Cedar Rapids slowly gathers itself

CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA —  Nearly every morning, about 200 laborers gather under a highway entrance ramp here, looking for work in the wake of the floods last month that wiped out neighborhoods and left the downtown business district without electricity.

Each hopes to be among a couple dozen picked daily to don a hard hat and march single file into the landmark Quaker Oats manufacturing plant. Once inside, they clear out the mud and damaged equipment that the Cedar River left behind, using scrub brushes, toothbrushes, squeegees, shovels and a lot of elbow grease.

“I’ve been lying in the muck, putting my whole body into it,” said Tanica Pearson, who learned about the work when her son picked up a flier. “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.

Much of what existed before the river swelled 20 feet above flood level is gone for good. More than 2,000 homes probably never will be rebuilt. The Summit View mobile home park on the west side of town is one of several now swelling with refugees.

A district of warehouses and shops along the river bank probably will lose many of the 818 businesses that were flooded. What had been a fragile economic revival -- rare for a rural, Midwestern city the size of Cedar Rapids (population 120,000) -- now is at risk.

Officials estimate it will cost $86 million to buy out the Cedar Rapids homeowners who will not be allowed to rebuild in the 100-year flood plain. Yet only about $50 million in buyout funds are expected to be made available -- statewide -- by the federal government.

The wait for information unnerves homeowners. One expressed his frustration in a spray-painted message across the siding of his home, “To: Cedar Rapids City Council & Mayor: Let us Move On.”

Debbie Benson spent a hot morning last week tearing down walls and removing debris from her 88-year-old mother’s home, which had flooded up to the second story.

“Nobody can move back in here,” said Benson, waving her arm at a neighborhood overflowing with waterlogged furniture, broken plaster and ruined appliances.

Cedar Rapids’ landmark City Hall, which stands on an island in the Cedar River and was marooned by the flood waters, also faces uncertainty. Some have suggested that city offices be moved permanently off the island. A week ago, workers used a construction crane to remove files through a second-story window to temporary quarters on higher ground.

With electricity either intermittent or nonexistent, much of the downtown business district is powered by gas-driven generators, the loud, dull roar serving as a kind of white noise. The marquee on Theatre Cedar Rapids proclaims: “We Are All In This Together,” but it is not visible after the sun sets because of a lack of power.

In one store, Deb’s Ice Cream & Deli, owner Deb Allick casually assessed 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 ice-maker there was five years old. It turned into a flotation device, it just flipped over and floated around.”

Allick called a cleaning company June 16, a day after the Cedar River crested, and except for a few odd things, the job was done in three days. Now she is hoping to obtain a low-interest loan from the Small Business Administration, which has a program for Iowa’s flood victims:8000/response. She is budgeting $100,000 to rebuild her 2,300-square-foot store, but she expects to get only part of that.

Steve Emerson, a downtown landowner, said he was frustrated with the slow pace of recovery. He figures it will cost him $1 million out-of-pocket to repair and rebuild 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.”

For many in Cedar Rapids, the downtown Quaker Oats plant -- the largest food processing plant in the U.S. -- serves as a tangible barometer of progress.

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. To get the tons of sugar into the cereal lines, workers reportedly are shoveling it by hand.

The Cap’n Crunch line, which fills downtown with a strong, sweet odor 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 Cap’n Crunch still need cleaning and repair, workers said.

Outside the plant, under the highway entrance ramp, Vincent Amaya is impatient, waiting for construction work. Not willing to do cleanup at Quaker, he has begun scavenging in the downtown area, looking for discarded copper he can bag and 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.