One that really got me is the director of Homeland Security. I can’t even pronounce her name [Janet Napolitano]. She came here and never set foot in the neighborhood. She went down and looked at the library, and then she went to the university and looked at some of their buildings. [She] never once stepped [foot] in a neighborhood. Never once took a tour bus or anything through the neighborhoods. And she came back out after she walked and said, “Oh, they’re recovering fine.”
I’ll show you what recovery really looks like. It’s not pretty.
—RON SIMS, FLOOD VICTIM1
It did not take long for Christian Fong’s fears regarding burnout and infighting to become reality. Cedar Rapids had hit the bottom of the bell-shaped “phases of disaster” graph. The next time we met in his office at AEGON, he was willing to name what many city officials would not.
“We’re rugged Iowans, and we don’t admit burnout. We don’t even admit it to each other. We don’t admit it to ourselves. You don’t do that. You’re an Iowan, and you just keep going. So what you look for are the behaviors associated with burnout. And we have those in spades. People who are as reliable as a clock don’t show up for a meeting, let a deadline slide. Yeah, people are burning out.”2
By the time of the first anniversary of the flood, Christian himself had cut the number of hours volunteering on flood recovery from forty a week to twenty. In addition, he was conflicted regarding the continued tension between the city’s public relations effort and the actual reality of hundreds of empty houses and impatient residents still waiting for buyouts. And it was apparent to me that the conflict was getting to him, gnawing away at his good intentions and challenging his deep faith.
“You want transparency, you want honesty. I watched one of my favorite movies, A Man for All Seasons, and there’s this great scene where either his [Sir Thomas More’s] daughter or his daughter-in-law is trying to convince him to just lie. ‘We’ll all know. Everyone that knows you knows the truth. So just lie and save your life, your family needs you. No one will believe that you really meant what you said.’
“And he holds his hands out, as if he’s cupping water, and says, ‘Everything you speak, you’re holding,’ to paraphrase this considerably. But the gist of it was: ‘Every time you speak, you’re holding your soul in your hands, and if there’s no integrity, and you spread your fingers out, you lose it. You lose your soul.’”3
Christian cupped his hands as if holding water and truth and, for the first time in our interviews, his eyes began to tear up.
“And the community’s the same way. We will have to deal honestly and transparently with what’s going on or we will lose our soul, and we will stop being able to function. It will become a propaganda machine, which is nothing more than corruption, when you don’t have a [sort of] transparency, when you’re trying to control the message that the community is giving [and receiving], so you no longer know what’s going on. We’re going to have to fix it our first time through it. Can we? I don’t know. So how do I deal with it? [By being] personally committed to be transparent and honest with what I see.”
With that in mind, Twitter, the unfiltered social networking medium, was becoming more appealing to him because “I don’t have to be on message when I’m on Twitter. That’s where I can say, ‘The city’s really hurting. There’s still cracked streets everywhere, instead of ‘Hey, look at this business that came back. Isn’t this nice?’”
Aside from his speaking with flood victims themselves and walking the abandoned neighborhoods, the movie illustrates that Christian so eloquently described seemed to me one of the most human portrayals of the sorrow that accompanies a natural disaster: the struggle for integrity. It also signaled another rent in the social fabric of a community in need of cohesion. But who could blame Christian— or anyone else—for burning out?
In A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit writes that survival for disaster communities is dependent on long-term commitments of mutual aid.
“We often hear about heroes in disasters, but the window of time when acts of physical courage matter is often very brief, and those when generosity and empathy are more important to survival last for weeks, months, years.
“Mutual aid means that every participant is both giver and recipient in acts of care that bind them together, as distinct from the one-way street of charity.”4
Christian had provided valuable, intelligent, and heartfelt mutual aid. He probably would continue to contribute something to the recovery effort, but the disillusionment was evident. More people had stopped “cupping their hands.” He felt that the real story of the flood was not getting out or that when “good news” was announced, only half of the truth came out. As an illustration, when we spoke in June 2009, he pointed to the cheerful announcement that around 80 percent of flooded businesses in Cedar Rapids had now reopened.
“It’s a fact. But is it the truth? No, because the real point is that of those 80 percent of businesses that have reopened, all are hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. They’re in danger of closing, and they haven’t hired all their people back. The 20 percent that closed represent the 1,200 jobs, which represents 800 families that also just lost their house.”
Then, he said, someone asks the governor’s office, “How are we doing?” and the powers that be say, “80 percent of our businesses have reopened. We’re doing great.”
Christian told me this on the eve of the one-year anniversary. He would not be participating in any of the city’s events. “Tonight I’ll go to the neighborhood event because being with my neighbors, being with my community, that’s healing for me. My family, my community, made up of the people, some of them suffering, some of them not.”5
At the one-year anniversary in Sunner Park that opened this book, City Manager Jim Prosser also gave remarks. Perhaps no one else throughout this ordeal has suffered the wrath of frustrated Cedar Rapidians more than Jim Prosser. He was on the e-mail address list that received this message on December 4, 2009. (By the time it was forwarded to me, I could not with complete accuracy determine the original sender. It could have been any number of people.)
Are the City Manager and perhaps his investor buddies really looking out for the best interests of the flood victims who have lost everything? Isn’t it time they get it together and look out for the people of the community?
The City Manager and his investor-friendly people doing the buyouts must be retrained to think more for the people who pay their wages. THE FLOOD VICTIMS who need to be bought out for the most money they can get for their flood-damaged property. They work for the flood victims, not the investors waiting in the wings to snap up the land at bargain-basement prices to build the Sasaki brand of big-city neighborhoods. Maybe the Prosser group should look to these investors to subsidize the payments to the homeowners. These flood victims need all the money they can get after such disaster, losing not only their home but all of their personal items, which are not being calculated into the buyout process for the flood victims.6
I caught up with Prosser the day before the one-year anniversary—the gray, misty morning when he read his speech to a small audience on the banks of the Cedar River. His office, like the mayor’s and flood recovery director’s, was in the temporary City Hall in an AEGON building on River Ridge Drive NE. He looked tired, a look I had been seeing all over town. I jotted in my notebook, “JP has the Cedar Rapids look.” He was just two months shy of being in his position as city manager for three years.
I asked him the same question I had asked Christian Fong and many other people that weekend: “Where is Cedar Rapids in its recovery?”
“Well, we’re still in the very beginning stages of the recovery. I was just asked about how far along we are, and percentages really are a poor way to describe where we are, given the fact that this is a marathon. The work that we do now, if you do it right, is going to help us recover quicker, and it’s going to help us recover better. I think we’ve accomplished that at remarkable speed. We’ve done a lot of the foundation building for a more accelerated recovery. It’s still going to take a long time, but because we’ve done some of these things, we prepared ourselves.”7
He spoke of three major developments: First was the flood management system that had been put in place in the first 120 days following the flood with public buy-in and by working closely with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The plan would involve the rebuilding of neighborhoods and the downtown area.
Secondly Prosser spoke of the neighborhood planning process, completed in five months. “It was completed with a very high level of public participation. The flood management plan [also] was completed with a high level of public participation, which is important.”
The last of the three major developments over the past year was the plan for recovery of city facilities.
When I told Time Check resident Frank King that Prosser said the neighborhood planning process involved a great deal of public participation, he was dismissive.
“Yeah. But it was [always] the same people. Threefourths of them were people that they brought [in], and a few neighbors kept coming. It was like taking a multiplechoice test—only they forgot to put the correct answer as one of the choices. It was like: ‘Do you prefer town houses or row houses?’
“‘I don’t like either.’
“‘I’m sorry, that’s not one of the answers. Do you like town houses or row houses?’ ‘Well, I guess of the two, I’d prefer town houses.’
“Seventy-five percent of the people in Cedar Rapids with the planning session wanted town houses.”8
Prosser was aware of the criticism directed at him and the city. He said it was understandable.
It’s great to see results when you’re reinvesting in building, but you don’t want to see it happen as a result of something like this. You don’t want to see families essentially brought to their knees as a result of what happened like this. We get a lot of criticism for not moving fast enough and not putting money in people’s hands so that they can recover more quickly. And they’re right about that stuff. I mean, timing is critical, and a lot of people aren’t going to be able to really recover anywhere close to where they were before because of how long it takes to get things done. It’s just terrible to see that, especially to know that you really cannot help people out because the money’s just not there.
You feel helpless at times, and so this has been, without question, some of the darkest days of my profession, and of my life, having to watch what happened here. At the same time, you can’t let that overwhelm you. You’ve got to look forward, because if we don’t set in place the momentum to make sure we’re building a greater community, then we will have a double tragedy here.9
The next day at the ceremony along the river, I hoped he would share some of those same feelings with those assembled. Although he was sympathetic to residents’ plights, he didn’t talk abut his own feelings. Maybe it was the wrong time and the wrong venue. Instead, Prosser spoke about how
More than 1,000 homes have been or are in the process of rehabilitation. Much of this work was aided by 200,000 volunteer hours and $30 million of federal and state Jumpstart money.
Twenty new homes in the Oak Hill Jackson neighborhood will start to resupply the demand for single family homes.
With the collaboration of our business community and the chamber [of commerce] over $20 million of federal, state, and local funds have been provided to flood-impacted businesses to aid in their efforts to recover much needed jobs and services . . . With the collaboration of area home builders, the State of Iowa, and the City [of Cedar Rapids] over 200 new homes are targeted to be completed by the end of this year.
Over 200 units of new multifamily rental homes have been approved for construction and are awaiting financing approvals.
Renovation of the historic Roosevelt Hotel will add more than eighty units of affordable rental housing to the downtown.
The City, Mercy Hospital, and St. Luke’s Hospital are collaborating to create a destination medical district as a means to promote further community investment.
The City, Downtown District, and 2001 Corporation are working together to redevelop the Courthouse Square adjacent to the new Federal Courthouse.10
Who could blame Prosser for listing those accomplishments? They were all true. He also added a dose of reality when he said, “These plans are the foundation for a greater, more sustainable Cedar Rapids. While this work may require ten to fifteen years to complete, much has already been accomplished and more results will be evident in the near future.”
Flood victim Ron Sims also spoke at the one-year ceremony. As I wrote in the prologue, his speech held nothing back in its criticism of the way the recovery was handled and the way federal money was misused. He made the crowd uneasy. I wanted to meet him.
Two months later, on a rainy August afternoon, I sat down with Ron and his wife, Sharon, in the home they were renting just off busy First Avenue. They had four dogs, including two large German shepherds. The dogs had made finding a temporary home extremely difficult. No one would rent to them until a landlord that had also been impacted by the 2008 flood leased them the house. As with so many residents I interviewed, a crisp American flag hung in front of the house. Inside, the Sunday Cedar Rapids Gazette was spread out on the kitchen table and coffee was brewing. The dogs were in the garage. Ron wore denim shorts, a Harley American Classic T-shirt, and a Carl Edwards #99 cap. Sharon wore a sleeveless white blouse and jeans. They were both lifelong residents of Cedar Rapids.
Ron was the former president of the Cedar Valley Neighborhood Association. Cedar Valley is downriver from the city in the southeast quadrant. Their home in Cedar Valley was Sharon’s childhood home, where she grew up with seven other siblings.
Because his work shift had changed at Logistics, Ron was no longer president of the association, but he remained active in the recovery. Sharon worked at an Amana factory. They were among the few homeowners I met that had flood insurance, and they were in the process of building a new house on the same lot. The insurance money paid to tear down the flooded house, rebuild the foundation, and pay off the old mortgage.
Ron described Cedar Valley as a “community of relatives.” Sharon added, “Yeah. That’s well put. Everybody’s related to somebody.”
“Except me,” Ron said.11
I asked him about his speech at the one-year commemoration.
“[The ceremony] was all glitter and shine. [But even] with the progress, you’ve got to remember that there’s a lot of people struggling, fighting out there, trying to get their lives back in order, and it’s just been nothing but red tape and bureaucracy and everything holding everybody up. If you don’t speak out, you lose perspective of what really happened.”
Sharon recalled, “It was so amazing when he made that statement; it was like you could hear a pin drop. And I was sitting on the side going, ‘Oh, God, you’re going to get stoned.’”
When the flood hit, the Sims’s house was nine feet above the 100-year floodplain. The new house will be above the 500-year floodplain. Ron shows me a photo.
In the style of some Gulf Coast homes, Sims’s new house would have large garage-style doors on two sides of the structure that would open to allow floodwaters to flow through. Of course, timing is everything. He would have to have plenty of advance notice to move items off the floor of the house before the river water rushed in.
“Almost like a Florida home?” I ask.
“Exactly,” Ron said. “Except it’s made for the Midwest. Because of the harsh winters, we’ve got a heater down there. We showed the city variance board the design on the house and the design on the foundation. They congratulated us and hoped more people in Cedar Rapids would do it. We were ready to get told no or something, and instead they were really positive.”
Ron said his neighbors that were able to do so began to rebuild immediately. They did not wait for the city’s blessing. “They got in there right after the flood and started rebuilding. They started rebuilding before the city decided or the Army Corps of Engineers decided where the flood areas were going to be and [what proposed] green spaces they want to buy up. [That] kind of saved themselves from the bureaucracy.
“Now they [the city and the Corps] come out with where floodwalls are going to be, the levees, and everything. They’re saying that all those homes in that area cannot be rebuilt. My understanding, after talking to a lot of city officials, is [that] if people [already] went in and rebuilt, they are not going to come in and tear their houses down or tell them they have to go.
“If they did do that, there’d be a war. It would be suicide for the city itself. You got to fight for what you stand for.”
Ron said his neighborhood never had a flood like the one in 2008. Not even in 1993, the last 500-year flood. When they saw the river was not going to stop rising, they finally brought in a moving pod and loaded it up with some furniture, TVs, and clothes. The railroad tracks near their home served as a dike, but finally it too gave way, and water began spilling over the tracks. In 1993 the water did not even reach the tracks. About a half hour after water breached the tracks, Ron said, “the “National Guard and the police were all down there kicking us out.” Sharon added, “They said we had less than an hour to get out.”
The next morning Ron and Sharon found a couple of boats, snuck back in, and paddled around. They were not alone at ignoring the orders to stay away. “They weren’t going to keep us out. We had to see. And that was everybody. Everybody. They closed off our neighborhoods, and everybody just wanted to get back in and see their houses.”
The smell was what Ron will always remember. “That gut-wrenching smell of rotting food, you know, from refrigerators being tipped over. The [smell of the] mud, just the dirty water.”
“Was it a sewage smell?” I asked.
“It was more of a chemical smell to me, like chemicals from up the river or something.”
Mud and dirty water weren’t the only things covering their home. “When we went back to the house, the roof was just covered with turtles,” Ron said. “They were trying to get out of the flood. I guess they were trying to [escape] the chemicals that were in the water—you could see oil slicks and everything. They were all over the roofs of the houses down there. It was kind of funny to see.”
The Simses knew everything in their house would be lost. And it was.
Ron said, “Jewelry, pictures, personal antiques—everything that was part of the family over the years just all gone. But the real killer came probably two weeks later, when we start clearing the house out. You throw [the debris] out to the curb, and the dump trucks just pick it up with a big clamshell bucket and haul everything away that you worked for.” Sharon let Ron, his dad, and his brother clean up the mess. She couldn’t handle seeing her life tossed to the curb.
The following spring, what remained of the house was torn down and hauled away. They had hoped to move back into their new house by the fall of 2009. Like Troy and Beverly Simon, they love living along the Cedar River. They love watching the bald eagles in winter, as well as the geese, ducks, and deer.
“They’re not living with us. We live with them,” Ron said. “And it’s back to that now. Right after the flood you didn’t see any wildlife. They were all gone. Now they’re all back. We’ve got a groundhog in our yard we can’t get rid of.”
Even though Ron and Sharon were in better shape than many other flood victims, they were sensitive to the sorrow and frustration that permeated many of the neighborhoods in the city. Ron said it’s hard to stay involved and attend public meetings.
“I don’t go to council meetings because when I hear people get up and speak it’s, how do I say it? A lot of times it upsets me because people get up there and rant and rave without knowing the facts. They want to tell their personal story, which is not the reason for a city council meeting. So I try to stay away from them. Instead I get involved with the neighborhood planning process.”
As far as how Cedar Rapids was handling the flood recovery, Ron said, “I think the city could have done a better job, but I also think their hands are tied. When funds come from FEMA or Homeland Security, they get sent to the state first, and then the state decides how they want to divvy them up to the flood-affected areas.
“I would not want to be in the city hierarchy’s position— they’re the ones that the people complain to. They have to take in those complaints and then tell the people, ‘We’re doing the best we can.’ To Sharon and me, it’s never the best. We feel they’re not doing the best they can. We feel that our government should be doing a hell of a lot more.”
He saved his harshest criticism for the federal government.
“One that really got me is the director of Homeland Security. I can’t even pronounce her name [Janet Napolitano]. She came here and never set foot in the neighborhood. She went down and looked at the library, and then she went to the university and looked at some of their buildings. [She] never once stepped [foot] in a neighborhood. Never once took a tour bus or anything through the neighborhoods. And she came back out after she walked and said, ‘Oh, they’re recovering fine.’
“I’ll show you what recovery really looks like. It’s not pretty.”
More than a year after the Flood of 2008, the center was getting harder to locate. This despite books and documentaries showing the heroic efforts of Iowans and Midwesterners battling tremendous odds to overcome the second 500-year or 1,000-year flood (pick any number you want) in just fifteen years.
The slow slog was on. The economy was dismal. In August 2009 heavy-equipment manufacturer Terex Corporation announced job cuts of 170 at its Cedar Rapids plant. “The worldwide recession has greatly reduced construction equipment orders. As a result, manufacturing capacity across the company is greater than needed to meet foreseeable market demand,” said Terex president and chief operating officer Tom Riordan from company headquarters in Westport, Connecticut. Immediately shares in the company rose by 31 cents.12
On September 24, 2009, the Cedar Rapids Gazette announced “Business Drags in Czech Village.” Reporter Cindy Hadish wrote:
Ten months after reopening his Czech Village gift shop, Bob Schaffer still hears people wonder what, if anything, is back in business in the flooded historical district.
“They aren’t quite sure what to expect when they come in,” said Schaffer, owner of Czech Cottage, 100 16th Ave. SW. “The word hasn’t really gotten out.”
The same is true of the other nearly 20 businesses that were mucked out, rebuilt and reopened—or opened new—after the devastating flood last year. Even the popular Sykora Bakery, which reopened in April to throngs of customers and a visit from Gov. Chet Culver, has its woes.
Some owners worry that what floodwaters didn’t annihilate could slowly be destroyed by lack of business . . .13
Linda Seger forwarded an Army Corps of Engineers’ news release dated December 28, 2009, with the headline “Cedar Rapids Flood Risk Management Feasibility Study Continues.”
“I wanted to send it to you,” Linda wrote, “so you could see what the Corps has to say. It looks like the city, in an attempt to keep us off our land, made the cost ratio down here very low, and Congress will not want to protect grassland.”14
Indeed, the news release was not good news for the city of Cedar Rapids.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Rock Island District, in partnership with the City of Cedar Rapids, continues to review and evaluate flood risk management alternatives for the City. The Corps has completed a preliminary analysis for an alternative that mirrors the City of Cedar Rapids’ preferred plan. This alternative includes levees and floodwalls on both sides of the Cedar River built to June 2008 record flood levels.
The preliminary analysis of this alternative shows a Benefit-to-Cost Ratio of less than 1. This cost ratio means that the estimated cost to provide flood risk management protection under this alternative is more than the estimated benefits. The law requires a project to have a favorable Benefit-to-Cost Ratio of more than 1 to move forward.
Under the Cedar Rapids Flood Risk Management Feasibility Study, additional analysis is being conducted to determine if a cost-effective flood risk management alternative, with positive net benefits, could be recommended by the Corps of Engineers to Congress for authorization and construction. Additional study analysis includes modifications to the City of Cedar Rapids’ preferred plan, modified levee alignments, and flood proofing . . .15
Mayor Kay Halloran retired, and in November 2009 Cedar Rapids elected a new mayor, Ron Corbett. Corbett handily beat out City Councilman Brian Fagan. Only 27 percent of Cedar Rapidians voted. In April of 2010 the Cedar Rapids City Council accepted city manager Jim Prosser’s resignation.
On and on it went.
I thought back to the Iowa State University Extension paper titled “Economic Impacts of the 2008 Floods in Iowa.” After more than a year of working on this book, I found the following statements from the report to be the most poignant:
Intangible community assets may also be lost. These include the breakup of established neighborhoods and the loss of iconic stores or other institutions that provided local color and character. Not to be forgotten, floods destroy or mar public spaces. Most greenways, parks, and community recreation facilities are located in floodplains . . . Additionally and importantly, the persons who tend to live in flood prone areas have lower than average incomes and much fewer resources to aid in their recovery. Those displaced by the flooding may have difficulty finding affordable replacement housing in the area. As a result of these accumulated pressures, many communities, especially smaller ones, face the risk of losing residents.16
After a year in this project and revisiting my family’s history in Cedar Rapids, it seemed to me that neighborhoods such as Time Check and Czech Village were becoming rarer and rarer in our rush to create a generic-looking United States (despite incredible immigration). In the face of shiny row houses, town houses, green spaces, and “SOHO Cafés,” what is the impetus to save the A&W, Flamingo Club, Boys and Girls Clubs, the Sykoras, the Polehnas? Is it still necessary to know who lives next door to you?
No doubt these are the nostalgic thoughts of an aging baby boomer. But are the executive “communities” of America an improvement over tree-lined Ellis Boulevard or 16th Avenue SW? Is the new plan to raze those neighborhoods progress?
It finally hit me the day of the one-year anniversary. I drove through Time Check and saw house after house, block after block abandoned and empty; lots full of weeds and junk; broken windows and gutted interiors; poignant phrases crudely painted on sidings and garages like some kind of apocalyptic aftermath. So quiet. So eerie.
Still, you could easily imagine the lives just a year ago. Children playing. Working-class men and women, visiting, hanging up wash, planting gardens, and depending on the strength that comes from neighborly ties. At kitchen tables, men and women would be planning their future, whether it was that evening’s meal or their kids’ education.
I was taking photos, trying for that journalistic objectivity that professionals yak a bit too much about but rarely achieve, when I just began to cry. I was crying for the lost lives and homes. I was crying for the absence of children and their parents. I was crying for the piles of toys still along the curb. I was crying for the loss of something sacred: an American neighborhood in America’s Heartland. And I knew that all the money in this nation would never bring it back.
I remembered what Frank King had told me. How when the workers were removing his ruined belongings from his house that he wanted them to show him each and every item so he could see if anything was worth saving. But after an hour he had to go away. It was too much for him. By then he had started smoking again. Emphysema be damned. Who could blame him? That mammoth pile along the curb was his life.
I finally understood. These homes were people’s lives. Now whatever neighborhood Frank, Linda Seger, and so many others are fighting for is gone forever. Whatever was there before the flood would never come back. There are few happy endings in flood recovery.
That’s what I was crying about. You would have cried too.