Little fanfare in Cedar County residents' flood recovery

Like nearly all their neighbors in one of Iowa's oldest towns, Nicole Conner and Sal Leanhart are back home.

“There may be a little settling here and there, but they said the foundation was solid,” Leanhart said of the William Greene Mansion, the former hotel, stagecoach tavern and Underground Railroad stop that he and Conner bought two years ago.

That holds true across Cedar County's western townships, where the namesake river overran the most rural areas of a mostly rural county in June 2008. Fourteen months later and with little fanfare, most flooded residents have returned home.

“We knew we weren't going to leave,” said Dan Lange, who lives across Madison Street from Conner and Leanhart in this unincorporated burg with one paved road and

75 homes. “It was a one-time thing. It'll never happen again.”

Upriver near the hamlet of Cedar Bluff, Brad Albaugh thinks he'll move his family's farm operation off what was his grandfather's homestead, where the river ran 15 feet deep over the fields and rose to 6 feet on the sides of the grain bins. The bins split open, dumping 30,000 bushels of corn.

“We didn't qualify for any (government) money yet,” said Albaugh, 37.

Besides the lost corn, the flood wrecked about $50,000 worth of bins, forcing Albaugh to plan ahead for this year's crop.

“We'll have to find somebody to store it, or we'll have to sell it on the open market,” he said.

Cedar County's flood experience isn't a closed book just yet. Denise Schneckloth, recently named the county's flood-recovery case manager, is still trying to track down about 100 of 150 residents who received a case number from the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the weeks immediately following the June 2008 flood.

“Those are the people I need to connect with and find what they still need, because there's other resources available,” Schneckloth said recently in her office at the county law enforcement center. Her salary is paid through a federal Emergency Jobs Program grant administered by Kirkwood Community College.

With FEMA's presence fading, Schneckloth steers residents to the state Rebuild Iowa program and to area non-profit agencies. FEMA distributed more than $1 million in housing assistance and $28,820 in “other needs” aid. The flood caused $3 million in personal property losses and about $700,000 in damage to public parks, roads and bridges.

That's a fraction of the damage in more densely developed upriver counties, but it's difficult for a rural county to raise recovery funds locally, as Linn County and others did through sales taxes.

“In Cedar County, we've got a regular Wal-Mart,” Schneckloth said. “It's not a Super Wal-Mart. The tax dollars don't come in to help.”

Schneckloth's family has a FEMA number, too. She, husband Kurt Schneckloth and their daughters, ages 11 and 9, hoped to rehabilitate their home in Rochester.

“(FEMA) all of a sudden said, ‘You can't do that,' ” Schneckloth said, and a contractor demolished the house within a month of the flood. The family moved to a new place west of Tipton, and the Rochester lot sits empty.

“I went through the Jumpstart process alone three or four times,” she said. “It's definitely something I have in common with a lot of (flood victims).”

Still, Schneckloth believes FEMA did a good job overall for the county.

“People were getting checks the week after the flood,” she said. “I really can't say anything negative.”

Rochester homeowner Lange agreed.

“The lady that came around and helped us was real good at it,” said Lange, 52, who runs a graphics business out of his home, “and she said she was surprised with the people around here. She said she'd never seen so many honest people.”

The flood is now a common thread for many in the county.

“It really pulled the town together,” Leanhart said of the past year. “It's probably how we met most of our neighbors.”