Cedar Rapids passes on lessons learned from 2008 flood

Five years ago, after surveying the flood water and the damage done, Cedar Rapids community leaders flew to Grand Forks, N.D., to seek advice.

“Perseverance” was the basis of the advice from folks along the Red River who had suffered their own “Flood of the Century” in 1997. Recovery, they warned, might take 10 to 15 years – or longer.

Five years into recovery, it's Cedar Rapids officials who are called on to advise their counterparts starting the long slog of recovery from natural disasters. City HESCO barriers were shared with Mason City, for example, and plans for post-disaster planning has been shared with Connecticut and New Jersey, says Joe O'Hern, interim director of Community Development for the city of Cedar Rapids.

Every disaster is different, he says, so every community's response has to be different.

“I may be biased, but I want to say that floods are the toughest,” he says, but flood, fire, earthquake or tornado, much of the advice is the same.

“Keep your receipts,” he says from his office overlooking downtown Cedar Rapids, which was hard-hit by 31 feet of floodwater in 2008. That applies to individuals and businesses as well as local governments.

Although he's a city employee today, O'Hern was with the Iowa Finance Authority in 2008. After the flood, he became the point person on meeting the housing needs in Cedar Rapids and other flooded communities.

Ann Poe, now a Cedar Rapids city councilman, also saw the flood response “from the inside out” as a member of Gov. Chet Culver's staff at the time of the flood. She moved to the hastily created Rebuild Iowa Office that coordinated the efforts of state agencies and acted as a conduit between local communities and the federal government.

In separate interviews, Poe and O'Hern frequently use words like flexibility, coordination and communication to describe the best responses to disaster.

When city officials present at government conferences or meetings on sustainability and recovery, O'Hern and Poe say they often talk about what they saw as keys to Cedar Rapids' recovery: The high level of coordination between programs and between local, state and federal government; the city's effort to get information out to the community; and, perhaps most important in the long-run, a willingness to listen to the community.

“Among the things we did right were the neighborhood planning meetings,” Poe says. “We needed that input on how the community saw itself, how it wanted to look post-recovery. That helped shape the direction we took.”

The city was aggressive in getting out into the neighborhoods to gather the vision of residents and businesses and understand the needs that had to be addressed, O'Hern says.

“We've shared that with other community, those programs and approaches that passed muster here,” he says.

In addition to documenting all of the lessons learned to share with other communities, they also are available for city staff as they confront the next disaster.

Late last month, O'Hern says, city employees began looking at the city's “high water operations plan” that lays out what each department does if there is a threat of flooding.

“The higher the water, the more people who are involved,” O'Hern says.

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