The record flooding that hit downtown Cedar Rapids a month ago has produced wrenching changes — wiped-out neighborhoods, a business district without electricity, possible damage to the historic City Hall — but perhaps the most curious is the horde of migratory workers who gather under a highway entrance ramp each morning looking for work.
The workers arrive early, before shift changes at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. At least 200 strong, each one hopes to be among a few dozen picked each day to don a hard hat and march into the landmark Quaker Oats manufacturing plant. Once inside, they muck out the mud and damaged equipment the Cedar River left behind, using scrub brushes, toothbrushes, squeegees, shovels and a lot of elbow grease.
“I’ve been laying in the muck, putting my whole body into it,” said Tanica Pearson, who learned of the work at Quaker when her son picked up a flier from a temporary labor contractor trolling her neighborhood. “They want the floors to look brand-new in a form it wasn’t even at before the floods.”
Before the flood and after the flood: That is the demarcation that defines life in Cedar Rapids today. Much of what existed before the river swelled 20 feet above flood stage is gone for good. Cedar Rapids’ citizens are gradually abandoning the idea that their city will ever be the same.
More than 2,000 homes in the flood plain likely will never be rebuilt. The Summit View mobile home park on the west side of town is one of several swelling with flood refugees who are moving in, probably for good.
A district of warehouses, offices and small manufacturers along the riverbank likely will lose many of the 818 businesses that flooded. A fragile economic revival, rare for a rural Midwestern city the size of Cedar Rapids (population 120,000), is at risk.
And all the while, Cedar Rapids knows that it will be competing for state and federal funds with dozens of other Iowa towns and cities that also were flooded.
The wait for information unnerves homeowners. Debbie Benson spent a hot morning last week tearing down walls and removing debris from her 88-year-old mother’s home, which flooded up to the second floor.
“Nobody can move back in here,” said Benson, waving her arm at a neighborhood in which each house is fronted by a parkway overflowing with waterlogged furniture, demolished plaster, toys, appliances and the detritus of life.
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Frustration mounts
Flooded residents are complaining that information about buyouts and relief programs is slow in coming. Across the street from Benson, a neighbor has spray-painted across the siding of his home his frustration at the deliberate progress: “To: Cedar Rapids City Council & Mayor: Let us Move On.”
The neighbor scrawled out other beefs too, against the gawkers and looters who followed the receding waters.
“This is Still My Home. Stay Out,” was scrawled across the front of his screened-in porch. And, on the garage door: “Where’s the Police When You Need Them?”
At times, crowds of flood tourists were so large that residents could not get to the parkways to dump the ruined contents of their homes.
A few nights ago, looters stripped parts from a sports car that sat in the neighbor’s garage — perhaps prompting the spray-painting spree.
Cedar Rapids’ landmark City Hall, which stands on an island in the Cedar River and was marooned by the floodwaters, faces an uncertain fate. Some have suggested that city offices move permanently off the island.
Smulekoff’s Furniture Co., an iconic downtown business, intends to come back. While the first floor of its five-story building, just a few feet from the riverbank, is being gutted and repaired, workers are making do at the company’s furniture warehouse on higher ground a few blocks away.
Bob Anderson, Smulekoff’s furniture buyer, is working from a desk constructed of two-by-fours that sits in the vestibule of the sprawling building. He sits on a director’s chair brought from home, and each time he leans forward to answer the phone, he bangs his knee into the desk’s bare wood.
“We’ve had customers call in and say they’re checking to make sure we’re going to be back. That’s gratifying,” Anderson said.
Powerless
With city electricity intermittent or non-existent, much of the downtown business district is powered by gas-driven generators, their dull roar serving as a kind of white noise on the streets. The marquee on Theatre Cedar Rapids proclaims, hopefully, “We Are All In This Together,” but is not visible after the sun goes down because of a lack of power.
In one shop, Deb’s Ice Cream & Deli, owner Deb Allick directed two electricians, casually assessing the damage as she laid out plans for rebuilding.
“Those were 10 years old, both of them,” Allick said, pointing to two flood-wrecked freezer cases. “The dishwasher was 2 years old, the icemaker there was 5 years old. It turned into a flotation device; it just flipped over and floated around.”
Like many business owners, Allick moved quickly toward recovery, even before the floodwaters went down. She called a cleanup company on June 16, a day after the Cedar River crested. Except for a few odd jobs, the cleanup was done in three days.
Allick is hoping to get a low-interest loan from the Small Business Administration, which has a program for Iowa’s flood victims. She is budgeting $100,000 to rebuild her 2,300-square-foot store but expects any SBA loan will cover only part of the cost.
Steve Emerson, a downtown landowner, figures it will cost him $1 million out of pocket to build out damaged space in his five downtown buildings. On one electrical repair, city inspectors made him redo the work, then returned a day later to say the original repairs probably would have been suitable.
“It’s frustrating,” Emerson said. “But maybe I’m trying to move too fast.”
‘I need a job’
For many in Cedar Rapids, progress at the downtown Quaker Oats plant — the largest food processing plant in the U.S. — serves as a tangible barometer of progress. Several workers have been injured in the rush to get the plant back in operation, including two who fell two stories down an elevator shaft.
But progress continues. The first line to come back into operation, two weeks ago, makes Aunt Jemima syrup. The grits lines and Life cereal lines came next. Not all the equipment is back, though. To get the tons of sugar into the cereal lines, workers are shoveling it by hand, according to some who have been in the plant.
The Cap’n Crunch line, which fills downtown Cedar Rapids with a strong, sweet smell when it is cooking sugar into cereal, is not yet up. The machines that extrude the slurry of flour, sugar, maltodextrin and other ingredients into sweet squares of Cap’n Crunch still need cleaning and repair, workers said.
Outside the Quaker plant, under the highway entrance ramp, migratory worker Vincent Amaya is impatient, waiting for construction work. He expected reconstruction to start by now and is not willing to do cleanup work inside the Quaker plant.
He has spent $2,000 on fuel, though, and to recoup those costs, he has begun scavenging downtown, looking for discarded copper to sell.
“You can make $300, $500 a day,” Amaya said. “I don’t see anybody picking this stuff up, and the owners are throwing it out anyway.”
But his family back in Mexico needs money. “I need to find a job, a big job to work on,” he said.
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The people of Cedar Rapids can’t wait for the reconstruction to gain momentum too.
THE COST OF CLEANING UP
$86 million
Cost to buy out homeowners forbidden to rebuild in the 100-year flood plain, Cedar Rapids officials estimate. Yet only about $50 million in buyout funds are expected — statewide — from the federal government. State and local funds will need to provide the remainder.
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