But the devastation, for those whose hearts still carry the weight of the suffering caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2003, is eerily familiar. Homes and businesses filled with water, coated in mud. The mucking out began, followed shortly by August’s hot, humid weather. People are being advised not to start installing drywall until the humidity drops.
“If there’s too much moisture, then the mold grows back right away,” said Marue White, associate for communications for the Presbytery of East Iowa. “They keep saying just wait, wait, wait, wait until the moisture goes down.”
But Iowa knows winter, where it’s in the bones of people to watch the weather and be prepared. With cold weather coming, as hard as it might be to imagine in the summer heat, people know they need to get things done, even if they’re not sure what’s the right thing to do.
“There’s a lot of mucking out, but there’s also a lot of hopelessness,” said Loren Neubauer, head of disaster relief for Westminster Church in Cedar Rapids. “People just throw up their hands and say, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ And there’s a reluctance to get started, because there’s all this talk about, ‘Well, maybe they’ll buy me out.’ There’s indecision.”
Winter definitely will play a role in determining what can be done when. “We’re a little bit different from Louisiana, because when November comes it’s going to start freezing,” Neubauer said. “Winter’s going to take hold of us. If you don’t have heat in your house, you’re kind of stopped for the rest of the year.”
In this struggle, Presbyterians are present — with Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, helping organize the response, with volunteers coming from around the country and with local congregations offering food and shelter for the volunteer workers.
St. Andrew Church in Iowa City, for example, provides a welcoming dinner for each work group staying at the church.
Men from Christ Church Presbyterian in Cedar Rapids and from First United Presbyterian church in Miles, Iowa, have built bunk beds, to be used with air mattresses so volunteers will have a comfortable place to sleep.
Westminster Church in Cedar Rapids has set up committees to organize the work, with people responsible for sending gift packs out with the work crews, for example, or for laundering the towels the volunteers use when showering at the church after a long day of work.
And volunteers have come from as far away as Wyoming and Pennsylvania, and also “day-trippers” from communities close by.
Lucy Lane led a group of teenagers and adults from First Church in Jeffersonville, Ind., to Iowa City in early August. While some relief sites on the Gulf Coast are now restricted to adults, Lane could bring the teenagers to Iowa – some of whom were really longing to help.
“I think these kids just really want to get their hands on something,” she said. “They can see a sense of accomplishment.” These Indiana teenagers also live close to the Ohio River, where stories of the Flood of ’37 still circulate, and the prospect of a life-altering flood does not seem improbable. “It’s happened here,” Lane said, “and it can happen again.”
Stan Tate coordinates the work site in Oakville, Iowa, a community in south-eastern Iowa with 200 homes and 30 small businesses, all of which were flooded. “Most had five or six feet of water on the first floor, and the water stood for two weeks,” Tate said, speaking from his home in a nearby town at the end of a long day.
“It destroyed roughly half the homes in town, and the other half were heavily damaged with a real heavy mold problem,” Tate said of the Oakville flooding. In reconstruction, “all the interior walls were stripped, all of the ceilings, all of the floor coverings down to the sub floor.” In the end, “it’s just a roof with a skeleton supporting it.”
And the work, much of it done by faith-based volunteers, “is pretty gruesome. It’s just about as hard of work as anybody would ever encounter. It’s virtually all done by volunteers who pay good money to get there,” and give up a week or more of their time. “These people are inspiring to work with,” Tate said. “I feel honored to be able to help support them.”
But this will be a long slog.
Some homeowners aren’t sure if they want to rebuild; the rebuilding effort will take skilled labor — plumbers and electricians and so forth. While there’s been a fairly steady flow of volunteers so far, some are worried that may drop off as the weeks and months roll on.
“We definitely could use more volunteers,” White said. “There is some concern. … You’re the poster child for a couple weeks, then another disaster comes along.”
Her presbytery, along with several others, is involved in conversations with nonprofits and governmental agencies about how to implement a case-management system to make sure those who need help are getting it and efforts are not duplicated.
And the work crews know there are spiritual and emotional needs as well. Often the volunteers will stop to talk to the homeowners and listen to their stories.
One woman told Neubauer about escaping the floodwaters “by the hair of her chinny-chin-chin. The levee broke, she was in her car and all she could see coming down the street was this wall of water. … Without her faith, she didn’t know how she’d get through.”
And Neubauer said one man, a member of a Presbyterian church in another city, said, “I just don’t believe all the people who’ve come to help me. I don’t even know who they are. … I’ve not been a real good church member. I think I’ll go back to church.”
In Oakville, Stan Tate’s job is to inspect houses, see what the homeowners need (and make sure they intend to come back to town), and connect the volunteers who come to work with the work that needs to be done.
A retired forester, Tate described the flooding of 2008 as “a perfect storm,” building up over a period of months during one of the wettest springs in Iowa’s history. The Iowa and Cedar rivers run out into the prairie, with enormous watersheds, Tate said. “All those watersheds were already soaked to capacity because of months of rainfall. When we had some storms that came in and just sort of stalled out over the upper end of those watersheds and dumped a tremendous amount of water … it just overpowered the system.”
Coming into August, Oakville was “a ghost town at night,” with the residents still not able to live in their homes, Tate said. The town sits at the end of a valley containing thousands of acres of prime cropland, where 20,000 acres flooded.
Faith-based volunteers have come to Oakville to muck out. “That’s a pretty nasty-type work,” Tate said. “It’s slippery and it’s dangerous and it’s heavy work – things like dragging soaking wet, mud-covered carpet out of the living room. … Can you imagine what a king-sized mattress weighs when it’s been soaking in water for two weeks? Every stick of furniture, every possession has to go out of the house.”
Some of the residents are shell-shocked, “numb, exhausted, hopeless,” Tate said. “We’re not just saving homes here, we’re trying to care for people.”
