What does success look like? Neighborhoods revitalized, big businesses back, and flood protection in. That’s it. Those are the three things. It will never look the same. Downtown will never look the same. We’re going to have flood protection in many parts of the city that was not there before. We’re going to have a greenway where there used to be neighborhoods. It won’t be the same. So it’s a disaster.
—GREG EYERLY, FLOOD RECOVERY DIRECTOR, CITY OF CEDAR RAPIDS1
Greg Eyerly did not aspire to take on the very thankless job of flood recovery director. He had only been in the city for four months before the 2008 flood. His wife, Kelly, arrived the week of the flood. Cedar Rapids had hired Eyerly to help run its water and wastewater treatment plants and to improve their reliability, lower their operating costs, and improve the quality of service for water and wastewater.
Little did he know when he arrived from Oregon that he would soon find himself directing one of the most heroic and publicized rescue efforts during the flood: saving Collector Water Well #3, the last operating well out of forty-eight in the city. The story of the over 1,200 citizens who came to rescue the well at the height of the flood after hearing a plea for help broadcast on radio and television was probably the highlight of the most dismal week in Cedar Rapids’ modern history.2 Eyerly’s story is vividly captured in the film Resilience. On the back of the film’s DVD box is his quote: “ . . . Having lived in Iowa for 4 months . . . I haven’t really seen Iowa, a lot of Iowa, as I have shared with a lot of people. I saw Iowa that night. That was the best of Iowa—it was the people—that’s what Iowa’s about.”3
As the deadline approached to apply for the position of flood recovery director, Eyerly sent an e-mail to the human resources manager and others that said, “I am not going to apply for this job. And just for the record, here’s thirteen reasons why I’m not applying for this job.”
I will have to spend too much time at work,away from my family.
I won’t have time to run ultras and train.
I have a great job with a defined career path that is in demand all over the U.S.
I have a great boss now; now everyone will be my boss.
The job is career suicide; nobody will be satisfied with the progress, no matter how fast we recover.
Too many factors outside my control: federal funding, national economy, other natural disasters.
Funding for the Flood Job is insecure; private sector, public sector, for how long??
The job has no career path, unless a City somewhere is Jonesin’ for a Flood Director . . .
The Flood Job doesn’t have a defined role.
I will have to be everything to everybody; neighborhoods, business and the non-flood affected public will all want something different.
I will miss the guys at the plants I work with . . .
I am sure they will find people far more qualified, so this will all be just a big waste of time for me.
I will be doing something that was completely different from why I moved to Iowa in the first place. This just doesn’t make any sense . . . 4
It’s not clear if the last sentence, “This just doesn’t make any sense,” was the fourteenth reason or simply a summary of the previous thirteen. Eyerly said he agonized for days over his decision.
“I’d wake up in the middle of the night and just sit on the end of the bed thinking that I’m playing the safe route. I’m holding back. I could be more. I run ultramarathons, so when I’m out on those long five- or six-hour runs, it gives you a lot of time to really reflect on what you’re going to do and what you’re thinking. You have nothing else to do. And so I went back to my wife and said, ‘I think I should apply for that job. I need you to tell me that it’s OK. Because if you tell me it’s not OK, I’m not going to do it.’ She said, ‘If you think it’s something you need to do, if it’s important to you, do it.’”5
Eyerly’s first day on the job was July 13, 2009. I talked to him a month later in the temporary Cedar Rapids City Hall, in the northeast part of the city near AEGON’s headquarters. I was politely told not to call him “Flood Czar.” I wanted to know if the accusation made by Frank King and others that the city was economically cleansing flooded neighborhoods was true.
Eyerly was late, and he rushed in dressed in jeans and an untucked white shirt with gray detailing on the back and cuffs. He tried to throw a sports jacket on—I suspect that was not unusual. He was a fit forty-four-year-old but joked that he will reach sixty-four after completing his first year as flood recovery director. The shelves in his office were practically empty. Everything felt makeshift, but more accurately, his new post did not allow him much desk time. He was on the go constantly.
Time Check resident and neighborhood activist Linda Seger, who Eyerly said encouraged him to apply by saying he was a “trustworthy kind of fella,” said of the position: “I think no matter what kind of job he does, the city government’s going to suck him up. They could have brought in Jesus, and they wouldn’t be happy.”6
Ron Sims, whose house in the Cedar Valley neighborhood was flooded, was against the creation of the flood recovery director position. Sims, who was formerly the president of the Cedar Valley neighborhood, spoke to me in a house that he, his wife, Sharon, and their four dogs were renting while their former house was being rebuilt.
“To take somebody and pay him an exorbitant amount of money like that when we already have the people to do this job . . . I know the pressure’s great, but that’s part of the job you’re doing. And we had a major disaster; we are going to get through it, but the pressure’s there. But that’s part of your job. We don’t need to sit and hire somebody to oversee all the money and everything. I don’t know how I want to say it, but no, I don’t think [hiring a] flood czar will work. I could have done the flood czar job even though I’m not connected with the government probably as well as he is, but . . . ”
Sharon interrupted, “You’re too outspoken.”
Ron agreed. “I am, yeah. They wouldn’t like me.”7
Eyerly told me he answers a lot of calls from residents and that they are typically 90 percent emotional and 10 percent fact based.
We talked about the Northwest, where we both had previously lived. Eyerly still owns a home in Sisters, Oregon, a home that he said he would never sell. Before Cedar Rapids hired him to be its utilities operations manager, Eyerly had worked as an executive in a supply company that sold toilets and sinks. Then he worked as an executive in a privatized public utility company. Eventually he became enamored with public service and methodically researched where he wanted to live.
“I wanted to take a job as a public employee and get away from managing income statements. We looked all over the country and actually created a little scoring matrix. As I was interviewing for different jobs, we were in there doing all the research on the communities, some very diverse choices. And Cedar Rapids looked like a good choice. I flew out here for an interview, and Cedar Rapids was very aggressive in recruiting me. The other municipalities I interviewed at were concerned that I would create too much change or rock the boat too much because they saw all that private-sector experience. In fact, I used to privatize public utilities. But Cedar Rapids, they wanted that. They said, ‘You’re going to be a real catalyst for change, and that’s what we want.’”8
Not long after he began his new job overseeing the water department, some of the locals began to speculate about whether 2008 would be a flood year similar to 1993. Eyerly said people who had been studying the local watershed also began to wonder. All the factors were in place, beginning with heavy fall rains that saturated the soil prior to heavy snowfall, prior to heavy spring rains.
We had that really cold winter, and then we had a really cold spring. That kept snow on the ground a lot longer. The other thing it did is it kept the farmers from getting in the fields to get crops planted. And so come June, you got saturated soil and you’ve got a very immature crop in place. You didn’t have the biomass out there to absorb and take up water as rain fell. You had bare soil.
We had an enormous rainfall the week of the flood, including the day before the crest. And an incredible number of bad things lined up to create that crest. We started preparing for the flood the Sunday before the crest. We knew we were going to flood, but we were, at that time, thinking twenty feet.9
In June the Cedar River usually runs between six and twelve feet high. Eyerly, who had been through a flood in Vancouver, Washington, during which he helped save a wastewater plant, could not conceive of a 31.12-foot crest.
In the film Resilience, Eyerly said, “The Sunday before the crest, before the work even started, we started to make preparations . . . because, at the time, we’re talking about a crest at that point in the twenty- to twenty-two-foot range. So we already started making emergency preparations for protection of both the water plant and the wastewater plant.
“We knew in the short term that we could operate without a wastewater treatment plant if we had to, but our water plant is just critical to us to function as a city, really as a society.”
As floodwaters knocked out all the other wells in the city, Eyerly knew it was just a matter of time before Collector Well #3 would go under too. There are forty-six vertical wells and four collector wells. The entire water system pumps some sixty-five million gallons of water throughout the city. Forty-five percent of the water is collected in the city’s aptly named collector wells. . . . 10
Eyerly and about eighty city workers were racing against time. Morale was low. The cinder-block structure that housed the well was soon an island. The rain was relentless. Water began seeping into the building itself. At 6:00 p.m. they temporarily ran out of sandbags. More sand arrived and more bags but, as Eyerly said, “We didn’t have sand in bags.”11 And more volunteers were needed . . . quickly. Eyerly and his crew could only stay a couple inches ahead of the rising river and knew they would run out of time.
Eyerly made a 9-1-1 call that eventually found its way to the local television station, KCRG, which rushed reporter Justin Foss on the air at 10:00 p.m.
“The city is in dire need of sandbaggers right now to help protect the city’s only suction well left. They usually have four suction wells operating. They are three down right now. This is the only suction well left operating in the city. They’re putting out a call to anybody that has time to sandbag.”
As the Cedar Rapids Gazette reported, “Within minutes, a wave of people were flowing across the bridge from northeast Cedar Rapids, some carrying shovels.”12
According to Everly, “The thought of losing a water system brought the flood to everybody’s doorstep at that point. The community responded, and there were young people; there were old people. I remember just seeing a handful of people filling sandbags. And then I turned around again and what had been a handful of people had grown to probably 200 people filling bags. Fifteen or twenty minutes went by and I turned around again and you could see the floodlights. They lit up the whole area along Ellis and out into the collector well, into the river where we were. I turned around again and there were probably a thousand people now filling bags.”
Resident Nick Scott said, “When you looked up Edgewood Bridge, it was just shoulder to shoulder.” Estimates ran from 1,200 to 2,000 volunteers.
Eyerly talked about the big, corn-fed Iowa boys that he selected to build the wall of sandbags. “There were some big boys out there. They were wearing nothing but T-shirts, sandals, and shorts, and they were standing in the Cedar River sandbagging.” Eyerly said it was all he could do to lift one bag. The Iowa boys had two in each hand.
Eyerly called it a “human army” that looked like a line of ants in the floodlights. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
By 11:00 p.m. there were 10,000 sandbags surrounding the structure. The well was saved.
It took Eyerly around ten minutes to get the volunteers to cease filling sandbags. They responded by doing a wave. Then they quickly rushed over to Mercy Medical Center in an attempt to save it from flooding. In that effort they were not successful. Mercy ended up evacuating 176 patients to other area hospitals. Around the same time, the Linn County Sheriff’ s Department evacuated 409 inmates to other facilities.
“For us, there was a certain amount of frustration that had built throughout the whole week of losing those battles . . . At least the collector well gave the community and the city staff a place to . . . it was our Alamo. It gave us a place to fight back the Cedar River and take out that frustration.”13
Cedar Rapids’ Mayor Halloran also told me that saving that last water well saved the city from an even bigger catastrophe. “I can remember in 1993 when the water system in Des Moines went down. But we never lost water pressure, because we saved the last well.” She likened the effort to a barn raising or other communal activities that were part of daily life in earlier agricultural communities. “I always knew it was a good city, but I also learned that there’s a lot of on-the-farm attitudes in the city of Cedar Rapids. If somebody needs something and you’re able to help provide it, you do.”14
In the film, Eyerly summed up that night this way: “It’s going to be years before we recover. I feel like you want to look back on your life and felt like you accomplished something. This is your chance, and so here’s your chance to dedicate part of your life and help Iowa work through all these issues. When I look back twenty years from now, I’ll always be able to look back on not just that night but all those years after, feeling like you did something worthwhile.
“I think it would have taken us a long time to be part of Iowa. But I think that night we really became part of Iowa.”15
The emotion and adrenaline of that dramatic night when Collector Well #3 was saved have long since passed. Eyerly was now the flood recovery director and responsible for, well, everything and everybody.
Distrust of city government was growing daily. Contacts wrote to me with comments such as these:
“I feel bad for Greg. I wish him the best and I think if anyone can help it will be him. I will be very involved in the election this fall [2009]. We need strong leadership from an elected official, not a hired city manager. These people work for us, and if they are not doing their job, they need to be replaced. The power is with us; I hope we begin to realize it.”
At the time of our interview, fourteen months after the flood, there were 280 ruined properties (“nuisance properties”) unchanged and standing in the Czech Village and Time Check neighborhoods. The future of those homes was complicated, Eyerly said, and made more confusing by trying to locate the owners.
“This is why we can’t contact certain owners: The person I just got off the phone with today, Dave, well, the property next to him is untouched. The person that lived in that property died a month before the flood. His sister got ownership of the property. She lived in Colorado. She died in February. Now it belongs to one of the kids of his sister. And he’s not sure where they live. They’re probably living in another state just waiting for a buyout.”
Eyerly also was building relationships with business groups, not-for-profit organizations, and various state and federal agencies.
“I set deadlines and targets for the city, rope people into commitments. I build the internal relationships within the city to get work done. The other part is education and communication. So yesterday I spoke at the Society of Engineers.
“I help shape messages and help prioritize gaps. As we get funding what gaps are left? How do we communicate those gaps? We have twelve appropriation bills coming up next year, and I’ll be taking all these gaps that we have in funding. I’ll define what the gap is, provide all the documentation they need, and then summarize an argument that our congressmen can go argue or put into a bill.”16
Three days after Eyerly’s first day on the job, an Associated Press story ran in the Chicago Tribune in which Eyerly said, “As a result of the differing methods, there is a $100 million gap between the city’s and FEMA’s versions of flood damage.”17
In the month since he had started his new job, Eyerly had taken only two days off, the day before he ran a hundred-mile race and the day of the race.
I told him that Frank King and others in the Time Check neighborhood felt that the city was in the process of “economically cleansing” the working-class families out of the river areas. Eyerly, who had heard of Frank, said it’s simple economics, and we went into another office where he had some numbers drawn on a whiteboard.
He set up the following equation: A flooded home in Time Check might be worth $50,000. The owner, like Jon Galvin, has long since paid off the mortgage. But the owner has to buy another house. That house will cost at least $100,000. The buyer puts $25,000 down that he might have received as a buyout, but he still owes $75,000 on the new house. Before the flood, the homeowner was surviving marginally without a mortgage or a low payment of $300 or $400 a month, plus property taxes. Perhaps he was on a fixed income, like a pension from Quaker Oats or Social Security. Now he has payments in the neighborhood of $1,000 a month. To raze the old house and rebuild a similar house at past construction costs is not feasible, Eyerly said.
“Economic cleansing is not our intent. But you can’t build a house on a piece of property for less than $100,000 or even $150,000.”18
Eyerly and I walked back into his office. I said, “OK, but you still have this group of frustrated residents. You have long-standing neighborhoods being busted up as people move out. How do you deal with them? I mean, they must call you all the time.”
“Oh, they do, and I welcome them. That’s why I go down to the flood recovery area. It reminds me why I’m doing this job. It reminds me that the need is still out there. Until we are dealing with those people’s needs on the ground— whether it’s a small business owner or a resident who’s been flooded out—you can talk about all the money that you’re getting committed or appropriated or distributed, you can talk about the stats and rattle off about the stats. But it’s the people on the ground—that’s the true test of whether you’re making progress. That’s the litmus test that tells you whether or not you’re being effective.”
I could tell his statement is sincere, but I decided to press him. I want to know what he believes success looks like. What does this term recovery actually mean?
“It’s those neighborhoods, you know; when we go back through them twenty years from now, there will be neighborhoods there, there will be people living in those homes, and there will be community.”
“But it won’t be those people that were there before living in those homes that are mostly still standing,” I said.
“Not those homes and not those people,” he admitted. “It’s like a broken leg that heals. Is that successful? Is that success? No. Breaking a leg and having to go through the healing process is a miserable experience. And it can take years before that leg’s ever [the same] way it was.”
So success is?
“What does success look like? Neighborhoods revitalized, big businesses back, and flood protection in. That’s it. Those are the three things. It will never look the same. Downtown will never look the same. We’re going to have flood protection in many parts of the city that was not there. We’re going to have a green way where there used to be neighborhoods. It won’t be the same. So it’s a disaster.”19
Eyerly was late for a meeting with FEMA, but before he could run out the door, the phone rang. “New York Times,” he said, apologetically. My interview with the flood recovery director was over. As I left I jokingly told him to contact me if he ever wanted to sell that home in Oregon.
“Sorry, I won’t be selling that home.”