was cranked up with the latest tunes from Britney and Rage Against the Machine. I was exhausted, covered in Mississippi silt and mud (I never saw a single snake), but ready to do whatever Chad needed me to do next. I could easily picture spending the whole summer with the crew, a group of idealistic twenty-year-olds who were having the time of their life. When I asked Chad what the Mississippi meant to him, his eyes lit up as he looked out at the river.
“It means everything. It’s my life. Now I’m in awe of it. How the bluffs change, the islands and different sloughs. It’s a sense of freedom to me.”5
So when the floods of 2008 hit, I knew Chad would be involved in the cleanup. I reached him the following summer just as he was preparing for a vacation in Costa Rica. He said that when the water began to rise on the Mississippi, he began to have a bad feeling. “We’re kind of out of touch with the news when we’re out there on the barge. We heard the water was coming up, and all of sudden we were seeing people pulling stuff out of their houses and starting to sandbag. People are saying, ‘Yeah, it’s close to what ’93 was down there,’ and I’m like, ‘No way! Not again.’”6
Chad pulled his barges out of the high water, paid a couple commercial fishermen to watch them, and then headed over to nearby Clarksville, Missouri, to help sandbag. Then a buddy showed him a news photo of the collapsed Cedar Rapids and Iowa City Railway Company (CRANDIC) bridge, a 793-foot-long span built in 1903 that crosses the river in Cedar Rapids. The photo showed everything from pontoon boats to pieces of houses piled up against the sunken bridge. At one point all bridges crossing the river, with the exception of the higher, four-lane I-380 bridge, were submerged. And of those four lanes, only two were open to regular traffic. One lane in each direction was reserved for emergency vehicles.
Cedar Rapids’ Mayor Kay Halloran told me, “We knew we needed availability for emergency vehicles, so we shut down one lane in each direction. All the [other] traffic was in single file, just crawling along. If you needed to go in a hurry, you put on the flashers or the siren, jumped into the left lane, and got there as fast as you could so that when another emergency vehicle needed to get through, there was nothing to stop them.”7
When Chad arrived in Cedar Rapids he could not believe what he was seeing.
“I got in my Honda and drove straight up there. I went to the train bridge and started talking to the guy in charge of the cleanup for the railroad. I knew where I could set up an operation, and three days later we had all our equipment up there—all five boats and a couple additional crew members. Then some of my sponsors called and said, ‘Hey, I heard you need some help up there. It looks pretty bad.’
“They started flying people in. They’d be there for a week, and we got an extra trailer for them to stay in. We did 170 boatloads [using the thirty-foot johnboats] in twenty one days up there. So that’s how our work started as far as the floods in Iowa.”
Chad said that while driving around downtown Cedar Rapids, other than the architecture, he couldn’t tell whether he was in post-Katrina New Orleans or Cedar Rapids. Both cities shared the same smells, the same sounds, and the same look.
Employees of AEP River Operations, headquartered in Chesterton, Missouri, not far from the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, came over to help Chad’s crew. “Chad does great work,”8 said AEP’s President Mark Knoy, who oversees nearly 3,000 hopper barges. He was happy to assist in the cleanup efforts, covering all his employees’ expenses and keeping them on the payroll during their volunteer shifts.
Helping out a river community was not unusual for Knoy. When Knoy received the Seamen’s Church Institute’s River Bell Award, board member Tom Prendergast said, “This is a man who loves working on the river and who deeply cares for his brothers and sisters working on the water.”
Knoy asked each employee to keep a journal of their experience. Chad told me that “people who came up and helped had lived through Katrina, so they knew exactly what was going on. Some of them wrote some really heavy stuff. . . . I read some of the journals and it was like, damn!” Kevin Lordo wrote:
As we worked through the area clearing debris, we came across a lot of different things. For me personally, the children’s toys were the most moving. The scope of the event is a lot for an adult to take in, much less a child. It is hard to fathom how a parent would begin to explain this tragic event to their children.
We cleared a lot of items including many refrigerators and 50-gallon drums. Perhaps the most important things we cleared up were the chemicals that could have leaked into the river.
It was great to be able to share this experience with fellow AEP employees. It built a bond between us that may not have been forged otherwise. As the days would wind down and we would begin to tire, we used the phrase “just one more” to keep us motivated. We knew that if we could get just one more item into the boat and cleared up, it would be that much better for the community.9
AEP’s Robb Osborne wrote with the authority of someone who knows rivers intimately; knows that flooding is part of a natural cycle:
I know flooding is nature’s way of refreshing the earth, sort of flushing it out. Bottomlands are replenished.
Undergrowth is swept away making room for new growth. The stronger trees and plants will survive while the weaker do not. Flooding is not all bad.
What about the people? I have mixed feelings regarding the residents affected by the flood. I witnessed the flood of 1993 firsthand with the affects it had on my family’s farm and the neighbors. Even though the farm is in the 500-year floodplain, my thoughts were that we should expect and prepare for something like that. On the other hand, can you really be prepared to lose everything? I don’t believe you can. These people went from living to merely surviving. I find that difficult to comprehend. Could I endure something like that? I can’t answer that, and I hope I never have to. I can only pray for the same strength as the people currently coping with this devastation.
Chad’s crew would return to the Cedar River three more times in the next year. On the one-year anniversary of the flood, they teamed with Cargill and Coca Cola employees—130 people in all—and they cleaned up forty-nine tons in three and a half hours. Chad was pleased. “That’s a record for us, dude.”
As of February 2009, some 80,000 tons of garbage had been removed from the streets of Cedar Rapids and the river and placed in landfills, at a cost of $9 million. City Manager Jim Prosser told me, “We reopened the central landfill that had just been closed and capped off. We looked at a variety of other options before we did that, including different types of incineration and shipping [the debris] out to other areas, but as a practical matter, that was the best option available at the time.”10
Most of the debris was first piled up in front of flooded houses. But “debris” is an inadequate, almost disrespectful, term for what was lost. Frank King, president of the Northwest Neighborhood Association in the working-class Time Check neighborhood, described the day when he had his ruined possessions removed from his flooded house.
“When we first got back in and the volunteers showed up to start mucking the place out, I wanted to see everything that was going out of the house. I sat down—I think it was in the backyard—and I had them bring everything by me. And after about an hour, I couldn’t take it anymore. So I don’t know what ended up out there. What looked like junk was my life.”11
There is a hedge that runs some 120 feet in front of Frank’s home. He said volunteers filled that space four times, five feet tall, with . . . his life.
“When you see a picture of your daughter who is now forty years old, and you don’t have the negatives, and it’s covered with human waste because what came in this house was sewage from the river, and there’s no way to replace that picture . . . I don’t care about the toys . . . but they were my grandkids’ toys, and you see them covered with this muck . . . ”
By July 29, 2008, more than 72,420 tons of debris had been hauled out of Cedar Rapids.12
Aside from the large amount of household items that ended up in the river, officials also worried about fertilizer runoff, propane tanks (which apparently float), carcasses of farm animals, and human waste. Cedar Rapids’ only waste water treatment plant was inoperable immediately following the flood, and raw sewage contributed to E. coli levels that were off the chart.13
As a longtime student of midwestern waters, I asked Chad Pregracke what he thought of the quality of the Cedar River, one of the larger rivers running through the state, draining 10 percent of the land upriver from Cedar Rapids. Did the river seem OK?
“I don’t know what OK is. I’m not a biologist, so I can’t tell you exactly what’s in it or how bad it is; but I caught some fish in it, so there must be something there.
“The fish are living and it’s still flowing, but as far as the amount of stuff that was from the flood, in all the places that I’ve traveled in the past twelve years, hundreds of cities and towns and areas and thousands of miles of river, I have never seen so much crap in a river in my life. I mean hundreds and hundreds of barrels and [containers of] acetones from companies, paint cans, and thousands of highlighter markers everywhere. . . .”
He hesitates to compare it to the 1993 flood but does note, “All I know is the power to rip down train bridges and twist them like a pretzel . . . I’ve never quite seen anything like it. Just blew people out of the water. This was like biblical proportions.”
Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources reports that the major pollutant in the Cedar River is the high nitrate levels caused by “row crop agriculture, livestock production, and wastewater treatment plants.”
Certainly the water in the river is not potable. According to the DNR, “Currently, Cedar Rapids drinking water is safe, as it comes from groundwater. However, the quality of this groundwater is affected by water quality in the Cedar River. Nitrate levels in the river have been increasing over time. Every spring since 2001, samples from the river have contained nitrate levels that exceed the state water quality standard to protect drinking water.”14
Water quality, or lack of it, made me think back to those summers in the 1960s—more than a decade before the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972—when Grandpa would rouse me out of my sleep and we would head over to the Cedar River to walk precariously across what I recall was a small dam near the First Avenue Bridge. The night before, Grandpa, a cigar hanging out of his mouth, would soak the backyard with a garden hose until fat night crawlers magically rose from the earth, where I would then collect them and place them in a coffee can. This was our bait. We were never disappointed and always returned with a nice string of catfish for Grandma to fry for supper. Now I wonder what toxic cocktail I was ingesting. Oh, well, too late now to worry.
I also wonder what Grandpa would have thought of what occurred in Green Square Park during the 2008 flood. The park in downtown Cedar Rapids—several blocks from the river—became the temporary home of many catfish, which became stranded when the water receded. One resident told me he grabbed the biggest ones . . . to eat of course.15